Page 26 of Wild Reverence

XVIII

Like Dying Coals

MATILDA

Time flowed like water through my fingers in the Skyward realm.

I grew older, sharper in my father’s court. There were no wasted doors here for me to pass through, no dream scrolls for me to read. I lost more than my mother that fated day, but I set my eyes ahead, letting my childhood and all the things that had made it soft crumble into dust-laden memory.

Sometimes, I would think of Vincent and his dreams.

Sometimes, I would let myself ache, as if I had reopened a deep wound. I would dwell on the ones I missed and had left behind. The ones I could no longer reach until I reminded myself of one simple truth:

Love amongst immortals is a weakness.

I had seen it in Bade. And I saw it in my father at rare moments, when he became quiet at court, watching me move amongst the crowd, flowers woven into my hair.

I knew he was thinking of my mother and what could have been.

Here in Thile’s sunset hall, I drank nectar and ate ambrosia from platters crafted from ice.

I reveled in stringed music and danced with distant kindred and delivered messages and news from one Skyward threshold to another as a good herald does.

I smiled and laughed and listened more than I spoke.

I hid what I truly felt because emotions were a snare, a danger.

I kept my eyes on the lookout for the eithral scales, wondering who amongst the Skywards had hidden them.

Whom had my mother bartered them to? But any hints of the scales, as well as the black market, seemed to have ended with Zenia’s death and Phelyra’s self-imposed exile.

I presented myself as a meek goddess of the Middle Court. I was no threat. But even so, I drew Skyward attention; I had been born in darkness and smoke and bejeweled firelight. A place they had never seen.

Gradually, I bloomed, like a primrose that waits for the moon to rise. And once I did, I came into my full power.

I asked my father if I could return to the mortal realm and begin my era as a goddess.

Humans had yet to know me, to learn my name.

Fate’s owls had been ordered to no longer carry stories or visions pertaining to me, an order that had come from Thile himself.

But I knew it was time for me to chart my own legacy.

And deeper still… I longed to find that fortress by the river.

I wanted to speak with Vincent again. To measure how much we had changed and grown against the other. Would I recognize him?

“No,” my father said, as if he sensed this weakness in me. The yearning for the boy I had once known in dreams. “You must remain Skyward beneath my watch. Your time has not yet come.”

His answer displeased me, but I was a patient being.

Another year passed, and I asked again.

“I am ready to travel to the mortal realm,” I said to him, sitting at his footstool. “Please, Father, grant me your blessing.”

I had not realized when I asked for his sanctuary that he would hold the power to keep me beneath his wing for as long as he liked. Once more, he denied me. Once more, he gave me a simple answer.

“Your time has not yet come, Daughter.”

I was disgraced from the under realm and barred from the mortal one.

I was a goddess in a cage here amongst the clouds, and I did not know when he would grant me my freedom again.

But I imagined he could still sense this weakness in me.

The compassion for mortals. The way I missed my mother and my kin below.

Let me be not loved but feared.

I would have to change myself in order to leave. I could not depart the same way I had arrived. My father, then, was testing me. He would not unleash a soft, ill-prepared daughter to roam the realms. One who might embarrass him.

I did not ask to leave again.

Instead, I honed my speed and my power in his court.

When Warin finally approached, unable to take his eyes from me, I was not surprised.

“You have grown since we last spoke, little goddess,” he said to me, taking in the curve of my waist, my collarbones, my bare arms. I was nearly as tall as him. “But you were just a child, then, with a very sharp tongue.”

“So I was. You, however, have not changed,” I replied, despite the fact that he had added to his power since we first met. He was the god of spring and iron now. And I could tell he was hungry for more.

“No?” He laughed, and the sound was rich, languid. “Then let me challenge you, Matilda of Skyward. I challenge you to an archery match. If you beat me, then I will give you anything you want. If I beat you… then you must agree to a courtship with me.”

This was not the first time a Skyward god had challenged me to a game.

They were fond of bargains and the thrill of winning, as well as witnessing the mortification of someone losing.

But it was the first time courtship had been brought to the table, and it sent a bolt of worry through me. Of course, I did not let Warin see it.

“Anything I want?” I echoed.

“As I said.”

“Then I want your eithral scale. The one you killed Xan with.”

I spoke a name that was on the verge of being completely forgotten. A name that was blotted out of our myths, our records. As if Xan had not existed.

Such a fate would never be mine.

Warin’s brows arched, and his mouth went slack. But then he laughed again, the sound noticeably keener, coasting over me like a blade.

“Agreed, Matilda.”

I had never been instructed in archery. All my time with Bade had consisted of sword and shield training.

But I spent the next day preparing with one of my father’s bows, confident I could win.

Warin struck me as lazy and overly certain in his abilities, and I did not need his eithral scale; I had my own in my pocket, still gilded with my mother’s blood.

But I did not want gods like him to possess an object of such power.

I woefully underestimated him; he was a far better archer than I’d assumed.

We held our competition in the villa’s gardens, a few Skywards witnessing our duel of arrows and targets, and he won handily. It was my first great lesson in tempering my own confidence, of learning how to strike a wise bargain in a challenge, and that was how Warin became my lover.

Skin to skin, breath to breath, he laid me bare on his bed. He saw me and yet he did not. I was guarded, even in pleasure, and he could not draw the light from my bones. He could not get me to talk, even when my limbs were heavy, my skin shining, his fingers carding through my hair.

“What was it like below?” he would ask me after our couplings.

“It was quite dark.”

“Were the Underlings harsh to you?”

“Occasionally.”

“How did you come and go, then?”

“I walked, of course.”

My obtuseness would always irritate him. His fingers would slide from my hair. He would rise from the bed, sensing his work had yielded him nothing this time.

“You are being difficult, Matilda.”

“Then stop inviting me into your bed. I cannot give you what you want.”

He would let a few sennights pass, ignoring me at court.

But then I would inevitably draw his eyes again—I was the daughter of summer and winter, and he was the god of spring—and I would find myself once more in his arms, seeking something beyond him.

A feeling I did not know how to name. Something that hid within me like dying coals.

One night, he came to me drunk after a court revelry, his hair tangled across his brow, his robes wrinkled and falling off his broad shoulders. He knelt before me and placed his hands on my thighs, gazing up at me with bloodshot eyes.

“Marry me,” he rasped. “I want you to be mine, and only mine.”

I tensed, my stomach winding itself into a knot.

Marriage was not on my horizon, and yet I considered it, imagining what it would be like to have a god like him bound to me by vow.

I considered him trustworthy only when it suited him.

If he was this way as an ally, as a lover, I could not imagine what he would be like as a husband.

“You deserve a wife greater than a herald, don’t you think, Warin?” I said.

He dug his nails into my thighs. “You are far more than a mere herald, my sweet.”

His words made me shiver. But then I realized he meant that I was the lord’s daughter. I was half an Underling.

“You are drunk,” I said, rising. “My answer is no.”

Warin would ask again, and again. He was persistent, but it was not me he truly wanted, much as I did not truly want him.

He wanted my knowledge, and maybe that is why I grew as cold as the moonstones that I continued to wear about my waist. He wanted to know where the Underling doors hid, and I was careful to never tell him, or anyone else. Not even my father.

This is how I survived above for thirteen mortal years.

I learned that there was no true home for me. I was safest when I was moving, as Orphia had once predicted. I was both sky and the underworld, and for that reason, I would never belong wholly to either of them. But when it came time for me to return to the Underlings, I was ready to see them again.

Or so I thought.