“You’ve laid a trap for us, Priestess,” Goda said. Her tone was matter of fact as usual, without judgment or surprise.

“And you blame me because you walked into it?” The leather-gloved hand of Priestess Rem was still pressed to Kanna’s mouth. Now that Goda’s light had emerged from inside of the cavern, Kanna could see the face that was hovering near hers, one that belonged to the woman who was standing on the ledge just beneath her.

“There is no blame, Priestess.”

The shocks had stopped. Kanna could feel Goda’s presence even before she jerked her eyes over to look. Goda was carrying a canister of fuel in each hand, the lantern clipped to her belt loop, and she was gazing down at the both of them with a neutral expression.

Priestess Rem was reaching up to Kanna, her eyes filled with a strange mixture of emotions—but among them, there was compassion, and so Kanna took hold of that and let it warm the freezing emptiness that she felt inside.

“Don’t worry,” she murmured into Kanna’s ear, once again in the Upperlander language. “She can’t hurt you when I’m here. Just be still and say nothing. I will take care of this. You won’t be in any trouble.” She frowned and studied Kanna’s face, then brushed some of the hair out from in front of Kanna’s eyes. She looked up at Goda. “What did you do to her?”

“She does this to herself.”

“Always the same answer. ‘Oh, they do it to themselves.’” The priestess pulled away, and Kanna watched her climb up onto the ledge so that she was standing evenly at Goda’s side. “When will you accept that you are more than just a bystander, Goda? You are an active participant and you hurt people with the things you create in this world.”

“Maybe,” Goda said, “but this one likes to be hurt. She realizes that the pain shows her a window to the truth. I’m giving her what she wants.” Putting one canister on the ground, Goda crouched and grabbed Kanna by the neck of her robes and tugged at her so that she would get up. “Sometime soon she might stop resisting the pain and look upon these demons without fear.”

Kanna refused. She made herself limp and kept still as the priestess had asked. Her heart pounded hard in her chest. She looked away from Goda as the light of the lantern hit her uncomfortably in the face, and so Goda dropped her with a dead thud.

“You’re too careless with her,” Priestess Rem said. She looked at Kanna for a long time. “Why is she like this?”

“The air in the cavern has shaken her up quite a bit this time. She won’t be normal for awhile,” Goda told her. “But there’s something else: She didn’t know about her family, about how they made themselves rich off our military, about how most of the grain was used to make fuel while people in her country starved to death. She only just found out. The shrine noticed the crack that formed in her right then. It sought to break her all the way open.”

“And?”

“She resisted.” Goda let the other canister go. With two free hands, she knelt down again and picked Kanna up by the waist with a more deliberate grip. This time, Kanna couldn’t hold back. She summoned her last ounce of will, and she screamed and kicked her feet and slapped against Goda’s chest, but Goda easily overpowered her as she always did.

The tall woman slung her over a shoulder, which made Kanna’s stomach lurch. When Goda began to stand up, the ground seemed to rush far from Kanna’s reach all at once. She felt like she was being launched backwards into the air. Before she could even try to fight the reflex, she purged the contents of her stomach over Goda’s shoulder and onto the ground. Some of it fell on Goda’s robes, but she didn’t have the strength to be ashamed. The contraction had moved through her in a wave that she could not control, and once she was done, she became just as limp as before. She pressed her face against the back of Goda’s shoulder.

Tears began pouring out of her anew. She didn’t even know why she was crying anymore. It was merely a reflex, a reaction to the emptiness inside of her that she could no longer fill. There was nothing to grasp around her that could fill the void.

For a long moment, no one moved.

“You’re a monster,” Kanna heard the priestess finally saying. “Even after all this time, you’re the same monster you were nine years ago. Knowing the kind of burden that this girl carries within her, you agitated those demons deliberately to watch her writhe in pain. How do you know so well that she’d be able to survive this? Knowing what kind of place this was, you still brought her here again.”

“It seems that you knew I would. You were standing outside the cavern waiting, even though it’s long past your time to sleep. Did you lead me here without my realizing? Did you plan this all along since I arrived here? Have you fallen into a spiral of manipulation again, Priestess Rem?”

“There’s no manipulation necessary. You’re very predictable in your own way, Goda—or maybe it is just that I know you so well and that I always know where you are.” She walked behind Goda and peered down at Kanna’s face with an expression that was all at once full of some hidden meaning, and yet unreadable—or else Kanna did not have the energy to read it. Kanna weakly lifted her head up to better meet the woman’s eyes. “It’s almost over,” the priestess whispered to her. “Be still, be still. The monster will be in his cage soon enough.”

Then the woman walked down to the path that led to the plain. “I’m sure you know how this goes, then,” she said, turning around to glance at Goda. “You’ve stolen from Innkeeper Jaya—and you’ve taken a restricted product, no less; there is no question that you have broken the law. Here you are with the spoils of your theft. You aren’t one to fight your punishment, are you?”

“Not at all, Priestess.”

“Then pick up the fuel and let us allow the injured party to decide what she will do with you. I imagine she will hold you until the local administrator can see you.” She continued to head down the gravel trail, but then suddenly she stopped. Without turning around, she asked, “Do you feel any dread, Goda? This time, do you feel something at least?”

“I have no feelings, Priestess.”

Goda began walking, and the rocking of her stride made Kanna feel sick all over again.

The priestess allowed Goda to move ahead of her eventually, and as they trudged through the sands in the dark, Kanna could hear a faint voice blowing messages towards her with every gust of the wind.

“You feel sorry for her, don’t you? It’s best that you don’t. I know that you like her in some capacity, as so many of us will come to like our captors, but you must guard against this sentiment,” the voice said in Upperlander, clearly so that Goda could not understand. Still, it was loud enough that Kanna couldn’t imagine that Goda had missed it, even if she might have been unable to parse the words. “Resist, Kanna Rava, resist. The porter deserves what she gets. This crime may seem small to you, but it’s nothing compared to all the other crimes she has committed that have gone inadequately punished. She will hurt you the way she has hurt countless others if I don’t put a stop to it now. She does not care about you. Her intentions are morbid and obscene, and you are too innocent to realize what evil looks like. Don’t be fooled by that neutral face. Underneath that calm demeanor is a devil, and it is time that the world is rid of it. Perhaps this is why the Goddess put me here.”

“What incantations are you whispering back there, Priestess?” Goda called over her shoulder. She had called the woman a priestess, but for some reason, Kanna had first heard the word as “witch”—though granted, the two words sounded very similar in Middlelander, so it was an easy thing to mishear. *

When they had reached the yard that had already grown so familiar to Kanna, Goda stooped down and lowered her gently onto the ground. Even by the dim light of the lantern, she could see that Goda’s face held no trace of annoyance. She seemed resigned to everything. She stared down into Kanna’s eyes so directly that it made Kanna want to look away, but then the woman touched her face lightly, and the gesture all but forced her to match the gaze.

“You are more than this,” Goda whispered to her—or so it seemed that this had been what she said. Kanna couldn’t tell for sure because the words had been very soft and the wind had carried them away immediately. Either way, hearing this only served to build another knot in Kanna’s gut, another layer of confusion. Trust and distrust fought together inside of her, and neither seemed to gain an edge over the other.

She didn’t have long to dwell on it, though. She heard the priestess knocking on Jaya’s door, and soon enough the door burst open, and the space just outside was bathed in the light of the oil lamps from the innkeeper’s dining room table.

Unlike Goda, Jaya looked immediately cross. Her lips were tight, her hand gripped the door knob so hard that her knuckles had grown pale. “Who is it, who is it? What do you—?” Then she seemed to notice that it was the priestess who was staring back at her, and her eyes widened in embarrassed confusion. “Oh, good evening!” she said quickly. “My sincere apologies! It’s such a dark night, isn’t it? I can barely see two paces in front of me! To what do I owe the honor of such a spontaneous visit, my priestess?”

“I don’t mean to disturb you this time of night,” Priestess Rem replied, “but there is a matter that requires your immediate attention, considering the circumstances. You have been giving Porter Goda refuge all this time, and yet she thinks nothing of betraying her benefactor.” The priestess shifted so that the light from the inside began to flow against Goda as well, and she gestured towards Goda with a sweep of her arm. Under any other circumstances, it would have seemed like a personal introduction. “Look. This is the porter’s true self. She has stolen the fuel that our assistants hid for you. My deepest apologies; I had assumed that your property would be safe from thieves inside the caverns, but I was wrong. We’ll have to call the regional administrator in the morning and see that this woman is arrested.”

Jaya stared out into the night, her eyes spread open harder than usual, her gaze falling squarely in Goda and Kanna’s direction. She seemed to finally notice the two canisters of fuel. She was quiet for a long moment, but then her eyes snapped over towards Priestess Rem’s face.

“I beg your forgiveness for having worried you, my priestess, but this is all a misunderstanding,” Jaya said, very flatly, with suddenly no shred of emotion in her voice. “Goda Brahm is not stealing from me. I gave her the fuel.”

The priestess looked flabbergasted. Kanna shot a quick glance at Goda as well, only to find that the woman hovering above her was similarly in the midst of a pause. Both her eyebrows were raised and she was looking at Jaya very carefully.

“She…but she…,” Priestess Rem began. It was the first time Kanna had ever heard the woman stumble over her words. The priestess cleared her throat. “I found her outside the caverns, clearly trying to make off with it stealthily in the dead of night. Was it not you who asked us to find a safe spot for the fuel during this time of crisis and thievery? Was it not you who told us to hold it for you and to keep it safe at all cost?”

The woman was saying this, but Kanna wasn’t sure how much of it was literally true, and how much of it was that face that Middlelanders always wore. At this point Kanna had surmised that the priestesses could not keep intoxicants at the temple, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Jaya was merely the middleman in whose name they could hoard fuel legally; this was what Goda had implied days before, and now it all made sense. After all, Kanna had not seen so much as a generator anywhere near Jaya’s house, and yet the garden in the temple was entirely lit with electricity.

Jaya did not disagree with the priestess. Her eyes darted back and forth across the scene in front of her, and finally she seemed to conjure up some kind of reply: “Yes, yes, of course!” she said. She met eyes with Goda. “But Goda, my dear, why did you wait until it was so late? You made yourself look like some kind of bandit in the night.” She turned to the priestess again. “I told Goda to go get some earlier today. She’s leaving tomorrow and I didn’t want her to end up stranded. This is all my fault, of course. It was wrong of me to have sent her to the caverns or even told her about where I was keeping the goods; I should have called an assistant to discreetly fetch the fuel. If anyone should be punished, it should be I. Because of this incident, I will double my tribute of fuel to the temple.” She bowed so deeply that Kanna wondered if the woman would fall over.

Priestess Rem watched the innkeeper’s gesture for a moment, and then she glanced in Goda’s direction once again. “I suppose you offered them that expensive lantern as well,” she said, “and the robes that Kanna Rava is now wearing instead of her uniform.”

“My priestess is entirely correct.”

“Well, then,” Rem said, her tone one of forced politeness that left Kanna with no doubt that the woman knew that Jaya was lying, “everything is as it should be. I would like to bless you on behalf of the Goddess for being so generous to those who don’t deserve it.”

“Thank you, priestess! It is during trying times like these that I can most use such a blessing.”

After that, Jaya seemed to be waiting, but the priestess did not make a move to leave. Because clearly it was unthinkable to close the door in her face, Jaya finally stepped outside to join the group. She shut the door after herself and suddenly the space was filled again with darkness, touched only by the waning light of Goda’s lantern.

Jaya met eyes with Goda again and they seemed to exchange a meaningful glance that Kanna could not interpret. “Well,” Jaya said, “let’s not waste the rest of the evening away. Now that we’re all up and energized, let’s go along with our plans from before!”

Goda tilted her head. It was a subtle enough reaction that the priestess might not have caught it, but Kanna was close enough to notice, and she suddenly felt a bit relieved that she wasn’t the only one who was confused.

“Goda, my dear!” Jaya called out to her as she grew closer. She pointed towards the containers of alcohol. “Don’t you remember my suggestion earlier today? I haven’t seen you in so long and we haven’t had a chance for a nice chat the whole time you’ve been here! Let us make a fire and drink together and catch up! Bring the spirits to the garden! Bring the girl, too. The more the merrier!” She looked over at the priestess; a strange, forced smile had grown on her face. “You’re more than welcome to honor us with your presence tonight as well, Priestess Rem.”

“Innkeeper, you know very well that it’s against my precepts to attend any drunken gathering.” Because she had backed away, and she was standing outside of the radius of Goda’s light, Kanna could only see the shadow of the woman’s face anymore. “And I would encourage you to abstain yourself, if not for reasons of the spirit, than to avoid squandering such a precious resource.”

“My priestess is quite right,” Jaya said, the smile still unfaded, “but you will have to please allow me this terrible indulgence. The fires in the Upperland have died, so the shortage will be over soon and this small bit of drink will make no difference to all the motors of the world. Let us celebrate the blessings that the Goddess has showered upon us in these days.”

