Nobody's Goddess (29 page)

“My man did find me. I killed him. I killed him, and no one remembers.”

One of the men from the commune tumbled out of a shack, his back slouched, his arms practically dragging against the ground. He moaned as he stumbled forward toward the bucket of water the farmers dropped off every few days for drinking, but his aim was off, and he bumped against the kids’ cart, his outstretched arm brushing against Nissa’s waist.

Nissa screamed, and Luuk jumped between her and the cause of her terror. “Let’s go,” he said, dragging her by the elbow toward the cart. The sight made me queasy—the thought of being pushed and pulled as I had been in another life—but Nissa let her man guide her without hesitation. As they pulled the cart away, she alone looked back at me.

Her expression reminded me of the look I’d given Ingrith when I thought she was just an old, crazy lady, before I realized the truth of what she said.

“Learned from Alvilda?” The voice was filtered and hoarse.

I turned my head slowly. The man scooping water up beneath his mask was Jaron, the only other commune resident whose name I had ever had cause to know. I recognized his worn-down animal mask from the quake at Alvilda’s house, although I was certain he wouldn’t remember the incident if I asked him, either in this life or my last. He stumbled forward and perched on a rock next to me, peering at my woodworking from behind his facial coverings. I couldn’t make out what animal it was supposed to be.

I suddenly took notice of the shape of the wood in my palm. A rose. I ran the gouge brusquely over the petals, tearing them asunder.

“Yes,” I said at last, not feeling that Jaron warranted my silence.

If he noticed that I now wrecked my creation, he didn’t speak of it. Instead, he put a hand on my shoulder, his touch as light as a feather. “She will not come here.”

She? Oh, Alvilda.

It was not Alvilda who was my torment. However, I knew instinctively that to this broken man, all torment was Alvilda. My heart tightened, and I wondered if Jaron and the other men in the commune had always felt this way. Even a tenth of my feelings for even a tenth of a second would be torture.

It was a wonder they did not die.

“That’s good,” I said. And it was true. I was in no mood for visitors.

Nevertheless, Jaron sat still beside me, his mask pointed toward the jagged wooden rose in my hand. I put the broken blossom on his lap and walked back to my shack in the middle of the commune.

***

After a couple of weeks, they didn’t feed us anymore.

There were supposed to be pity scraps, weren’t there? The rotted produce that didn’t sell in the market. And the buckets were supposed to be refilled because someone remembered the men didn’t have the strength to pull their own from the nearest village well. Because someone cared enough that we didn’t die of thirst. But the buckets ran out of water a few weeks after I joined the men in the commune.

I saw a man vanish one morning, his rotted dog mask clattering to the broken stone tiles in the middle of the commune. I felt compelled to trace the fading pattern on the mask, the nose, the mouth, the long, floppy ears, one half broken. I hoped it wasn’t hunger or thirst that had killed him. How long were these men going without food or water? How could I have been so lost in myself that I hadn’t noticed? I’d hardly eaten myself.

The men were lying in front of their shacks, moaning. One man was half in a shack, half out, rolling around and pawing for an empty bucket. He scooped imaginary water with the scoop beside it, lifted the empty ladle up under his mask, and grunted when the ladle fell from his grip, clattering to the ground. “Water … ” It was the first word I’d heard him speak that wasn’t the name of his goddess.

“Water,” another man nearby joined in.

“Water,” they all repeated.

I wanted to roll on the ground beside them. I wanted to not want water, to let myself vanish with the life I knew.

But thirst won out. As did the constant chorus of “water” punctuated by the names of women from around the village.

Those women couldn’t care less if you starved.
I knew it. What I once wouldn’t have given for the problem of the lord to resolve itself without me. For him to suddenly vanish, for me to not know it was my fault.

I stood, fighting the weakness in my legs, and grabbed the nearest empty bucket. Without responding to any of the anguished cries, I headed toward the well at the center of the village, not caring if I drew everyone’s notice as I dragged my feet through the crowd I knew I’d find there.

I drew no one’s attention. And there was no crowd in the market.

Merchants’ stalls were threadbare or empty. There was only a quarter of the amount of produce I expected to find and almost none of the cheese or fabric. The little things that no one needed, even if they were lovely, the gifts that men often bought their goddesses, were gone entirely. The rotting produce that would normally have gone to the commune was for sale at discounted prices, and it was only those cheaper items that the few villagers with baskets were buying.

“Come now,” said one merchant. “Don’t you have a young boy and girl at home? Don’t you want to feed them the best? Look at the color on this tomato!”

A woman who seemed vaguely familiar grimaced and rifled through her basket for a single copper. “No. These.” There was a pile of wilted vegetables in front of her, and she shoved them eagerly into her basket after the man accepted her coin, sighing as he tucked it into a pouch at his waist.

“I suppose no one can afford to pay for your husband’s music no more.” The man put his perfect tomato down gently with both hands in front of a sign that read, “High Quality Produce. Among the Last. 3 Coppers Each.” He scratched his chin. “Why is that, you think? What went wrong? Seems just a few weeks ago, the farmers had more food for us than we knew what to do with.”

The woman tucked a wilted head of lettuce on top of her basket. “I don’t know.” Her lips pinched into a thin line. “Maybe you merchants pay them too little for their crops because you charge too much and no one’s buying. Now they don’t have enough copper to feed themselves anything but what they manage to hoard from the rest of us.”

The merchant yawned and stretched a hand over his head. “But the prices aren’t so different, are they? I know we charged more than this for quality goods just a short time ago. And we had no need to sell this wilted trash.”

