Page 85

“The drawbacks of haste are plentiful,” the crystal goddess judges, her epicene features creasing.

The agate goddess steers them back to the subject of Sorrow and Envy—their attempt to save each other by the shore. “Since sentimentality has grown to be a disease with you archers, this susceptibility to love a contagion among your class, a theory presently festers in our minds.”

“You can theorize all you want, geniuses,” Sorrow says. “You’d be wrong about him and me. We’re not like our friends.”

The butterfly ruler drifts off for a second. “How many arrows do you have in your quiver?”

Wow. Talk about a change of subject.

Not to mention, Sorrow’s archery is no place in sight. She’d lost the chance to find her weapons. And since a deity can’t replace his or her weaponry, much less produce new ones, she’ll have to deal with the loss. It wouldn’t be the first time.

By the same token, the female says, “It seems you’ve been missing one since youth. In all this time, you’ve failed to recover it.”

The cloaked god twists in his seat and straightens, brandishing a lone ice arrow between his fingertips. “Would you care to have it back?”

Sorrow blinks. “Where…”

“In his home,” the butterfly ruler provides. “According to the archers who swarmed your band, one of them found it there while searching the interior.”

It’s a good thing Sorrow’s already prostrate on the ground, because her knees buckle. Do they mean Envy?

When Sorrow and Envy swam to his home, Nostalgia had been guarding the place, and after they’d dealt with him, they found Envy’s cache of alternative weapons gone. One of those archers—maybe Nostalgia himself—must have discovered Sorrow’s old arrow and snatched that, too.

All of these decades? Nearly two centuries? The whole time? That fucker had Sorrow’s arrow the whole time?

“This means nothing,” she insists. “It means less than nothing. The immortal prick must’ve taken it to use against me later, to bribe or blackmail me for sport.”

“If so, let us do it for him,” the cloaked god volunteers. “Since he never mustered the courage to follow through.”

“I’m not an easy target.”

“I think you are,” the butterfly goddess counters. “I think you’re the type who weeps when a human soldier dies in combat, because you couldn’t leach him of anguish, because you reached him too late, because your speed has its limits, because you can only be in one place at a time. I think you’re the type who strokes a classmate’s hair when she’s being persecuted. I think you’re the type who cuts herself after witnessing the pain that you’ve failed to alleviate in others.”

Sorrow’s jaw locks. How dare they!

The waterfalls escalate to a deafening plunge. The constellations stab holes into the sky.

The crystal goddess crosses her lacy limbs. “Love, Anger, Wonder. Haven’t prior installments in this series of reckless tales taught you anything? You didn’t think that we parceled off our archers to serve the mortal world without keeping tabs on them, did you? Did you think we missed your gesture of comfort toward Wonder during her punishment? Or the effect war zones have had on you?”

“It harms you greatly to see another suffer,” the braided god says, screwdriving each sentence into Sorrow’s chest. “Such is the nature of a trauma goddess, particularly one susceptible to infernal sentiment. I think you hold those memories so close, that if history were to repeat itself, it would be a devastating trigger. Just imagine how it would feel to see your friends befall the same fate, if they should lose this battle. Picture the slow, drawn-out consequences of execution. Visualize the pain they’d go through, while you watch from the sidelines, awaiting your turn.”

“Envy may mean nothing to you, but will that make it easier to witness us stripping the flesh from his body?” the crystal goddess inquires. “For your sake, I certainly hope so.”

Sorrow tosses her head from side to side. “You wouldn’t be that vicious.”

Wouldn’t they? They ordered Wonder’s torture. Yes, she’d endangered the life cycle of immortals. Nonetheless, the Court had opted for brutal retaliation rather than mercy.

In fact, Love is the only prize who’s too valuable to damage. She’s the only one who’s absurdly difficult to replace, after millennia of trying to create her. The rest of them are expendable.

The butterfly goddess’s brows knit as she listens to her peers flick threats across the amphitheater garden. “Or when you lose, we could show clemency,” she interjects. “We could make it less inflicting, less memorable, less permanent. But that is contingent upon you.”

Impatient, the agate goddess strides across the dais. “You may have recruited a legion, you may have infiltrated this land, but you were caught within moments of sneaking into the Astral Sea. Before that, according to the archers who accosted you in the valley—”

“—and who are oh, so willing to take credit for it, even though they kept you in the dark,” Sorrow baits.

“We shall deal with their misguided ambition,” the cloaked god assures her. “Be that as it may, you hadn’t been in the Peaks long before a gaggle of children and their companions swarmed you. If you can’t get that far, what do you expect? No matter what you think or believe, you are outarmed and outnumbered, and you do not have the degree of magic to change that.”

The butterfly goddess retrieves the ice arrow from her peer and then lowers herself to Sorrow’s level, presenting the shaft with upturned palms. “You, Goddess of Sorrow, know hopelessness and anguish like none of your classmates. So let’s start over, shall we? What are you afraid of?”