With that, Jaya headed in the direction of the garden and Goda scooped Kanna up again before taking hold of the two canisters of fuel. Kanna looked up over Goda’s shoulder, and she could still see the shape of Priestess Rem standing in the darkness near the door. Half her face was smeared with the dim moonlight, but the other half was so obscured in shadow that Kanna could not even see the white of her eye.

Once Jaya was out of earshot, but before Goda had started moving, the priestess called out in a flat voice that was devoid of any curiosity, “How is it that you’ve survived this long, Goda?” It sounded more like a lament than a question.

Goda was not facing the woman and made no move to turn. She merely stood there, stopped, leaning forward slightly as she had been about to take her first step towards the garden. She was waiting, perhaps because it seemed by the priestess’s tone that there was more to say.

“You should be dead,” the priestess told her. Again, her voice held no overt edge of anger. At most, there was a mild sense of bewilderment and wonder in it. Kanna looked up at the woman with surprise, but the woman did not respond to her stare. Instead, her gaze seemed trained on the back of Goda’s head. “Nine years, and still you have not died. How is that? I know death is what you want, and yet it escapes you. Why not give into it? Why won’t you let me help you die, Goda? It’s what’s best for everyone. The world is better off if you’re not in it.”

Kanna’s eyebrows knotted in shock. She gripped the back of Goda’s robes with her fingers, the squirming feeling of discomfort returning to her bones. By then, she knew that the priestess was trying to get Goda arrested, but she couldn’t imagine that such a small offense would warrant capital punishment, even by the unbalanced, draconian laws of the Middleland. The woman must have meant something else; perhaps it was yet another obtuse metaphor that she didn’t understand.

“Maybe it is true that the world would suffer less if I was gone from it,” Goda replied, still without turning around, “but whether I am to stay or to disappear from the world, it’ll be by the will of the Goddess, not by the will of Rem.”

* * *

“You owe me, you bastard—and not just for the fuel, but for everything else. You’ve brought me a lot of trouble this week. I don’t even know how I’m going to make up for basically insulting a priestess in front of my own home.” Jaya took a swig from her cup and rubbed her face. She was sitting so close to the fire that a bead of sweat had visibly accumulated on the back of her neck, and for some reason Kanna watched it with fascination. “Good thing liquor is a universal cure for everything. It’s even a repellent for clergy members.”

Kanna had managed to crawl onto a rock and sit up. She still felt lightheaded, and her ears roared with blood so that everything—the conversation in front of her, the rumble of the trucks behind her, the whistle of the wind—sounded like she was hearing it underwater. She was regaining her senses slowly. Thoughts from before—thoughts about what she had learned in the cave—had also begun worming themselves into her brain like wiry snakes, but she tried her hardest to suppress them.

I need to rest, Kanna told herself. Even just the prospect of thinking with any kind of depth exhausted her.

“You will return everything that I have given to you—and threefold. I don’t know how you will do it, but you will,” Jaya continued. “Not only that, but you will visit my wife in the Middleland when you get there, and you will shower her with all kinds of frivolous presents, and you will tell her that they all came from me.”

Goda stared into the crackling fire without saying anything, and so Jaya reached out and took Goda’s face in her hands.

“Both your mothers would have a fit if I let you get in trouble again. I know you think they’ve disavowed you—and they have—but they are still your mothers and they are still human. Knowing that you’re alive at least gives them some comfort.” Jaya’s gaze was so intense that it made even Kanna wince. After a moment, the woman’s glance wandered slightly, off towards the far side of the fence, and this relieved some of the tension—until Kanna followed her glance and realized what she was looking at.

Just outside the garden, shrouded mostly in darkness, stood the silhouette of Priestess Rem. Kanna had lost sight of her earlier and had assumed that the woman had left.

“That priestess has it out for you. I don’t know why, but she’s trying to get you into trouble. She’s been asking about you the whole time you’ve been here, did you know that? On the first day, she came to me and told me to let her know if you did anything wrong. I don’t think she had realized yet that I’ve known you since you were a child.”

“She can ask whatever she wants,” Goda said. She too seemed to glance briefly at the figure of the priestess beyond the fence. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters, you idiot. She’s the head priestess. She could pray and send you to hell. She could lie and get you locked up if she wanted. I think all she’s looking for is a good enough legal justification for her own conscience. I don’t want you coming back here again anytime soon. It’s far too risky now. Promise me that after you leave tomorrow morning, you won’t show up here again unless you absolutely have to.” Jaya’s hands seemed to grow tighter against Goda’s face. “Promise me, you imbecile.”

Goda’s jaw clenched. “Fine,” she muttered after a moment.

“Good.” After kissing the side of Goda’s mouth in full view of the priestess, Jaya released her. Kanna raised both eyebrows in shock at the gesture, but she knew better than to say anything. The innkeeper reached down beside her and picked up a cup of fuel, which she offered to Goda. “Drink,” she whispered, her side-glance aimed towards the priestess. “We’ve already made her uncomfortable. If all of us are drunk, she’ll have no choice but to leave.” Jaya turned to look at Kanna. “This one, too. She should start drinking so that the priestess isn’t tempted to talk to her.”

Goda shook her head. “This is ninety-five percent alcohol. She’ll go blind—or worse, vomit all over me again.” She threw a smirk in Kanna’s direction and Kanna responded with a wry glance.

“Fine, fine—but you will drink.” She shoved the cup into Goda’s hand. “You will drink, if for no other reason than the fact that you’re not very much fun when you’re sober.”

Kanna watched Goda take a sip, then another. Goda winced the first few times, but otherwise there seemed to be no resistance in her. She drank the fuel as if she were drinking a glass of water.

When Kanna looked up towards the entrance of the garden awhile later, it was as Jaya had said: the priestess had disappeared.

After the fire had time to wane and the stars had moved around in the sky, Goda told Kanna to retire to the storage shed. Her speech was not slurred, but it had slowed down to a pace where Kanna did not need to make the slightest bit of effort to understand every word of the Middlelander that flowed from the woman’s mouth. As Kanna stumbled past her, she could smell the fuel coming out of every one of Goda’s pores as if the woman were a rumbling truck giving off a cloud of exhaust.

Jaya’s arm was slung over Goda’s shoulder. She looked up at Kanna with an impish smile. “Don’t worry, she’ll come join you soon enough. She’s more suggestible in this state, by the way. If you’re looking to convince her of anything, seize the opportunity.”

Goda didn’t seem to hear Jaya’s indecent statements. She was staring off into the darkness of the plain, her body loose and relaxed, her eyes unfocused with a touch of sadness. With some hesitation, Kanna nodded, and headed out of the garden and to the shed by herself.

Once she had staggered inside, as if she were drunk herself, Kanna shut the door and immediately fell face-first into her mattress. She pressed her face deep into the fabric and sobbed until she lost consciousness.

* * *

The door creaked. At first, when Kanna looked up, she thought that the dim twilight that fell into the room was coming from the moon, but then she realized that there were faint edges of sun coloring part of the sky. Dawn had only just emerged.

Framed by that sky, a ghost hovered in the doorway. Because it was still very dark, she could not see any details.

“Goda?” Kanna whispered, though something inside of her immediately told her that the figure who had appeared was not her master.

“Goda is passed out drunk in the sand,” a soft voice blew in with the wind, “so I’m your master now, and I’ve come to torment you with the gift of free will.”

Kanna’s eyes widened and her pulse pounded in her throat. She wondered what kind of nightmare she had fallen into. She wondered what she needed to do to wake herself up.

The figure in black robes came into the room. Even as Kanna tried to recoil, the ghost moved faster, until it was kneeling at the foot of her bed, looming over her with an eerie presence. Kanna fought through her first paralyzed reaction, and she forced herself to sit up and face the shadow. She swallowed.

The face that stared back at her belonged to Priestess Rem. The woman was holding out her arm in offering, her leather-covered hand clasped into a tight fist as if she were carrying a precious jewel.

“Take it,” the woman said, her breaths coming rapidly. She seemed exhausted from some effort that Kanna could not fathom. “Take it. It is rare to find Goda so soundly asleep, and it cost me a lot of trouble not to brush my skin against hers on accident, so show some respect and take the gift.”

Kanna looked at her with confusion, but not knowing what else to do with the woman’s insistent posture, she slowly reached out and opened a receptive hand. The priestess took her by the wrist and pressed the gift against her palm. She remained there for a moment, crouched, looking Kanna in the face with the intensity of someone who was waiting for a disaster to happen.

“I wish this was for other reasons,” she said. The priestess let out a sharp breath, as if she were suppressing tears of anguish herself. “I wish this was because I don’t believe in slavery, and I don’t believe that you deserve your fate—and while all of that is true, it’s not the real reason. However, even though this act indulges very low parts of me, I do believe it’s also what’s best for humankind in the end.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am using you, Kanna. To avoid sinning against the Goddess by the letter of the law, I am putting the choice in your hands instead of mine. Your ignorance will protect you from conscious sin. It is inexcusable, and I hope you can forgive what I’m doing to you, but this burden will be useful to you nonetheless.”

She dropped something into Kanna’s hand, but Kanna was too bewildered to look at it at first. The priestess stood and gazed down at her with a tightened jaw, her breath growing shallow, shaky.

“You are aching to escape, I know—but you must be patient. Goda’s next stop after this will almost surely be the city of Karo, which is on the other side of the border, but not too deep into the Middleland yet. There is a midnight train that goes to the Upperland from there, every other day. If you don’t see it at the station the first evening, then that means it will arrive the next night. You should go then and only then,” she said. “You’re small; you can stow away easily. You won’t have much to return to, but you’ll be back in your home country and it will be easier to find people who are loyal enough to hide you.”

She turned and began walking towards the threshold, towards the door that remained partly opened even still. As she stepped through and some of the fledgling rays of the sun hit her face, she turned back one last time. “Goda will notice very quickly, so be swift when the time comes. Do not hesitate. Fight her if you have to. Do anything you need to do to escape. You won’t have another chance like this; make it count.”

Then she disappeared and the door rattled behind her until it clicked shut.

Her mouth agape, Kanna uncurled her hand and looked down. Among the creases of her dirty palm sat a cleanly-polished silver key.

She didn’t have to try it. She knew which void it was meant to fill.

---

* In the Middlelander language:
“Priestess” is pronounced “maaga,” with a neutral tone and emphasis on the first syllable.
“Witch” is pronounced “maajya,” with a rising tone and emphasis on the second syllable.

Goda calls Rem “maaga” (“Priestess”) with a rising tone while stressing the second syllable conspicuously, so Kanna mishears her at first.

The words indeed have the same root and were once the same word in Proto-Low-Middlelander.

Onto Chapter 13 >>

Goda glided across the desert and Kanna followed her strides much less gracefully. She didn’t know where they were going at first, but then when her eyes adjusted to the darkness outside, and she saw that Goda had turned straight in the direction of the caverns, it all fit together in her mind.

She knew that the next morning, they would be heading out of the desert and into the Middleland; to be able to even set out on that journey, they would need fuel. But she couldn’t fathom that Goda would try to steal from the priestesses—or from Jaya, rather, since technically the temple couldn’t keep fuel—especially after having been caught wandering in the caves only two nights before.

Goda explained nothing. When Kanna fell behind a bit, Goda glanced briefly at her, but otherwise she seemed to expect her to keep up. In no time, they passed by one of the military trucks—the one that had been parked close to the garden—and Kanna saw a soldier peek her head out the door. It was the same woman she had seen the evening before, when they had been coming back to the storage room from Parama’s shack. She had a cigar stuffed in her mouth again, and the glow of her match as she lit the tip of it was the only thing that allowed Kanna to see her face.

Perhaps it had only been the dim light, but Kanna thought she saw a dark circle under the woman’s eye that hadn’t been there before.

The soldier took one look at Goda and recoiled into the truck, slamming the door behind her. Kanna raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment. By then, she had grown used to all the negative reactions that people had towards her master; she herself had them still.

Kanna caught up to Goda and kept close to her as they walked through another patch of trucks. “Are you sure this is a smart thing to do?” she asked. “What if we get caught? Priestess Rem already knows that we’ve been in there.”

“If we get caught, then we get caught. The caverns are our best option now.”

Kanna glanced around at the machines that surrounded them, some of which were rumbling conspicuously, wasting their precious fuel. “What if you steal from the soldiers?” She was a little surprised at her own suggestion, but it was true that she didn’t think much of the military, perhaps because they had been the ones who had driven her family out of their own lands. She wasn’t a thief herself, but if she had been, stealing from other thieves seemed to be the most reasonable strategy.

Goda shook her head without turning around. “No, I tried that already,” she said. “Earlier this evening, when you were hiding from me, I went into the back of that nearby truck and rummaged around for some spare fuel. The soldier inside the cabin heard me and confronted me. It was then I learned that none of the trucks are carrying extra fuel. They plan to refuel in the Upperland where all the product is, so their fuel tanks are half-full and tightly locked. It would be unlikely that I would be able to siphon from one of them without breaking the tanks open and causing a scene.”

Kanna glanced back towards the truck that stood near the garden, and she watched it grow smaller in the distance. She could just barely see the small point of orange cigar light through the dark windows of the cabin.

Then something connected yet again.

