Page 73 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth

Grief touched his face. “The dead are the dead. It isn’t my place to bring her back. But I would like to see her one more time. My father, too. I’d like to know they’ve gone to their rest, that they’re not suffering. That they’re together.”

“And you have faith that the gods will … let you see them again?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

She kicked at a clod of dirt. “Does Tuer often send you visions? Do you always do what he tells you to?”

“I never vowed myself to him, if that’s what you mean, but the gods have always been part of my life. I go up to Tal-Arohnd on feast days. I bring offerings to the temple. I listen for Tuer’s voice. He never spoke to me, before the other day, but I always knew he was there.”

A knot pulled tight inside of her. “How?”

“I just do, Eda. I can sense him, watching over his mountains, watching over his people.”

“You still think he’s benevolent, even after everything I told you?”

Morin sprawled out on the stone ledge, propping his head up on one hand. “I think you only know one side of him.”

“And you know another?”

“It seems I have heard different stories than you.”

“Tell me one,” Eda challenged.

Morin glanced up at the spangled sky as Tainir stopped singing, her glance passing between the two of them.

Morin shut his eyes. “When Tuer first saw Raiva, she was so beautiful he thought that she must have been born of the Stars themselves. In a way, he wasn’t wrong. Raiva alone of all the gods and goddesses had touched the Stars and not been burned—save Caida, who was the Stars’ keeper. Their light had sunk into Raiva. Become part of her. And so she was the embodiment of light and truth and beauty. Tuer didn’t know it then, but love woke like a flame inside of him, and the more he knew her, the more it grew.”

Eda kicked at the dirt clod again. Morin clearly wasn’t telling a thinly disguised story meant to flatter her. She was no Raiva, and no one would ever think that about her. Ileem’s face rose unbidden to her mind, and she bit back a curse. If anything, she was like Tuer. Selfish. Possessive. Guilty.

“She was gentle and wise,” Morin continued, “and yet also fierce as a flame. She taught mankind music under the shadow of the Tree, and she mourned the falling of it, the division between them and the gods. She withdrew, for a time, to her great wood, where she watched mankind from afar and sang every night to the lesser stars the songs she had learned at the beginning of time.

“From deep inside his mountain, Tuer heard her sing, and he took to emerging every evening to better hear her. He could see her shining among the trees, and, little by little, he began to descend from the mountain and venture into the wood.

“One evening, he came very near to where she was, standing ankle deep in a pool of water, her face tilted up toward the sky. She turned and smiled at him, then bowed very low. ‘Won’t you join my song, my lord Tuer?’

“‘My lady, I do not know it,’ he replied.

“‘Then I shall teach you.’

“And she did. When he had learned it, they sang together, and their voices were like starlight and earth, strong and bright.

“‘Come again tomorrow, my lord,’ said Raiva. ‘The wood is beautiful, but I am lonely.’

“And so the next day he came, and the next day and the next. Always she looked for him, and they sang together. Sometimes they sat and took bread in the shadow of the trees. Sometimes they drank deep of the wine of wood and earth. Sometimes they simply were with one another, content each in the other’s presence.

“Raiva’s heart warmed to him, and she knew that she loved him, as she had seen the men and women of the earth love each other. But she saw in him a great and heavy sorrow, and it grieved her.

“‘My lord,’ she asked. ‘What troubles you?’

“The god of the mountain bowed his head into his hands and wept. ‘You were there,’ he said. ‘You saw my greatest sin. You were there the day I slew the man Tahn, who stole the seed from the Tree. It was I who began everything: death, time, sorrow. It was I who put to naught everything the One meant for Endahr to be.’”

Eda squirmed with discomfort. She had begun everything, too: Niren’s death, the Empire’s fall, Ileem’s betrayal. She hated Tuer for reminding her of herself.

But Morin wasn’t finished. “‘Not everything,’ Raiva argued. ‘There is still life and light and music. There is still love.’

“Tuer couldn’t bear to look her in the eye, because he was not brave enough or strong enough to ask her if she loved him as he loved her. ‘I wronged gods and men alike that day, and I have made no recompense.’

“‘Have you entreated the One?’ Raiva asked. ‘Have you asked him what you must do?’

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