Page 78 of The Second Death of Locke
thirty-five
T HE WIND WHIPPED THROUGH the Ghostwood, screaming in the trees. It was a sound Grey knew as well as the beat of her own heart: so many years, she’d tried to recall the timbre of it, to recollect the background noise of her childhood.
She wore a heavy cloak, fastened at the throat, with the hood pulled up to obscure her face. It wasn’t often that people came to pray at this abandoned altar, but if anyone did, she did not want them reporting that the Lady of Locke and her commander had been seen here in the dead of night.
“Stop fidgeting,” Kier said to her. “You’re making me anxious.”
She was only shifting her weight from foot to foot, standing before the moonlit altar, but she tried to school her body into obedience.
“Are you not afraid at all?”
Kier grimaced. “If I think about it, it means acknowledging the fact that I might anger your god, who holds my life in her hands. So really, I’m trying to avoid thinking about it at all.”
He was kidding, but the truth of it made Grey’s stomach feel like it was full of heavy stones.
She reached out, crossing the gap between them to take his hand.
“She made no mention of your behavior factoring into the deal,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “Which is good, for obvious reasons.”
Kier didn’t answer. He was looking straight ahead, at the altar.
It looked more like a tomb—and Grey suspected it was, the stone container the final resting place for Kitalma’s bones.
She wondered if Retarik was laid there as well, or if she really was interred in her own ruined abbey across the Isle.
If the gods had been separated in death, by some mortal’s choice.
Kitalma’s temple had fallen into disrepair too.
The wall behind the altar, which once held thick glass windows, had half crumbled into the sea at some point during the reign of one of Grey’s ancestors.
Now, they looked at the roaring waves and the spray that kicked up as the waves crashed against the cliffs.
It was a rare clear night, and the moon shone over the sea, casting Kier’s face in shadowed silver.
“It’s not too late,” she said, “to change your mind.”
He looked at her askance. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Before she could respond, the air in front of them shifted, shimmered—and then Kitalma was there, standing before the altar, where before there had only been moonlight.
She wore her simple dress and armor, a medallion hanging from a chain around her neck.
She was just as Grey remembered her: a fierce warrior goddess, a queen in her own right. A reckoning.
“Oh,” Kier said, his voice soft—as if, even knowing what he knew, he did not fully believe in the goddess himself.
“Daughter of Locke,” Kitalma said, turning her face to Grey. She looked at Kier, her expression unchanging. “Boy.”
Grey bit her lip. She inclined her head in reverence, making the sign of appreciation with her right hand. She’d been taught it as a girl, mostly as a joke—in Grey’s childhood, they believed in the gods, but they did not keep their customs.
“You have come with your decision?” the goddess asked. The moonlight seemed to move through her, as if she was not fully real. Grey wondered what would happen if she reached out and touched her—if her hand would move right through the goddess’s image, if she would dissolve into nothing.
“We have,” she said. It was her job to speak the words, to take from Kier what he wanted to give. She wished her mouth did not feel so dry, her throat so sore. She wished she didn’t feel like she was ruining him. “I will keep my power.”
“And I will surrender my freedom,” Kier said.
Kitalma looked between the two of them. For a moment, Grey wondered if she was judging them, but who could understand the judgment of the gods?
After all, it was Kitalma who stole the heart of her lover—or was given it, depending on which version of the story Grey chose to believe.
Perhaps the goddess understood Kier’s sacrifice, and the necessity of it, better than anyone.
Kitalma reached forward, her hand gaining solidity the closer it got to Kier’s body, until she pressed it flat to his chest. Kier sucked in a breath.
Grey watched something gold and formless stir, running from Kier’s body into Kitalma’s.
The goddess glowed for a moment with startling light, the medallion on her chest glowing brightest of all.
For the barest fraction of a second, Grey was certain she saw someone else behind her, the impression of a hand on Kitalma’s waist, the glint of armor and a billowing mass of tangled red curls—but she could not fully make out the shape of the other woman.
She only saw her impression, and her smile, and then she was gone.
“Then it is done,” Kitalma said. She took Grey’s hand and pressed it to the medallion. It was warm to the touch. “You belong to the Isle, and to its daughter. May your union be sweet and long in its years.”
Before either of them could respond, the goddess faded away as quickly as she’d appeared, leaving the moonlight, and the sea, and the altar behind.
“Well.” Kier blinked, long and slow. “That felt… official.” He glanced at Grey, some odd mirth playing across his face. “Did that feel like a marriage ceremony to you, or was that just me?”
“I don’t know?” Grey said, pitching it as a question. She flexed her hands. She felt oddly bound to Kier, even more than their official binding ceremony had made them. “Do you feel okay?”
He pressed his hand to his chest, rubbing the spot where Kitalma had touched him, where she’d pulled some physicality of his freedom away. Grey covered his hand with her own, as if she could heal the invisible wound that lurked under the surface.
“I feel fine,” he said, but there was that trace of sadness. Perhaps it would always be there. Grey thought about all the years she had been separated from her own home, severed at the root, missing something that no longer existed.
“You’re astonishing,” she said
The sadness dimmed, just enough. Kier called forth a golden magelight, glowing faintly in the seaside. “Astonishingly handsome,” he said.
Grey elbowed him between his ribs. “And more annoying by the day.”
He laughed, the sound of it brightening the gloom of the temple. He slung an arm around her shoulders, steering her back toward the Ghostwood, back toward the fortress, back toward the rest of their lives. “Then you’d better get used to it,” he said. “You’re stuck with me. Forever.”
Grey turned her head to kiss his shoulder, seeking shelter from the freezing wind and rain that pelted them. The Isle was always mercurial with its weather, at odds with the warmth glowing within her chest. “I can tolerate forever,” she said.