“You hit that woman, didn’t you?” Kanna said. “The soldier. You punched her in the face. She had a bruise on her eye.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But why?”

“She didn’t like that I was looking through her things. That’s understandable—but I was in a hurry and I didn’t have time to deal with her emotions. She swung at me and she missed.”

“And?”

“And so I swung back at her and I didn’t miss.”

Kanna felt her heart race a little harder, so she crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling. It was that mix of fear and curiosity together again. It was some kind of response that her body had when it became aware of any edge of Goda’s power, a sensation that was still mostly unpleasant to her, but not entirely so anymore. It was just unpleasant enough that it made her want to turn away and look at the ground for awhile.

When she looked back up, they were much closer to the crag where the caverns lived. Goda began leading her up the winding trail of the cliff and Kanna watched where she stepped to avoid slipping on the gravel. Just as before, she could only see where Goda’s lamplight shined, so she stayed close and she held her hands out so that she could catch herself on Goda if she stumbled.

“I thought that lamp had run out of batteries,” Kanna began to say—but then she remembered that Goda had found two lanterns in Jaya’s storage room that first afternoon.

“This is the other one,” Goda replied. “Hopefully it will stay alive until we’re done. There are no spare lanterns or batteries, so it’s our last resort.”

“Why don’t we just light a candle, then?”

Goda paused for a long moment, but since she was facing forward, Kanna couldn’t see her expression. “Why don’t we smoke some cigars while we carry the fuel out, too?”

It was only a few paces later that it finally dawned on Kanna, but still she huffed with irritation. “I can’t imagine that engine fuel is so flammable that we can’t even have a tiny light,” she argued, even though she actually agreed with Goda and wasn’t too keen to test her own argument. It was just that she still couldn’t tolerate having anything in common with the woman—even a meaningless opinion.

“You can light a match when we get there and see for yourself if you want,” Goda offered. Kanna could hear the smile in her voice.

They reached the mouth of the cavern a few minutes later, and Kanna felt the impulse to turn away again and look towards the plain below. The desert was bathed in the bluish glow of the moon, but here and there she could see the points of a few white and orange lights among the military trucks. A bonfire flickered near the middle of that maze; she noticed the tiny shapes of countless soldiers crouched around it. They looked like a swarm of ants.

“How does a country with such a small homeland have such a huge military?” Kanna murmured. “I heard that a hundred years ago, you people had barely enough to even eat, and now you’re bursting out of the seams of your original borders to the point that you have to conquer everyone else.” Kanna turned to see that Goda was standing at the entrance of the cave, looking at her with a strangely amused expression.

“What we’ll find in here is the answer to your question.”

Kanna shook her head. “Engine fuel? But any of the kingdoms can use that.”

“And yet none of them use it the way we do. On its own, any technology just sits there and does nothing. It’s human intention that drives the motors more than the fuel.” Goda stepped into the cave’s mouth. The glowing lamp swung by her side, lighting the first edges of the colorful snakes on the walls.

Kanna didn’t want to go inside. The snakes unnerved her almost as much as Goda did—but she knew that wherever Goda went, she had to follow. “Human intention,” Kanna echoed as the walls of the cavern began to swallow her up. “You mean the intention of the Middlelanders? What intention is that?”

“To be evil. To be selfish. Just like you.” She turned back around to face the void and Kanna stared after her.

Distracted for a moment by the growing tangle of serpents above her and to the sides of her, and the garbled script on the walls that glowed in response to Goda’s light, Kanna did not protest at first. She felt that pressure in her head returning, and that whining pulse from the last time she had seen the snakes growing louder in her ears.

Kanna let out a breath, pressing her hands against her eyes. The snakes had become too bright. “I’m nothing like you people,” she said finally.

“What are you babbling about, Kanna Rava? You’re exactly like us. In fact, you may as well be one of us. It is you and your family who fed us, and now you complain that we’ve grown strong and fat and insatiable along with you. How silly.”

“You’re full of nonsense. All you ever say is nonsense.” Kanna gritted her teeth against the vibration in the air that seemed to grow only higher in pitch. It made her feel like her brains were buzzing inside of her skull. Once she felt that she could hardly take another step, a nauseating sensation came over the whole of her: She could suddenly sense an inner ghost floating in her body, one that was separate from her bones and muscle and physical frame, one that hovered loosely just underneath her skin.

Her body was resisting it, resisting everything—the ghost inside her, the environment outside of her, even just the way the air played against her flesh as she moved. She couldn’t stand any of it. She had the intense feeling that her body was about to burst open, that the ghost inside of her was fighting against its container so that it could spread beyond her skin and fuse with the cave itself. She had no idea what it meant. An insistent pulse rushed up her spine and through her head, as if to crack it open.

Kanna’s panicked steps echoed loudly until she stopped dead in her tracks altogether. “What’s…happening? What is this, Goda? Is it the serpents? Why are they doing this? Stop them!”

A hand clasped against hers. Some force pulled her forward into the darkness—and with every ounce of effort that she had left, she refused to give in to the serpents, and she allowed the hand to lead her quickly down the cavern until they had reached a fork in the path.

To the right was the tunnel where the snakes flowed, the tunnel where she and Goda and Parama had hidden themselves that first night; to the left was the cavern where the assistants had carted off the fuel. Goda pulled her to the left, further into the void, into the path that was free from serpents.

Within moments, the feeling of conflict inside of Kanna’s body dissolved. She felt her spirit collapse within her body, so that they became the same again, so that she could no longer sense any separation between herself and her other self.

And then she wondered—but only for a split second, because it brought up a new kind of pain to even think about it—that perhaps the resistance between the two was always there, but she could not always feel it. She had never experienced that kind of discomfort so directly before. It had been a pain without a source, like every atom of air that surrounded her had been a threat.

She pressed herself against a wall of the cave and gasped and tried to fight the tears, but the water was already falling in thick streams from her eyes. “Goda, what was that?” she asked between heaving breaths. “What on Earth…?”

Goda was staring at her intensely. The light from the lamp made her black eyes glow. It was terrifying enough that Kanna had to fight not to look away.

“A wave of death passed through here. You were able to sense that?” There was fascination in Goda’s tone. “The cave is aroused by our presence tonight, so it agitated our snakes to try to kill us.”

Kanna stared back at her with bewilderment. “That was real? It happened to you, too?” But she couldn’t comprehend how Goda had felt the same thing and continued to walk seemingly as if nothing had occurred at all.

Goda stared back down towards the main part of the cave, where some of the lamplight still reached, where the outline of a few of the snakes was still visible. “It’s not real,” she said, “but yes, it happened. It seems to have passed mostly through you instead of me, so maybe you were the one meant to receive it this time.”

“You act like you’re not even surprised by all of this,” Kanna huffed. Her senses felt like they were returning to normal, even if her mind couldn’t completely let go of that feeling of dread and hollowness that had emerged under the snakes.

Goda released Kanna’s hand, began advancing again down the path. “That’s because it’s not too surprising. I’ve seen it before, in other old shrines that I’ve explored, though most people don’t notice it because the shrine is picky about who it will kill, and it has its favorites. This is just a feature of these kinds of places. The first time you die, it’s unexpected, but after awhile you grow more and more used to it, so you just let it happen.”

“But I didn’t die!” Kanna pressed her hands against her own body, as if to feel whether her flesh was still there, even as she began to follow Goda once again.

“No, you didn’t. You resisted, so you survived.”

Though they appeared to agree, Kanna had no idea what the woman was talking about. Goda had made it sound as if she herself had died many times, and that it was no big deal, just a minor inconvenience when taking a stroll through a cave. Of course, that was complete nonsense, Kanna thought, just like everything else that came out of Goda’s mouth. After all, if Goda had died, then naturally she would be dead and not leading Kanna deeper into some pitch black hole.

“Is this what Death Flower does?” Kanna asked suddenly, as soon as the thought bolted through her mind.

Goda laughed. At first, Kanna thought it was a laugh of derision, a dismissive gesture—but then she heard the edge of pleasure in it. “Yes!” Goda told her, glancing behind her, a smile spread on her face. “That is exactly what it does. It works differently—it’s much more potent than any shrine—but this is essentially what it does. It kills you.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. “You’re telling me this is why people eat Flower? Why would anyone ever want to do that?” she cried. “That was the worst thing I have ever felt in my entire life! I’d rather be shocked a hundred times by the cuff than feel my soul dissolving into infinity like that for even a minute!”

“Of course. Death is many things; pleasant is not one of them.” Goda’s strides grew longer as the cave stretched further in front of them. “But there’s more to life than pleasure.”

Kanna stared into the darkness. She shivered as she felt herself getting sucked in, but she willingly continued to follow because she had no choice, and because she had grown curious of what she might find in the void.

When they reached a dead end—a pit, a belly—Kanna only noticed because the echoes of their footsteps bounced back towards them quicker, and so she could tell that the walls were closing in around them. The chamber was large enough that the tiny lantern could not light up every side at once, but from what Kanna could see, there were no etchings in the stone.

“Thank goodness,” she muttered, pressing her fingers against the pores of the rock. “No snakes.”

“Actually, the snakes are here, too,” Goda told her. “They’re everywhere—even outside the caverns. It’s just that you normally can’t see them. If you see them, then you start to die.”

“Again, your riddles are tiresome.”

“Then go back to sleep.”

As they moved deeper into the chamber, a familiar smell began to fill Kanna’s nostrils. “There’s…fuel in here,” she whispered. The smell triggered a vague memory again—one from long before her first night in the caverns, one from her childhood—but she could not piece it together into a stable image. “Why does the smell seem familiar to me?”

“Did you ever spend time near your father’s work?”

Kanna sighed. “No. Not really. My mother always thought that brewing spirits was unseemly and she kept me away from all drugs—including the booze my father produced. She never even let me visit the factories. It seemed like everyone in the world had tasted my father’s product except for me.” Kanna kept her eyes on the spotlight, but only saw an endless gravely floor below it. The source of the smell was still not apparent. “Even after she died about a year ago, and I was alone in the house and old enough to drink, I didn’t seek it out for some reason.” She paused, a bit bothered by Goda’s question. “Why do you ask?”

“Because what you’re smelling is the blood of your father’s victims.”

Kanna reached out and struck her open palm hard against Goda’s back. “You know nothing of victimhood!” she yelled, her ire rising hotly up into her head. “You’ve never had to live what I’ve lived through!” A metallic clanking rung through the space as she shuffled forward and her foot scraped against something in the dark. She nearly tripped over whatever it was, and it felt like she had knocked it over.

The smell grew immediately stronger.

Goda stopped walking then. “Look to your left. I think you’ve found it.”

“Found what?”

But the light didn’t reach. As Goda placed the lantern on the ground nearby, Kanna could see a bit better, and she noticed that there was a crowd of large steel canisters in the middle of the space. One of them had spilled over, and as the liquid—and the smell—of pure fuel came rushing out of the spout, she crouched down quickly to stand the container upright.

There were words written on the side. At first, her brain was pleased, because catching sight of the cozy, familiar Upperland script gave her a sudden rush of comfort—but then she noticed what it said:

Rava Spirits

Kanna blinked. She turned her head slightly towards Goda in confusion, but the woman was conspicuously quiet, as if she were waiting. Kanna could no longer see Goda’s face. All the light was spent shining on the two words that made up the seal of her father’s company name on the side of the canister.

Rava Spirits

Curiously, Kanna ventured to dip her fingers in the puddle of fuel close to her knees, and she brought the liquid up to her nose. She recoiled at first, because the smell was strong, but it triggered her memory again, and this time the image was a bit more solid. This time she remembered her grandfather’s breath, one day when he had come to visit her mother’s house.

Rava Spirits

“This…this is grain alcohol,” Kanna whispered in realization. Her hand shook in front of her face. “This is a canister of distilled spirits.” She looked up at Goda again, even though she could not see her. “But why?”

“Why indeed.” Goda’s voice emerged from the dark, and it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. “It’s fuel, Kanna. Ethyl alcohol. Ethanol. Our trucks, our factories, our soldiers—this is like blood for them, and your father was the only producer. You should already know.”

“I don’t know anything….” Kanna pressed her hand into the puddle of alcohol again. She felt the substance seeping into the tiny cuts and scratches on her palm and making them sting. “I don’t….”

But very suddenly, she knew. Exactly because she knew, she shook her head and backed away, as if the canister of fuel had been on fire after all. She stumbled back against the dirty floor, sending gravel shooting in every direction.

“No…,” she said. “No! That can’t be true! Stop toying with me, Goda! We didn’t—!” She pulled back far enough that the light no longer touched her, and she ran straight into one of the walls of the cavern. “No, we didn’t make fuel for you wretched people! That isn’t even possible. If we did, then that means we’re the reason that you…!”

Goda laughed. It was the most horrifying sound that Kanna had ever heard. It made her feel hollow again, as if the laugh were coming from inside of her own self instead, as if it were echoing against the very core of her.

“So now you know,” Goda said.