I didn’t think the woman cared. “Good day,” she said, curtly. She met my eyes as she passed and looked at me from top to bottom, but she said nothing. I realized my bedraggled appearance wasn’t as out of place as I expected. The woman’s dress was coated in white dust, and I wondered what a musician’s wife was doing to get that way, and who was watching those children the merchant mentioned if she worked.

“No one has enough copper.” The merchant stared overhead, not paying me any mind. “How could so much copper just vanish into thin air? Goddess help us.” He kept muttering to himself and I pushed forward down the path, my eyes widening as I took in the line in front of the well.

They
were
all tired. No one was quite as tired or hopeless as the men in the commune, but there was something different in the air. Men still had their arms around women, and women still laid their heads against their men’s broad shoulders. But there were fewer smiles and less laughter.

“Thank the goddess water is always free,” said the woman in front of me to her man.

“Yes, darling.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault the payments at the quarry have decreased.” The woman bit her lip and traced a finger over the man’s chest. “How can the foreman
forget
where he got the copper to pay everyone from when people weren’t buying stone for building materials? How does he expect to replenish it with more copper if he can’t pay the men enough to dig it up?”

“We’ll find more.” The man took the woman’s hand in his. “We all have our goddesses to take care of. So many of the men have children—”

“Thank the goddess we haven’t yet had any.” The woman smiled, but just barely. She didn’t seem thankful at all. “I don’t mean … Don’t get it into your head that I don’t want any. Because I do. It’s just … ” Her voice quieted as she played with her man’s shirt. “I’d hate for them to be so hungry now, along with us. Someday it’ll get better. We can welcome them then.”

Someday it’ll get better. It won’t.

The bucket fell out of my hands and clattered to the ground. The coupling in front of me tore their gazes from each other just long enough to glower at me, but I didn’t care. I crouched beside the bucket and hugged my knees to my chest.

They don’t remember the lord. They don’t realize it was him who kept this village running. I didn’t even realize it was him, really. How could I? He never even came down to the village. He never spoke with the people directly. How could I have known he helped so many?

How could I have known what I was doing, when I yearned for my own freedom?

“Hey.
Hey
. Do you want some water or don’t you?” The woman behind me kicked at my back lightly.

I saw the line that had formed behind me and realized I was some distance from the well and it was my turn. I didn’t know how long I must have been lost in my thoughts. “Yes,” I said, quietly, thinking of the men in the commune.

Every muscle ached as I dipped the bucket down with the rope to the well and pulled it back upward.

They all knew. Before they forgot him. They all wanted me to Return to him, to keep him happy because he was their best customer.

Because he kept this village going.

***

A couple of weeks later, I laid on the ground in my shack, telling my thoughts to quiet for once so that I might sleep and enjoy a brief moment of peace from my waking dream.

“Because you bring us water. And scraps. And for the rose.”

A gruff voice. I struggled to open at least one eye, but my eyelids were heavy, and it strained me more than it should have. I blinked to bring the streaming moonlight into focus. A black figure stood in the doorway.

I shot up from my pile of hay on the ground. My heart beat harder, stronger.

And then I recognized Jaron standing before me.

It wasn’t the lord. He was gone, and he’d taken everything I knew with him. My life was gone. I felt the violence of a torment that would not break, even across the jagged surface of my heart.

Jaron must have recognized the feeling in my face, for he was soon crouching before me with both hands extended.

He held a sheathed blade.
Does he even know what’s in his hands?

Before I could stop myself, I grabbed it from him, pulling it out of harm’s way and removing the blade by the hilt. It sparkled with a violet glow that felt all too familiar. “Elgar? How … ”

“Don’t know what it is. Maybe a carving tool. Found it in a tree hollow in the woods,” croaked Jaron tersely. “When cutting wood for Alvilda. Years ago. She would not take it.”

Years ago? Of course. I just have to leave it there for him to find, all these countless years later.

I felt a stirring in my heart that wasn’t quite like the pain it had known for the past month. It was mixed with great sorrow for Jaron and the truth of the longing I knew he felt even now for Alvilda.

I sheathed the sword and squeezed Jaron’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

Jaron’s mask bobbed, and he stood up. He left the shack just as quietly as he had entered it.

I pulled out the sword, gripped my hair into a tail behind me, and sliced it off close to my scalp. Now that I was alone, I was free to be myself. There would be nothing about me for anyone to make pretty.

***

I brushed aside the last of the branches that blocked the cavern’s entrance from view. Elgar, my blade, had summoned me here. The sheath hung from my waist, and I rested my hand comfortably over Elgar’s hilt. I couldn’t walk through this life anymore. My parents were gone. My sister and the man I’d loved were lost in each other completely. The lord had vanished, but he left behind a feeling of emptiness in my chest each time I thought of his face—and I hated myself for that. I didn’t want the burden of remembering him. If my heart was empty after I had slain the heartless monster, I would let the blade and the violet glow guide me to where I would stop him from hurting others in the first place.

I was the elf queen—and I was nobody’s goddess.

Elgar proved the key to getting back through the violet sphere, as I’d guessed. This time when I resurfaced, I knew immediately it had worked, even though I had no reason to believe the cavern was any different.

But there was an ax against a nearby rock. As I grabbed it, I noticed Elgar and its sheath were missing from my waist. The memory of the lord taking the blade away with him to the castle surfaced, more real than I had let myself believe it to be all these long, long months.

There’s no going back now. Not without getting the blade back.
Somehow I knew this, even though the pool had taken me back once without it.
But that was just as well. I had no place to go back to.