“I don’t know anything!” Kanna shouted—but it wasn’t true. This time, for the first time, she knew. She pressed her hands hard against her face. “This can’t be real! I’m not going to help you drag cans of fuel out of this place—fuel that was made by the hand of my own father—so that you can use that same fuel to drive me to the place of my slavery, so that I can work in a factory powered by this very poison! No! That’s too perverse for me to even comprehend!”

“Oh, you will do it.” Goda stepped into the light and stooped down to grip the handles of two of the containers. “You will do it because you’re my slave and you have no choice.”

“No! I won’t even touch that! You can’t force me!”

“I don’t need to force you. Life itself has forced you already.” Goda turned to look at her. Her eyes were smoldering with fire reflected from the light, but otherwise they were empty. “Just as your father and his father and his father greedily deprived your countrymen from the grain that would have fed them, and instead used your precious mok to make fuel and line their pockets with our money, you too will help me greedily steal this fuel from the people who actually deserve it. Just as your father was too blinded by money to notice that he had helped us grow strong enough to finally take him over—that he had been digging his own grave out in those fields—you too will blind yourself to what all of this means, and you will become an accomplice in your own slavery.” Goda approached her, stretching her arm out to offer one of the canisters. “Take it. Take it. This is what you must face. It is your own doing. You must live the life you’ve created.”

“No! I didn’t create any of this! It isn’t my fault! How could I have known? How could I have possibly known?”

Goda shook her head. “It’s not what you knew. It’s what you didn’t know. No one would ever do this consciously. You and your family have done this out of ignorance. But your father has yet to awaken, and probably never will. It is up to you to awaken in his place.” She offered Kanna the fuel again, more insistently this time. “Now take it. You have no choice. This fuel is yours—you’re the rightful heir to it—and you will use it to drive yourself into slavery. That is your fate.”

Kanna shuddered, a screaming breath emerging from deep inside of her. It shook the very center of every bone in her body. The presence of the snakes returned in that instant, as if her cries had been a call meant for them, and though Kanna could not see them, she sensed those serpents pouring into the room in droves. It felt like her skin was about to rip open from a fire that exploded through every particle of her flesh.

It burned from her ancestors’ fuel, the fuel that had spilled in front of her. The specter of death loomed over Kanna’s head, and she realized that it was the shadow of Goda Brahm.

She ran. Rather than face it, she ran.

She didn’t know where she was or where she was going, but she only knew that she needed to run away from Goda. Her footfalls echoed loudly in the void and it only reminded her of the hollowness within. Every hole on her face oozed with warm water and made it hard to breathe and made her cough the faster she ran.

When she reached the main cavern, she thought she felt the snakes following her. She looked up to see that some of them had started to light up, even where the moonlight could not have possibly struck.

“No!” she cried out, and she pushed forward to the exit, where the first wave of electricity pulsed through her body.

Perhaps the cuff had been shocking her the whole time, and she had only noticed just then, but it felt stronger than before, like the throbbing pain reached into her marrow. She fell to the ground just outside the cavern, writhing in the pain of the shock and of the emptiness that was washing over her. She writhed like the snake that Goda had crushed to death in the desert.

“No!” she croaked out as her face smashed into the dirt. It was all that emerged from her mouth, but in her mind, a hundred thousand thoughts had raced to the surface. I am Kanna Rava! It’s not my fault! It’s not my father’s fault! The Middlelanders, they made us do it! I am Kanna Rava! I am—

A cold, dry hand pressed suddenly to her face. It covered her mouth, as if to silence her gently. It reeked of the tanned hide of a dead animal.

“Quiet now,” a voice whispered in Kanna’s native tongue. “The time has come for me to free you from her.”

---

Onto Chapter 12 >>

“Why did you do that?” Kanna demanded. “What if I hadn’t been able to get out from where I was? You would have been pointlessly torturing me!”

But Goda had already started walking in the direction of the temple complex. Kanna ran up behind her and reached up to grasp her shoulder. Her palm accidentally pressed against the spot where she remembered Goda’s bruise had been, but she had no compassion left, and so she didn’t feel compelled to move her hand. At any rate, the woman didn’t flinch.

“Hey! Hey, listen to me!” Kanna’s shouts grew louder. “Are you crazy or something? Why did you do that to me?”

“I looked around and couldn’t find you. I suspected you were hiding, but I knew you would appear quickly enough once I left the garden,” Goda said without turning around or even pausing her stride. “Otherwise, you did it on your own. I just stood there and allowed you to do it.”

“Bullshit!” Kanna grabbed two handfuls of Goda’s outer robes and she dragged her feet against the gravel to slow the woman down. “It was you! You pulled out of the cuff’s range, not me! Why would I do something like that to myself?”

“Because you love the shocks.” Goda glanced over her shoulder at Kanna. Her face was neutral except for that tiny, annoying smile, which made her words all the more difficult to tolerate. “They tell you where the walls of your prison are—so that you can run head-first into them. By all means, do it. Test every corner for my weakness. Break yourself up for me and I will gather all the pieces when you’re done.”

It took all of Kanna’s mental strength not to unclench her fists from the woman’s robes. She wanted to punch her in the face, the same way that she had punched Goda’s body—but she wondered if the woman’s jaw was also made of iron, and if it might break her hand entirely. Her knuckles still hurt from the night before. Even just noticing the pain again coaxed a few angry tears to the surface.

“I hate everything about you, Goda.”

“Good.”

“Good?” Kanna dug her nails into Goda’s back through the fabric of her robes. She felt a crazed laugh emerging from inside of her instead of a sob, and she didn’t know why. She held it back.

“Yes. You told me this morning that you were tired of being afraid of me,” Goda said, turning back to face the plain again. “Now you’re not afraid; you hate me instead. Isn’t that what you want?”

Kanna didn’t know how to respond. As her eyes and the inside of her nose were damp, she found that the grainy air of the desert irritated her. She pressed her face to Goda’s back and took a deep breathful of the warm air that hovered between the folds of the woman’s clothes. Her tears seeped into the cloth.

She was exhausted of everything. She followed Goda mindlessly. She closed her eyes.

“I’ve only known you for three days. Why do I feel this way about you?” Because she was in a daze, at first Kanna hadn’t realized that she had spoken aloud, that she had whispered the confession against Goda’s back.

She hoped that Goda hadn’t heard—but of course she had.

“You have been through the most intense moments of your life in the past three days. Everything you’ve ever known has been torn away from you, and so it feels as if you’ve lived many lifetimes in a matter of hours, that you’ve gone through the labor pains of your own birth over and over. And you’re projecting those intense emotions onto me, because I happen to have been the pair of cold hands that ripped you out of that womb you were living in,” Goda said. “It’s all right. I’m used to the blame. That’s the job of a porter.” Her husky voice vibrated in her body distinctly enough that Kanna could feel the words buzzing against her own lips as much as she heard them in the air.

She thought about what Goda said, but she knew that it didn’t answer her question. She had been asking about different feelings, but maybe the answer lay between the words. Maybe Goda had just dismissed her as generously as she could have.

When Kanna’s breaths became shallow and she felt the urge to taste the outside air again, she pulled back. A cloud of motor exhaust hit her in the face right away. She opened her eyes and saw that they were surrounded by a labyrinth of military trucks, and there seemed to be even more of them than there were the night before. As she squinted into the dim evening landscape, she could see that some of the rigs were hauling huge storage containers, and others carried what appeared to be farming equipment.

“Why did they come here?” Kanna asked.

“They’re stopping to rest and to get a blessing at the monastery before they head North. Now that the fires in the Upperland are under control, it seems that the government is sending soldiers up to finally collect the grain.”

“Fires?” Kanna had vague memories of smoke when she had stepped onto the train that was destined for the Outerland, but it had just been a thin taste in the air, so she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. The sky had been clear when they had stopped in the desert days later.

“There were fires burning through the grain fields. Half the planted mok that was overwintering is now pot-ash and some of the silos full of mok seed caught fire, too. It’s a mess. Many of your people will starve.”

“The mok grain is burning? But how? Are the fires anywhere near my family’s property?”

“The fire is over now, so don’t worry about it.”

Kanna sighed. She knew any further demands would be useless, so instead she looked around at the uniformed women who rushed to and fro. Some of them were tying down equipment, some were flipping through paperwork, and still others were just standing around smoking. “But why are they sending soldiers to do farm work?”

“Easy labor, I suppose,” Goda said. “For the past few decades, a lot of the resources have been funneled into the military machine. It’s how the Middleland expanded as quickly as it did. So many people are employed by the military—and they work on a contract, so they can’t just quit—that the government shuffles them around to do all sorts of menial tasks. They’re also the ones who consume most of the truck fuel.”

Kanna’s grip on Goda’s back tightened. “The fields they’re harvesting the grain from—they’re my father’s fields, aren’t they?”

“They’re not his fields anymore.”

They reached the threshold of the temple complex not long after they had both fallen silent. As the two towers loomed closer, Kanna peeked from behind Goda and noticed that there were soldiers near the gate. Most of them were kneeling on the ground—just as Goda had done the first day they had arrived—and they were placing bowls of fruit and yaw root near the gateway.

On the other side stood two priestesses, smiling down at the visitors, saying nothing. Their expressions reminded Kanna of the Goddess that she had seen in the sanctuary. Priestess Rem was not among them—and neither was anyone who might have looked like her. Now that Kanna knew about the woman’s twin, she had been a bit more careful to observe the faces of the other clergy members, though she still wasn’t sure if Rem’s sister even worked there.

Goda handed Kanna a thin stack of papers. “Here, take this to the head priestess. She’ll stamp them.”

“But I don’t see her.”

“She’s here.” Goda’s gaze fell beyond the gateway, though her eyes didn’t appear to be searching for anything in particular. “Go in and you’ll find her soon enough.” And then Goda knelt down beside the soldiers to stand in the crossfire of the priestesses’ blessings.

Kanna gave Goda a questioning glance, but the woman had already turned away. It was then that Kanna remembered what Priestess Rem had told her the day before: “I can tell where she is if she’s close enough. Call it a sixth sense.” Maybe that perception went both ways.

Kanna moved on, and she found a space in the threshold where she could respectfully squeeze past the priestesses after giving a deep bow to each of them. She wasn’t sure if the gesture was adequate, but they both offered her a smile in return. As a foreigner and a heathen, it seemed no one expected much from her.

She flowed down the path that she had walked with Priestess Rem the night before, even though everything besides the stone beneath her feet looked unfamiliar still. She had no idea how she might find her way around—but before she had come upon the space between the two towers, she noticed a low table set up near a corner of the fence. The crooked form of Assistant Finn hunched over it, stacks of paperwork spread like a makeshift tablecloth.

Kanna couldn’t help but grimace. That poor woman has been faced with a torture worse than mine perhaps, she thought. She couldn’t imagine spending years staring at tiny little smears of ink for hours per day.

In spite of her distaste for both the woman and her bureaucracy, she approached, wondering if maybe the assistant could tell her where to go, or even just stamp the papers for her and be done with it. A small man crouched near the woman as well—seemingly subjecting himself to the same smattering of words—and his face grew clearer when Kanna walked closer.

She felt ashamed to see him again. In spite of what had happened between them the night before, however, she lifted a hand in greeting because he had already caught her gaze and it was too late to escape him.

“Hello there, Slave Rava! How are you feeling tonight? It’s your last day here, isn’t it? Tomorrow morning you’ll be able to—” Parama stopped, a puzzled look on his face. “Are those my robes you’re wearing?”

Kanna looked down at her clothes, her cheeks growing automatically warm. She had somehow forgotten what she had changed into hours before, and indeed it did seem a bit awkward to walk up to someone while wearing their stolen clothes.

Or borrowed clothes. Kanna decided to rethink the last thought in her native tongue, since the term for “steal” and “borrow” were the same. It made her feel better about it.

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said when she had the courage to look up at him. “Innkeeper Jaya gave these to me today during…an emergency. I’ll bring them back to you as soon as I can change out of them.”

“No, no! Don’t worry about it!” Parama replied quickly, waving his hands around as if the notion of Kanna’s returning the clothes were preposterous. “Those are old anyway. She bought me some new ones recently, so I don’t need them. Besides, they suit you well.” He gave her a smile that she felt she didn’t deserve.

“Are you sure? After all, I’m not the only one who has stolen from you recently. If you want, you can come back with me and I’ll return both the clothes and that book that Goda took from you. I think I saw it on a shelf in the storage room this morning.”

“Oh, that? Don’t worry about it, either, Slave Rava. It was just a beginner’s guide on Old Middlelander script and it’s of no use to me anymore. I had already forgotten about it, actually.”

Kanna stared at him. She found it unfathomable that he had forgotten, considering that it had been the source of an entire altercation. “Then what on Earth possessed you to fight a giant over it?”

The corners of his eyes creased, the edges of his lips rose just slightly. “Was I fighting her?”

“Yes, of course. I saw what you did. I was there, remember? I was part of that fight.”

“But you weren’t fighting her, either, were you?”

Kanna felt her face grow warmer, so she turned away. She cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m sorry about last night, but I didn’t come here to talk about any of that. I’m supposed to get my papers stamped.” She glanced towards Assistant Finn, but the woman had been ignoring their whole conversation and offered no answer to Kanna’s implied question.

“I think I saw Priestess Rem go into the silo,” Parama said. He gestured towards one of the towers, the one that stood on the opposite side of the wide path.

Kanna gazed up at those twin stacks of stone. Silos? she thought. It hadn’t occurred to her that this was what they might have been. Perhaps it was just that the granaries on her father’s property had looked very different.

She bid farewell and followed the walkway, spotting an open threshold carved into the rock of the tower. The instant she stepped past the doorway, she was faced with a choice: a spiraling staircase to her right that seemed to lead up towards the top of the structure, and another spiral to the left that appeared to sink beneath ground level. There was a warm light—like a flickering fire—that came up from below, so she descended after only a moment’s hesitation.

As she circled down around the core of the building, the air grew slightly more damp, enough that it contrasted noticeably with the desert air that she brought with her. She came upon a pit soon enough, a small room that spread out before her. The space carried an uncomfortable silence to it. Kanna’s soft footsteps echoed even though the room was compact and the walls were smeared with dried earth.

In the middle of the chamber, facing away from her, was a figure in black robes kneeling on the ground. Three candles dripped against the floor, wax oozing untended in an ever-expanding pool near the far wall, as if the light had been long forgotten. If it was some kind of altar, Kanna thought, it must have been incomplete: It included no image of the Goddess.

She was disturbed by the scene for a reason she couldn’t quite name, but because she was impatient to stamp her papers and leave, she took the last few furtive steps down the staircase and into the room.

She was sure that the woman in the chamber was Priestess Rem. Her suspicions only grew confirmed when she sneaked close enough to look over the figure’s shoulder, and she noticed a bowl of water that lay before the woman’s knees: Many familiar features emerged in its rippling reflection–but as soon as the image came fully together, Kanna jerked away in shock.

She slipped in her panic. She fell to the ground beside the woman and the thump sent the bowl vibrating. From her new vantage point, her gaze darted up to the woman’s face, to make sure it hadn’t been a trick of the light on the water. Indeed, Priestess Rem’s eyes were glazed over, her pupils wide, her mouth agape like all consciousness had been stripped out of her. Fat streams of tears flowed out of her eyes and landed like lead weights into the water below. Drool had accumulated in the corners of her mouth, falling just the same.

Kanna shuffled to get up off the gritty floor, but the commotion seemed to have broken the priestess’s concentration–albeit greatly delayed. Seconds later, the woman’s whole body finally jerked in some kind of reaction. Her eyes blinked in rapid succession.

“Ah…?” She looked around, confused, as if Kanna had just shaken her out of a dream. “Who is…?” She peered through the dim light of the chamber, but before long, lucidity seemed to take hold and her slackened face regained its usual sharpness. “Oh! Kanna Rava? Is it time already for your papers to be stamped? I must have lost track! Sit down, sit down.” She pointed to a spot next to her on the floor and Kanna hesitantly crouched down beside her.

“Are you all right, Priestess?”

Priestess Rem either did not seem to notice or did not want to acknowledge Kanna’s disturbed expression. The most she offered was a funny glance. “Yes, of course. Why would I not be?”

“You seemed…different just now.” Then again, Kanna had only met the woman a few times. Perhaps crying and drooling into a bowl of water was the norm for her. For all she knew, every Middlelander did this once a week; she had only immersed herself in the culture for a few days yet.

“Ah, yes, well, I was in the midst of a ritual—one that must be done in private.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said, looking towards the stairwell, already feeling her legs bursting with the itch to run away again. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“No, it’s my own fault. I should have emerged long ago to the surface. I was just caught up in the moment.” She motioned for Kanna to sit all the way down. “I was fortunetelling, you see. It’s an ancient practice, but it’s not very common among the priestesses anymore. I’m out of practice myself. It took me hours to get into this state.”

“You were trying to see the future?” Fortunetelling was technically against the Upperlander religion, but people had a tendency to do it anyway, so Kanna wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the idea—even if she had always regarded it as nonsense. “Did you…see what you needed to see?” Kanna asked politely, unsure of how else to reply.

“Hmm,” the priestess murmured. She pressed her hand to her mouth and stared again into the bowl of water, this time with eyes that held an active mind. “No. I tried, but something blocked me from seeing through the eyes of the Goddess. In the past, even when partly blocked I have been able to grasp at something useful most of the time, but this time the energy wouldn’t flow at all.”

“Is it because of Goda?” Kanna asked cautiously.

“To be honest, yes. I think so. When she leaves tomorrow, maybe I will be able to reconnect. Even then, however, I will just be resting on the laurels of avoidance. The truth is that as long as I hold this rage inside of me, I will never be able to fuse fully with the Goddess, and the anger will only come up again and again. It is clear to me now how much I have been denying and repressing. In fact, when I entered the fortunetelling state, this was all the Goddess would show me: my own hatred and how it colors my fate.” She paused for a long moment, her eyes growing dark. “No, there was something else. One other thing.” The priestess looked directly at her. “It was about you. I saw your future instead of my own.”

“My future?” Unnerved by the expression in the woman’s eyes, Kanna added, “Could I ask you what you saw?” In truth, she wasn’t completely sure if she wanted to know, assuming the priestess was even clairvoyant in the first place.

“I saw…a bird. A swan.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow, a bit speechless. It was certainly not anything that she had expected. It was an eerie coincidence, too, considering that she had dreamt of the same bird only nights before.

“In my vision,” the priestess continued, “there was an egg inside of you filled with a writhing ball of snakes. The Goddess sent a white swan down from the heavens, and then the swan entered into you and forced the egg to crack open. The egg soon hatched and the snakes slithered out, so the swan crouched between your legs and ate them one by one.”

Kanna’s face twisted in confusion and embarrassment. “I don’t know what that means! How could that be my future?”

“It’s a symbol, of course. For what, I don’t know. Only you can really know that.”

“I…know nothing. I’ve never known less in my life.” The words had come tumbling out seemingly without intention, but they were nonetheless true.

When the room had fallen again into an awkward silence, the priestess extended her arm, but was careful not to touch Kanna directly, since her hands were not gloved this time. “Put the papers on the floor and I will stamp them,” she said. With her other hand, she rummaged inside her robes to produce her seal. “After that, you are free to go. You look to me like you are not influenced at all by Death.”

And you? Kanna thought. The woman’s pupils were still large and Kanna could see beads of sweat on the sides of her neck.

“Perhaps,” the priestess said suddenly, just as she had finished stamping her name, “that swan who will attack you and shatter everything inside of you…is Goda Brahm.”

* * *

Back on the other side of the gateway, Kanna tried not to appear too shaken when she met eyes with Goda Brahm. For her part, Goda didn’t seem to notice anything different, and as soon as Kanna stepped through, they began walking back into the plain.

“Priestess Rem told me all kinds of terrible things about you, you know,” Kanna said to her once they had wandered far enough away from the two priestesses at the threshold. She wasn’t sure why she was saying this, but something in her felt that it would be dishonest if she held back.

“Did she now?” Goda replied. She didn’t seem bothered or even interested. She walked into the wind, the sand pelting hard against her, but she wiped her face with the back of her hand and moved onward.

“For some reason, I didn’t believe her.” Kanna squinted from the dirt that was getting in her eyes, but she could still see the details of the woman’s neutral face. “Should I?”

Goda smiled. “Depends on what she said, I suppose. Just to be on the safe side, go ahead and believe it. It’s probably true.”

“But I don’t. I can’t. The only thing I seem to be able to believe is what I see in you directly for myself, which is nothing good—but nothing evil, either. Maybe I’m just too stubborn to see it.”

“Maybe you are.”

When they had walked back to the inn and stepped into the storage room and Goda had closed the door behind them, Kanna didn’t find the privacy quite so unnerving anymore. She felt anxious, but the fear wasn’t overwhelming; something else had replaced it. Maybe it was hate, after all.

She glanced at Goda discreetly as the woman began to take off her own robes.

“Here,” Goda said. Now half-dressed in the middle of the room, she handed Kanna a small book. Kanna recognized it as the volume that Goda had stolen the night before from Parama’s room.

Ancient Middlelander Script for Beginners, it said. It took some effort for Kanna to parse the text, since it was in a stylized form that she hadn’t encountered before. “What’s this for?” she asked.

“You said you had dabbled in calligraphy, did you not?”

Kanna tilted her head. She found it odd that Goda had been paying that much attention to her conversation with the assistant the day before. “Yes, sort of. I used to paint decorative scrolls for my tutor, but that was in Common Middlelander. This is Old Middlelander. I don’t know it.”

“Exactly. You’ll learn it, then.” Goda extended the book further until Kanna felt she had no choice but to take it.

“Why do you want me to study this, though?”

“We can say that there’s something special that you’re meant to write for me.”

Kanna furrowed her brow. “And we can also say that I don’t want to do it.” She began to put the book down.

Goda’s face was blank as always, but her stare remained fixed, intense. “You will do it.” Her voice held no threat in it, almost as if to imply that the threat was unnecessary. “Because you are my slave.”

Kanna sighed. Her hands still held the book, even as they loosely hung down over the floor, where she had intended to drop the weight. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll try, then.”

“No. You will not try. You will do it.”

* * *

In the late evening, after Kanna had studied the book and scrawled messily on a sheet of scratch paper for an hour, Goda had told her to go to bed. Her master blew out the candle, and they lay side by side in silence for many long minutes, yet Kanna still could not close her eyes. She watched the outline of Goda’s form, the rising and falling of the woman’s chest in the moonlight.

And like every other night so far, she wrestled with the burning urge to touch her—only this time, she could not reach out even discreetly. Goda was awake. The woman was staring up at the ceiling, and though Kanna tried to be inconspicuous, she sensed that Goda was watching her too, out of the corner of her eye. There was a strange air of patience in it all, as if the woman were waiting for Kanna to voice some reply to an unspoken question.

Kanna, for her part, had no such patience. Even spending their days slogging through temple bureaucracy had done nothing to break up the tension of the nights, a tension which only seemed to compound on itself every time they lay together.

She couldn’t take it anymore. After steeling herself, hands tightly gripping the sheets, she finally made her indecent request:

“I’m cold,” she rasped.

Goda turned slowly towards her. At first, Kanna was convinced that the woman hadn’t understood her at all.

But then Goda unfolded one of her arms, as if she were spreading open a single wing. Her hand fell lightly on the edge of Kanna’s pillow.

It was an invitation.

After hesitating one final time, Kanna accepted. She slid across the space between them and pressed her body to Goda’s side. She laid her head on the woman’s chest, which felt hard and soft at the same time, the way it had earlier that morning. Once she was settled, Goda’s arm came to wrap around Kanna’s shoulders in a loose embrace, and then the flows of heat naturally danced between them like spiraling currents—warm skin against skin, breath against breath.

It was through this small ounce of comfort that she was able to fall asleep.

When she awoke again, it was still dark. It seemed like only a second had gone by, but the moon had fallen out of the frame of the window, and so it must have been hours that had passed. Kanna was still lying in Goda’s bed, but it was empty and cold. Perhaps it was the discomfort of separation that had awakened her, though she hadn’t noticed any stirring before she opened her eyes.

She found her master near the door, dressed fully in her robes and fiddling with something made of metal and glass. Kanna couldn’t see what it was until a bright spark came to life in Goda’s hands and the electric lantern bathed the bottom of the woman’s face in an eerie glow.

She noticed Kanna’s gaze and replied to it with a faint smile.

“Let’s go,” she said, “back into the belly of the beast.”

---

Onto Chapter 11 >>

Kanna put one bare foot in the sand. Somehow, she had awakened with every limb intact.

She was standing at the threshold, the door half-open, her body shielded from the wind. She didn’t want to step into the outside world, to feel the sharp sand pelting her body out in the open—but she knew that she couldn’t stand there with indecision forever.

Maybe if I feel too vulnerable, she thought, I can take refuge behind a boulder. But from where she was hiding behind the door, she could no longer see a single rock. Her view was clouded by the sun rays that had lit the dust in front of her and created out of it a swirling mist.

She squeezed the edge of the door with her hand. The rough sides of the metal dug into her palms, and her swollen knuckles pulsed angrily as she flexed them, but she couldn’t help the urge to cling hard onto something. With the last bit of courage that she could muster up, she walked straight into the haze and closed the door behind her.

The finality of it was unnerving. She could hardly believe what she was doing, and some very deep-seated part of her was screeching with terror, writhing with discomfort at her nakedness. As she had feared, the wind huffed gritty sand against her bare skin as reward for her audacity.

Still, she persevered. She took another step forward. Every time the wind paused, she felt a bit of relief even as she shivered. When her eyes finally did land upon that boulder that she had promised to herself, the fear only thickened—but she pushed past this, too.

Kanna stared at Goda. In the morning light, she could see a red, fist-sized bruise that had formed on the back of the woman’s shoulder. Kanna winced with shame, but again, she pushed herself, and her feet scraped against the gravel, and soon enough this made the woman in front of her turn around.

Goda, who was holding a handful of water, tilted her head up and squinted across the space between them. She seemed to have been jolted from some kind of daze.

“I haven’t bathed,” Kanna murmured. “Not since the cleanse the other day. Do you mind if I…?”

Without saying anything, Goda slid over to the side, as if to make room for Kanna to come hover next to the bucket. It was hardly necessary, of course: Goda was the only bather and the basin was wide open on all sides, so Kanna instead took it as a gesture of token acceptance.

When Kanna crouched beside her, the woman ignored her. As Goda went back to splashing water onto her face, Kanna tried not to comment about how futile it was to take a bath with the dusty wind swirling, since she had realized by now that it was more for the ritual.

Goda was a very religious person, Priestess Rem had told her—a religious person who believed in no gods and who sinned every day with full intention. Maybe the water was meant to wash these less visible impurities away instead.

Kanna dipped a hand into the container, then jerked back for a moment because the water was cold, but eventually she was able to relax into the discomfort, and she came to mirror Goda’s movements.

Goda still did not look at her. Kanna examined her face for some twinge of anything—annoyance, amusement, even rage—but there was nothing. The corner of her eye carried only the reflected image of Kanna’s stooped form in the bright sunlight.

Kanna pressed her now freezing hand to her own face. “Look,” she said, her voice shaky. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did to you. It wasn’t right. Even if I say that you deserve it because of what your people did to my people, that would still just be a stupid excuse.” Her hand brushed against Goda’s as she reached for more water. She fought the urge to pull back. “The real reason I did it was…to provoke you.”

Goda finally lifted her gaze up. Her brow had furrowed; her eyes had narrowed. She was listening. Kanna looked back at her for a long moment, feeling awkward at the confession, but knowing that she couldn’t just leave it at that. There was a question hanging in the air.

“I’m afraid of you,” Kanna finally admitted. Her eyes had grown warm with nervous tears. She swallowed. “I’m terrified of you, all right? Every time you stand next to me, I get this sinking feeling in my stomach. It’s like you dwarf me, like you’re so much bigger. It’s like you fill up all the space around me, but…you’re made of this endless emptiness. You’re like a container with nothing in it, with no bottom and no ceiling. I get lost in it. It doesn’t make any sense.” Kanna looked down at the sand and shook her head. “You’re big, but not that big. It’s not your body; it’s something else. I don’t even know what it is, or why it exists, but I can’t fight it. I’ve already lost to you. You’re made of nothing, and so there’s nothing I can take away, no dent I can make in you. I’ve never met someone so empty in my life.”

When she glanced at Goda again, she found that the woman was watching her intently.

“I thought that maybe it bothered me because I couldn’t stand to see any shred of peace in anyone else when I have to suffer in this chaos,” Kanna continued, “but it’s more than that. It’s you. It’s personal. I want something from you, and it infuriates me because I know that you could never want anything from me. Nothing I do makes a difference, does it? You’re not bothered if I resist; you’re not pleased if I surrender; you accept me exactly as I am—and I hate it. Do you know how terrible it is to push with all your strength, but to see no result at all, not even something you feared? Maybe I do have a death wish. Maybe last night, I just wanted you to kill me already so that I wouldn’t have to look at your blank, unfeeling face all the way to the Middleland—but even when I hit you, you didn’t hit me back. You barely flinched, and I nearly broke my fingers trying to get a rise out of you. It was like punching a rock. All I have to be proud of and ashamed of is that bruise on your shoulder.”

Goda stood. Her body stretched up into the sky that hovered above them. Kanna squinted to gaze up at her, and in that second she became transfixed with the water droplets that etched Goda’s skin: Each one of them held a tiny image of the sun.

The woman started to leave without a word. The wind blew against her as she shuffled her way back, but her legs seemed to make no extra effort, her arms loose with no sign of resistance at all. Kanna sat alone staring into the bucket of water. She could see a dim version of herself staring back.

She spun around. “Wait!” she called. At once, she bolted across the space between them.

Goda turned with surprise and Kanna charged at her, a burning energy not unlike rage filling her bones. Before Kanna could falter to the cowardice that was also growing in her second by second—before she could stamp out her irrational impulse with fear and logic, before she could even feel sorry for what she was about to do—she rushed against her.

Kanna threw her arms around Goda. She pressed her face into her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut because she could not bear to see that monster’s naked body so close, but even still she felt a warmth of embarrassment rising up her neck. The louder parts of her mind were screaming at her to let go, to run away.

But through it all, she stayed put. She clung to Goda in the middle of the sandy yard, and she breathed in the woman’s scent, and she tried not to be alarmed when she felt the woman stiffen in her arms. The swell of Goda’s small breast next to her face contrasted strangely with the tenseness of the muscles of that same chest. This softness was Kanna’s only source of comfort; the rest of the woman felt hard.

Goda didn’t push her away. Instead, she waited. After the initial surprise, her body seemed to relax, and her breathing fell back into a steady rhythm, though Kanna could hear that her heart hadn’t quite slowed to a normal pace. Goda placed a hand on Kanna’s shoulder, but otherwise she offered no sign of encouragement, nor rejection, nor acknowledgement.

“I don’t want to be afraid of you,” Kanna murmured against Goda’s skin—but she was still afraid. She could feel that automatic repulsion in her gut even then, and a voice in her head that was calling for her to break free.

When the fear reached its crescendo, and she couldn’t ignore that expansion of panic anymore, she pulled away. She turned to the side and crossed her arms over her chest. She looked down at the sand instead of up at Goda’s face.

All in all, the contact had lasted seconds—but her body felt it still, as if the touch had been etched into her skin, and she wanted to go run to the bucket of water to wash the feeling off.

There was another sensation, too. Kanna saw it clearly now.

It was the other reason that she had tried to provoke Goda, a reason that was more deep-seated and vulgar, a reason that was nonetheless intimately intertwined with her fear. She found that she couldn’t voice it even then. She only hoped that Goda genuinely hadn’t realized what it was. Out of everything that floated unspoken between them like a swirling cloud of dust, Kanna couldn’t stand the thought that Goda knew, and that the woman was quietly standing there, pretending to have missed it out of a sense of pity.

Everyone else had pitied Kanna, and she accepted it—sometimes gladly, because it served to vindicate her feelings—but it wasn’t something that she would ever accept from Goda Brahm.

“Kanna,” Goda began to say. It was the first time she had called her by her bare first name, and so on reflex Kanna glanced up at her in surprise.

The look on Goda’s face was one of simple acceptance. It was that vast emptiness again, that face that wanted nothing, that face that somehow left Kanna feeling completely alone and stripped of everything she used to cover herself.

And so Kanna ran away. She ran naked across the yard and into the innkeeper’s garden, where she crouched behind a small, bushy tree that Goda must have planted years before. She cloaked herself in its shadows and masked her face in its leaves.

It was there that she hid from the woman who would not chase her.

* * *

It was there that the innkeeper found her. She seemed to have been hauling a bucket of greywater to throw onto the few living plants in the garden, when she had noticed that Kanna was ducked in the corner.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked. She glanced over her shoulder towards the storage shed. Her eyes were wide. “I never thought I’d ask this, but…did Goda try something?” Kanna shook her head and the innkeeper responded with a face of relief. “Good. I wouldn’t want to have to alter my entire opinion of that brute—it would be too much mental work.” She poured the water on some shrubs near Kanna, then stared with expectation.

At first, it seemed to Kanna that the innkeeper was waiting for the plants to unshrivel, but then she quickly realized that the woman was expecting an explanation instead.

“Uh, we got into a fight,” Kanna told her, “so I didn’t want to go back into the shed.”

The innkeeper pursed her lips with suspicion. “You took your clothes off to get into a fight? Was it a wrestling match or something?” This time, because Kanna merely offered a blank stare, the innkeeper shrugged with casual acceptance. “All right, whatever. If you need something to wear and you really don’t want to face her—which I can’t blame you for, to be honest—then go ahead and come inside. We can’t have you running around naked with all these soldiers milling about; they’ll give you a hard time.”

The innkeeper handed her the bucket, and after a moment Kanna realized what it was for. She pressed it against the front of her body and furtively trailed behind the woman as they made their way to the threshold of the inn.

It felt strange to step inside, after it had been forbidden to her for three days. She felt like a dog who had finally been let into the house and offered some semblance of human comfort. While the innkeeper crouched down to take off her own shoes, Kanna looked up to survey the room.

It was little more than a small den attached to a hallway that was lined with many doors. There was a long dining table to the right and a stove to the left, with a tall pipe that led up to the ceiling and broke through the roof. The smell of old wood permeated the space. She could tell that the house had been standing at least for decades.

Without wasting any time, the innkeeper led her to one of the first rooms. “We don’t want any of the guests to see you,” she muttered, “especially in that state. We’re a little less uptight about nudity than you Upperlanders, but we still have some standards. You don’t want to attract any unwanted interest, anyway.”

Kanna gave the woman a confused look.

The innkeeper sighed as she ushered her further into the room and closed the door behind them. “These are soldiers staying here. They’re supposed to remain celibate while working outside the Middleland, but they don’t do a very good job of it, and their isolation makes them desperate at times. Besides, you’re small and cute—like a man—so they would find you particularly interesting, I imagine.”

Kanna’s eyes widened, but she said nothing. She looked around the room, still holding the bucket tightly against her, and her gaze first fell on a side-table that held a tiny replica of the idol she had seen in the sanctuary the night before. There was a small altar in front of it, where some sticks of incense had been burned.

In addition to the table, there was also a bed, a couple of chairs, a wardrobe—but little else in the room. The innkeeper had ripped the doors of the wardrobe open and was diving into the drawers, clawing at stacks of messily-folded clothes. When she finally picked something out, she held it up against Kanna’s body and tilted her head in thought.

“Hmm,” she said, “your shoulders are a little narrower and you’re a little shorter, but the length of the arms looks just about perfect.” She took the bucket from Kanna and handed her the robes instead. “These actually belong to…a friend. He left them here a few weeks ago when I bought him a new set, and I forgot about them until now, but I don’t think he’ll mind. Lucky for you that you’re both about the same size.”

Kanna gratefully accepted the clothes and threw them on over her head. She felt a little bad because Goda had already stolen from Parama the night before, and now here she was stealing yet something else that was probably his, but her desire to cover herself up quickly overrode any hesitation.

“All right, all right,” the innkeeper said, “get on out of here.” She waved her hands at the door.

Kanna gave her a wry look and started to head towards the exit of the room, but she stopped when her hand touched the doorknob. She took in a shaky breath. A mix of dread and indecision filled her, enough that she felt a sob building in her chest.

The innkeeper watched her quietly. After a few moments passed, something in the woman’s stern expression seemed to crack. “Fine,” she muttered. “Fine, stay here for awhile and avoid Goda if you’d like—just don’t leave the room to go milling around in the common area where people can see you.” She pointed to the chair in the corner. “Have a seat. Stay there.”

And so Kanna sat. She looked over at the woman, and the woman stared right back at her awkwardly.

“So,” the innkeeper said finally. She slumped into a chair that sat tucked against the wall, on the opposite side of the room. “Today is your last day, is it? One more examination and you can leave tomorrow morning. How exciting.” But the woman’s tone didn’t sound particularly excited for her.

Kanna swallowed. “Do you know what’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, on the other side—when I get to the Middleland, and we reach the city where Porter Goda is supposed to turn me in. What kind of life will that be?”

The innkeeper shrugged. “I can’t really tell you. Every slave’s journey is different. That male scribe who works at the temple, for instance: He was very lucky. The first few months of his slavery, they had sent him to card wool at a clothes factory. But then someone figured out that he had studied an obscure tongue that was useful for working out the writing in the caverns, so they sent him to the monastery as a translator. It’s very rare for men to be allowed to live near a temple. The stars just happened to align for him.”

“What happens if you’re not so lucky, though?”

“Then you work hard. It’s a punishment, after all. You’re a woman, too, so they’ll send you to work in a factory that requires heavy lifting. You’re a lot scrawnier than a Middleland woman would be, so I imagine you’ll have a much harder time, but they won’t really care. That’s how the bureaucracy works: It’s not made to be flexible for anyone’s individual situation, and it’s not kind to foreigners at all.”

Kanna groaned and rubbed her face with her hands, but the cuff knocked uncomfortably against her cheek. She glared at it, and the polished metal glared back. “I honestly don’t know how much longer I can wear this cuff without losing my mind, though. I’m just about ready to rip it off.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” the innkeeper said with a funny look on her face—something between a grimace and a smile. “From what I hear, it will shock you to your bones if you tamper with it. Years and years ago, I used to work in the capital, and the cuff engineer who built those things had a reputation as something of a twisted genius. She tested every possible way around it—on thousands of people—and I doubt you’ll be the first to escape it.”

“Thousands? That can’t be right. Where do you even get that many people?”

The woman shrugged again. “Those were the rumors I heard. But, let me tell you, I believe them. I worked in the same building as that woman, and she’s terrible. Even Goda can’t stand her, which is saying a lot.” Jaya laughed, perhaps because she had noticed Kanna’s horrified expression. “Sad as it is, if that’s what it takes to keep the prisoners in line, I can’t argue with a method that works. We need some way of keeping order, or we’d be overrun with foreign criminals in no time.”

On impulse, Kanna opened her mouth to argue—but then she thought better of it, considering that the woman was allowing her to hide from Goda in her bedroom. She sighed and instead glanced towards a window on the far wall. She could just barely see the edge of the garden through it, and she thought she had seen a figure moving past. “Porter Goda told me that you hate foreigners,” Kanna murmured, still a bit too dazed to completely censor herself.

“I don’t hate them.” The innkeeper rolled her eyes and leaned further back into the chair. “I married one, didn’t I? It’s just that I don’t see eye to eye with most outsiders. No offense, but you carry with you strange customs into the Middleland, and I don’t think it has a positive effect on society.”

Kanna gave her an irritated glance. “Did your wife carry strange customs with her?”

“She did, a little bit—but she’s more educated than most. I won’t lie to you, though. The day I met her, when she showed up at this inn, I was a little wary of her. We may be technically in the Outerland, but I don’t like Outerlanders staying here. They make a mess of the place.” The innkeeper smiled suddenly, as if a distant memory had popped into her mind. “But my wife, she was different. She was very polite at first. She would sit at that dining room table in the main space, and she would talk to me while I cooked up the meals. She had a bit of an accent, but her grammar in the common language was impeccable, and she accepted every morsel of food I made for her without complaining about how different it was.”

Kanna couldn’t help but soften her expression a bit at the story. “That’s sweet. When did you marry?”

“Oh, some months after that, I think. She showed up a few more times to the inn, and eventually I realized that she was going out of her way to stop by before crossing the border—she works in the Middleland, but her family still lives out here in the desert, you see—and so I took her alone and asked her why she had befriended me. She didn’t tell me why. Instead, she just asked me to marry her.” The innkeeper chuckled to herself. “The clock was ticking for me, I’ll admit. Living out here, you don’t meet many prospects, so after considering it at length, I said yes and we went to go see a priestess. That was about a year ago. We still haven’t lived in the same place together yet. We’re at a bit of a deadlock on that.”

“What do you mean?”

The innkeeper shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She leaned over towards the side-table and opened the drawer, pulling out what looked like a thin cigar, though Kanna couldn’t tell what herb was stuffed in it.

“She had expected to transfer out here to the Outerland once her work contract was done and she had become a full citizen, but after we married she was promoted. She wants me to come live with her in the Middleland.” She lit the cigar between her lips and a cloud of smoke quickly began to permeate her side of the room. “But my business is here. I left the Middleland to be free, to live a quiet life in the desert. I would have to leave everything to join her in the capital city. And besides, I’m the higher wife. How would that make me look, being the higher wife and living in submission to a foreigner? My mothers would be ashamed.”

Kanna scratched the back of her head. “What does that even mean?” she finally asked. “Why is one person lower and the other higher?”

The innkeeper waved her hand, as if the question was unimportant—or perhaps too fundamental to be anything less than obvious. “Almost always, marriages happen between people of differing status. I have the higher status between us: I’m a citizen and both my mothers are Middlelanders. Since the higher wife is the one that takes the lower wife into her family, my new wife now enjoys the privileges of my family’s status. In exchange, she’s expected to make herself useful: Fixing up the house, helping me look after children, those sorts of things. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked, since the beginning of time. This is why I say foreigners don’t understand, and their customs can lead to chaos.”

“You mean you didn’t marry her because you loved her?” Kanna asked, though she had to actively stop herself again from commenting on the innkeeper’s prejudice.

The innkeeper had a bemused look on her face. “Of course I don’t love her,” she said. “I’ve barely known her for two years. I heard that you Upperlanders had an overly-romanticized view of marriage, but this is just silly. How can I love someone who doesn’t even share my culture?”

She reached over to ash her cigar on the side-table. Her hand hovered over the incense tray at first, but she seemed to quickly realize her mistake, and she flicked it instead on a dish that was right beside it. Kanna wondered briefly how sacrilegious it would have been if the innkeeper had accidentally offered the Goddess the waste of her cigar.

“Middlelanders are so cold,” Kanna murmured. Just as she was crossing her arms and adjusting in her seat, she caught some movement coming from the garden again. When she peered through the hazy glass, she saw the shape of Goda Brahm driving a shovel into the earth. The woman’s outer robes were strewn on the ground; her jaw was set; her body was flexing, and yet the movement flowed into the dirt as if the earth gave her no resistance at all.

Disturbed, Kanna looked away within seconds and found that Jaya had been following her gaze.

“Are you talking about me or about Goda?” Jaya asked. Smirking, she took a long drag from her cigar. The smoke had started to seep into Kanna’s side of the room. “She’s not cold. She just likes to keep her mind blank, so she doesn’t really notice people. Does it bother you that much that she pays you no attention?”

“Why would that bother me?” Kanna huffed. “I’m hiding from her in here, aren’t I?” Out of the corner of her eye, Kanna could still sense Goda’s movements, but she forced herself to keep her gaze across the room, at the idol on the table.

“Oh come now, even when I’ve seen you just sitting next to her, the tension is so thick I could swim in it. You’re obviously attracted to her.” Jaya laughed at the annoyed glance that Kanna threw her. She ashed her cigar once again, this time without hesitation. “You really should stop torturing yourself. And you really should stop hiding from her. She’s going to have to come with you to the temple in the evening anyway, isn’t she? You’re cuffed to her. You can’t hide for long.”

“Well, I’m sick of looking at her face. I wish she would just give her cuff to someone else for tonight at least, so that they could take me to the temple instead.”

Jaya gave her a strange look. “But she can’t. You know that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“She can’t take it off. She doesn’t have the key,” the innkeeper said, as if it were some obvious fact. “She has the key to yours—she brought your paired cuff with her from the Middleland—but she doesn’t have the key to her own, of course.”

Kanna stared at her. “The porter’s cuff is locked?”

“Why yes. They lock it before she leaves. The administrators who sent her to get you are the ones who hold her key, and they’ll only unlock her cuff once she gives you over to them. They take it off at the same time as yours. That’s how it’s done.”

“But…why?”

Jaya was quiet for a long moment. “If no one else has yet explained the situation to you,” she said finally, “and you don’t already realize, then maybe it’s better that you don’t know. If I tell you now, then you might just become even more afraid of Goda, and then you’ll never leave my room.” She was smiling, but the expression held a touch of ill humor.

Kanna uncrossed her arms and placed her hands on her thighs. She gripped her own knees with frustration. “Can’t I know anything around here?” she asked, but she wasn’t looking directly at Jaya. “Why does everything have to be a mystery?”

“Maybe you should stop worrying about everyone else’s business, and then nothing will seem mysterious.” Jaya stabbed the ash tray with the butt of her cigar. Her chair squeaked across the floor as she stood up. “How long do you plan on cowering in here, anyway? It’s late and I haven’t even started on lunch. I have so much to do.”

Kanna looked down at her own feet. “What if…I help you?”

“Help me with what?”

“What if I help you with your chores? Will you let me stay then?”

“I already told you that I can’t have people like you milling around in here so openly.”

“The guests don’t have to know.” Kanna glanced at Jaya with a pleading expression just as the woman was heading towards the door. “I’ll do something productive in your room.”

“You’re really hellbent on avoiding the porter, aren’t you? You’re even willing to play the part of a slave before your sentence has started. How ironic.”

“I know I can’t avoid her forever, but right now I can’t bring myself to face her after what I did to her, either. She can’t come in here, so at least I’ll feel safe until you make me leave.”

Jaya raised an eyebrow. “What did you do to her?”

Kanna opened her mouth, then stopped. She felt warmth returning to her face. “I guess it’s my turn to be mysterious,” she mumbled.

The innkeeper laughed. “All right, fine. Somehow I feel like you’ll be more trouble than you’re worth, but you can fold that laundry over there in the corner. I’m going to go serve the guests lunch, and then I’ll have to go up to the hill to fetch water. You have until then. I don’t want you to be here when I return.” She began to step out the door, and before she slammed it closed, she added, “Once you hear everyone leaving, wait until it’s clear, and then sneak out. Don’t linger, or you’ll be testing my generous patience.”

And then Kanna was alone. She knelt down on the floor in front of the pile of laundry and did her best to remember how her mother had folded her clothes. Her work looked a little sloppy as she stacked it next to the laundry basket, but she carried on anyway, and even when she came across a pair of underwear that clearly belonged to a man, she didn’t recoil. Parama must come here a lot, she thought to herself.

She found the monotony of the work soothing. It helped draw her attention away from the burning desire she had to look out the window. In time, she even started to yawn. She hadn’t slept very well the night before, and the drowsiness was catching up to her.

Her eyes wandered over to the bed. The quilt and pillows on top of it looked a lot more inviting than her thin sleeping mat in the storage room. There’s still some time before I have to go, Kanna thought. She could hear the guests talking on the other side of the wall. But I shouldn’t even consider a nap. If the innkeeper came in here to find me sprawled on her bed, I might end up never waking up ever again.

She dismissed the idea and went back to work. At around the same time that she had finished, she heard a swarm of boots pounding along the floor in the common room, amidst the sounds of laughter and complaining. The front door squeaked, then scraped shut.

It was quiet suddenly. The voices came muffled from outside; she could barely hear them anymore.

Kanna glanced around the room. Against her will, her eyes fell again towards the window, and she saw that Goda was kneeling in the dirt, still working in the garden. Kanna sucked in a frustrated breath.

I can’t go out there now.

But how long could she really keep hiding? Like the innkeeper had said, she would have to face Goda eventually. Was all the waiting really making it any easier? What was she going to realistically do, stay in that bedroom until she wasted away from old age?

Maybe in a hundred years, I’ll be able to look at Goda without flinching, Kanna thought. Even just the idea of having the woman gaze upon her with that blank expression felt more humiliating than kneeling on the floor and folding a stranger’s clothes in a room that smelled like incense and foul cigar smoke.

So she got onto her hands and knees, and she slid down to hide under the bed, where she quickly fell asleep.

* * *

Kanna awoke with a painful jolt. She hit her head against the bottom of the bed frame when she tried to sit up. Her brain was swimming in grogginess, so at first she didn’t realize what had jerked her awake in the first place.

And then she felt the electric pulse radiating from her wrist. It stung her with a searing pop and it heightened her awareness at the same time. It was growing in intensity by the second.

“Goda,” she coughed as she felt the waves of pain flowing through her body. She flailed her arms around in a panic, clawing at the wooden floor, until she managed to pull herself out from under the bed. “Goda!”

The room was dim because the light outside had waned, but pink rays from the setting sun danced annoyingly against her face as she scrambled to her feet, pain shooting through every limb. It took all her strength just to shuffle across the room.

“Ah!” She stumbled against the wall and leaned on it to keep from falling, her jaw clenching, her eyes screwing shut. She grabbed the cuff hard with her hand and jostled it, though of course it did not come loose.

When her eyes opened again, they landed towards the window. Across the expanse of the yard, standing in the plain beyond the garden, was Goda. Even in the growing darkness, she could see that the woman was staring in her direction. There was a faint smile on her face.

In desperation, Kanna took a shaky step towards the window. Maybe, she thought, she could get close enough to ease the pain.

Goda took a step back.

The next wave hit Kanna so intensely, she nearly collapsed. “Goda!” she shouted at the window. “Goda! Stop!”

She had no choice. She rushed through the bedroom door, gritting her teeth as her cuff pulsed its angry beat against her. When she stumbled into the outer room, a dozen eyes turned in her direction, but she was barely aware of them.

“Goda, you bastard!” She pressed herself against the wall to keep standing, and she slid as quickly as she could towards the front door. “A plague on you, Goda! A goddamn plague on you and your mother and your mother’s mother and your—”

“Where the hell did you come from, Rava?” a familiar voice screeched. “I thought you were gone!” Kanna looked over to find that Jaya was staring at her in disbelief—and so were a crowd of guests at the long kitchen table—but she also found that she couldn’t summon any embarrassment through the pain.

“Rava?” one of the guests asked. “The arsonist fuel gouger?”

Kanna didn’t respond. Her feet felt like they had turned into stones, even as she managed to drag herself to the door. She heard Jaya yelling something behind her, but the woman was speaking too quickly and she was using expletives that Kanna had not yet learned in Middlelander. When Kanna finally burst through the exit, it seemed like less than a second before it had slammed closed behind her.

She ran. With the last bit of strength she had left in her, she ran in the direction of the plain, towards where she had seen Goda standing. She fell once or twice from the shocks, but she forced herself to stand again, because each step closer to Goda’s presence made the next step easier. The pain began to drain out of her, as if a valve had started to twist closed.

By the time she had rounded the cabin and could see the woman’s face again, the pulses had stopped. Only a light buzzing remained, and Kanna wondered if that was simply her nerves adjusting to the abrupt loss of stimulation. Everything was suddenly quiet. Besides the low rumble of the trucks in the distance and the swirling of the wind, the world felt empty.

But she didn’t stop. She passed the garden and kept running with all her strength. The air whistled against her until she found herself facing that giant from only paces away. Goda stared back at her with the same faint smile, with eyes that gleamed like mirrors.

“Are you afraid of me now?” Goda asked.

Kanna’s breaths were coming raggedly. As usual, her mind was at war: She wanted to stare back into those insolent eyes with defiance, and at the same time she was disgusted by them enough to feel the urge to pull away.

So she stood tall. She clenched her fists. She insulted Goda’s ancestors in the Upperlander tongue because she didn’t know how to say it any other way.

Nonetheless, the woman seemed to understand the sentiment. She laughed.

---

Onto Chapter 10 >>

Kanna stared at the priestess, completely taken aback. “You can speak Upperland tongue?” she stammered in amazement, though even still she tried to keep her voice quiet.

“I can speak many tongues. That’s why they sent me here,” the priestess said. “But more importantly, no one else here can speak Upperlander—and certainly not Goda Brahm, so there’s no chance that she can overhear.”

“I understand, but isn’t Porter Goda near the threshold? She does remind me of an animal sometimes, but I can’t imagine that she has the ears of a wildcat.”

“She’s not at the threshold. She’s standing on the other side of the far wall of the garden, just beyond the fence. She moved. You sensed it, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?” Kanna asked, newly perplexed.

The priestess gave her an enigmatic look. “I saw you twitch—but also, I can tell where she is if she’s close enough. Call it a sixth sense.”

“Because you’re a priestess?”

“No.” She looked away from the Goddess. “Goda and I are bound together by fate in a manner which I cannot freely explain to you, because it’s in a manner that the Holy Mother disapproves of, one ill-suited for a priestess. Though I had hoped that through years of prayer, I would have been able to cut this thread that held us hostage to each other, I realize now that it isn’t true. The moment that I saw Goda’s face yesterday, every old emotion erupted in me. I had ungodly thoughts. We never know what we can tolerate until we’re tested, I suppose.”

Kanna hesitated, not sure how much was appropriate to ask. “Were the two of you…married or something like that?” she guessed.

Priestess Rem gave her a crooked smile. “Priestesses cannot marry or even leave the clergy, except under very limited circumstances. Goda also cannot marry, for different reasons—and to be frank, I would not…encourage any person to view her as a suitable partner.” She seemed to have chosen her words carefully. She was cringing. “But I didn’t ask you here to burden you with our tedious history, which is none of your business. I took you alone to ask about Goda and your present situation.”

“What do you need to know?”

“Tell me…,” the priestess began. She had a strange tone of voice; she was staring at Kanna with absolute attention. “Has Porter Goda abused you in any way?”

“Abused me…?”

“Has she beaten you? Denied you food as punishment? Has she…forced herself on you when you were alone? If she has,” the priestess said quickly, “you should accuse her now, so that we can rescue you from her.”

Kanna pulled back in surprise. At first, she really did consider implicating her temporary master. She was eager to grasp at any escape rope—any at all—even if it meant that she had to lie through her teeth. The moment she had been arrested and thrown into a cage, she had promised herself that she would do anything to break herself out.

However, her desperation was blanketed by a healthy surge of hesitation, too. She was skeptical of the priestess. The offer had been so blunt and so sudden, and she had no idea what the woman’s actual motives might have been.

Kanna finally asked, “If I accuse Porter Goda, will that set me free?”

“No. You would just go with a different porter to your assigned factory in the Middleland and complete your ten years of hard labor, while Goda would be confined for investigation.”

Kanna sighed. She had assumed as much. Even if it did not technically change her situation, though, finding a new porter could buy her time. It was something to consider.

But she also knew that she would have to be more calculating than this: Goda had not yet laid a finger on her except to restrain her, and the woman actually seemed reluctant to hit her, in spite of all the threats. She was also much more aloof than Kanna had expected for slave-driver. The woman didn’t even seem bothered enough to watch her too closely most of the time, and Kanna wasn’t entirely sure that a new master wouldn’t end up being someone much crueler or more scrutinizing.

More importantly, if she was to escape, she would have to make the most of her forty paces and find some way to get back to the Upperland. This was not going to happen in an empty desert, half a continent away from any civilization.

She would have to wait for a city. It would not be wise to delay that journey.

The Goddess was still watching her from above, too—perhaps with some reassurance—so Kanna found herself shaking her head, deciding on the truth by default. “She’s tied me up and she’s offered empty threats—but no, she hasn’t beaten me. She hasn’t denied me any essentials, either, to be honest. At first I was angry with her, but then I started to see how all of this works, and now…I don’t even know who to blame.”

The priestess appeared to deflate a little as she considered this. It was only then that Kanna realized the woman had been carrying an anticipatory tension. “I see,” she said, and Kanna wasn’t sure if the woman sounded disappointed, or if it was simply her own imagination. “Well, if she hasn’t acted illegally and you won’t accuse her, then there’s little we can do for you—but I will warn you to be very cautious of this woman. She’s dangerous for many reasons. She must follow general orders from the government, but she will do her job at all costs, even if it means committing a crime.”

“What kinds of crimes?” Kanna found herself asking. She wondered now all of a sudden if she should change her answer.

“Any kind. Just about the only thing she won’t do is commit a crime against the temple, and she considers her orders to transport you to be the unquestionable commandment of the Goddess herself. She’s extremely religious, but she only fully converted to the Cult of Mahara as a teenager, so she’s obsessed with making up for her past sins and torturing herself through her work.”

Kanna stared at her with astonishment. “Past sins?” This didn’t make any sense to her, especially considering that Goda had claimed that she didn’t even believe in the Goddess.

The priestess waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter now. Blessed Mahara forgives all, though I myself falter in that respect. However, even as a priestess, I will tell you that a religious person can be most dangerous of all. Goda may follow religious restrictions, and she may wash herself every morning, and pray every evening, but there is no compassion in her heart, so it all means nothing. If she can use religion to justify hurting you, then she will.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Kanna stammered.

“Because you don’t belong here. Only criminals can be slaves in the Middleland, and you’re only a criminal through technicality, so of course I’m sympathetic. It’s my role as a priestess to offer you the infinite acceptance of the Goddess, but I’m limited in what I can do for you legally unless you accuse Goda of a crime. It’s a chore to get the bureaucracy to care about what happens to a foreign slave, but the word of a priestess will help you.”

Kanna glanced up at the Goddess again, and the motherly gaze was unchanged. “Then your word,” Kanna asked, “can’t that set me free?”

“I’m afraid not. Though I wish I could unchain you myself, even a priestess cannot free a slave before the sentence is over…generally-speaking.”

Kanna gave her a curious look. “Please tell me.”

“It’s not worth worrying about,” the priestess said to her, shaking her head. “The only way to free a slave early is for a priestess to marry the slave. It’s a serious statement that the slave is innocent of the crime, but it requires a huge sacrifice from the priestess, because she has to immediately leave the priesthood and she can never divorce her wife.” She smiled with empathy. “So you see, it would be hard to find a priestess who would choose you over the Holy Mother. It’s like we’re already married to our Goddess.”

Kanna nodded with understanding, a bit disappointed. In truth, she wasn’t sure if she would trade her ten years of servitude for a lifetime of marriage to a strange woman, anyway.

As she glanced again at the altar, her mind swimming with thoughts, she allowed herself to be distracted by the details instead of by the idol’s powerful gaze. She looked at the intricate carvings on the wood below, and the collection of offerings and amulets, and the strange script that was etched in bronze on a pair of vessels near the idol’s feet. Her eyes stopped suddenly at a design that was engraved beneath the writing. There was something uncomfortably familiar about it.

“That symbol…,” Kanna said. She stared at the eight-sided outline, and the circle that it enclosed, and the lines that passed through the center and shot out to every edge. “It’s the same one that was on a pendant I saw, one that Porter Goda has. What does it mean?”

The priestess followed the direction of Kanna’s gaze and furrowed her brow. “You mean one like this?” She reached into the neck of her robe and produced the same pendant that Kanna had seen on the keyring.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

“Are you sure? It’s usually only priestesses who will carry this.”

A vague thought that had been floating in the back of Kanna’s mind fully connected just then. “Is Porter Goda…?” Kanna stopped, unsure if she should ask. “Was Porter Goda ever a priestess? I know that she used to work at the monastery in…Samma Valley, I think?”

But the priestess seemed amused by the question. “Perhaps that was the intention of her parents when they sent her there, that she might warm up to the clergy and make them proud; but no, Goda Brahm has never been a priestess. I think if she had ever tried to be initiated, the Goddess herself would have struck her down with a bolt of lightning.”

Kanna would have laughed if the woman hadn’t said the last part so flatly. Instead, she whispered in confirmation, “That’s the pendant that I saw.” Still, some part of her regretted mentioning it.

“I think I know from where she might have stolen it, a long time ago—but it’s best if I focus on the present moment, or else even this will bring me towards ungodly thoughts.”

“Why are you so angry with Goda Brahm?” The only reason the bold question had left her mouth at all was because she was speaking in her native tongue, where she felt more comfortable and familiar.

Priestess Rem regarded her with a sad smile. “Because I am a poor example of a priestess, even if it is only today that I’ve realized it. A priestess isn’t ever supposed to hold a grudge.” She looked up at the Goddess before them. “I thought I was righteous, but I have been humbled. If I had half the honor that I pretend I have, I would defrock myself right now in front of you, and fall on the floor begging the Goddess for forgiveness.”

“But why?”

“In my heart, I have destroyed Goda Brahm a hundred times, in a hundred different ways,” she said, her smile transforming into a grimace of pain, “and a sin of the heart is just the same as a sin of the flesh.”

And so it seemed that the priestess did not want to tell her. Kanna trained her gaze on the fiery glow of a torch, though she felt the Goddess watching her from the corner of her eye. When she turned back to look at the priestess, the woman was kneeling in prayer.

Not long after, when they walked outside, the priestess stopped by a pillar near the entrance to the temple sanctuary, and she struck a small bell with a mallet. Right away, the rows of prostrated women dissipated and the garden became empty.

“If there’s anything else you want to tell me—anything at all—then tell me soon, before Goda takes you away the morning after tomorrow.” The priestess began walking down the steps of the sanctuary, and she switched back to the Middleland tongue when she said: “Just think about the open door that fate has offered you, Kanna Rava. Otherwise, you’re dismissed for tonight. You have seen the Goddess for yourself.”

* * *

At the gateway, Kanna found no one except for the assistant, who was still busy with paperwork. Kanna shuffled quickly past her, wary that she might be asked another set of annoying questions, but the woman didn’t even look up.

It was only once she came up to the threshold that she saw Goda coming around the corner of the stone fence. The priestess had been right: Goda had been wandering around—but she wasn’t alone. Walking beside her, clinging to her arm and talking to her animatedly, was Parama Shakka. Goda’s face was serious as usual, but she was nodding her head, glancing down at him with something that bordered on affection. Kanna felt her own face twitch involuntarily. She didn’t like what she was seeing at all, but she wasn’t yet sure what problem she had with it.

Maybe it was the young man’s expression, she thought. It was too trusting, too naive and unafraid, considering that he was standing next to an apparently dangerous giant. She wondered if he knew any of the things that Priestess Rem had told her.

When they both reached the gateway, Parama left Goda’s side to hand Assistant Finn a sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” the woman asked with a weary sigh. “Word that the fuel shortage is over, I hope?”

“No, not at all!” Parama said, smiling. “A messenger just came by. She had a letter from the monastery in Samma Valley. They’re asking if we know any translators who can read or write…any of these languages.” He pointed to the page while the assistant glanced over it with a displeased look.

“Again? I haven’t even heard of half these tongues,” she grumbled, “and the other half are useless for any project I can imagine, just dialects of Upperlander. What on Earth is going on out there these days? Has Priestess Rem’s replacement quit on them already?”

“Maybe they’ve discovered something new amongst the ruins?”

The assistant dropped the letter onto her stack of paperwork. “It’s not your place to be speculating about the sacred work of the priestesses,” she chided him.

Kanna found the reprimand to be hypocritical, considering that the woman had just criticized the monastery herself, but Parama didn’t seem to notice and he apologized anyway. Perhaps it’s not so much about what you say, Kanna thought, so much as who says it.

Goda turned to leave and, without exchanging a word between them, both Kanna and Parama began following her at the same time. Kanna looked at him, mildly annoyed. He was giving her a strange little smile, as if they were co-conspirators sharing some secret, but she didn’t know what that could possibly mean.

Parama shuffled ahead to Goda’s side and took a handful of her sleeve. “Porter Goda, why don’t you come by my cabin tonight? I rearranged my room since you were last here. Don’t you want to see what I’ve done with the place?”

Goda glanced down at him with a smirk. “What’s so interesting about the position of your furniture?” she asked, but still she allowed him to pull her in a new direction, until they were headed to the opposite side of the plain.

Kanna reluctantly followed.

“We can have fun, the three of us,” Parama said, giving Kanna a friendly smile. “We can make a fire and eat yaw together.”

“No, thank you,” Kanna muttered with gritted teeth. She could still taste the bitter root in her mouth, even a day later.

“That’s fine! We can do something else, then. We can do all sorts of things!”

Goda seemed amused by his enthusiasm, but Kanna was still unsettled by it all. He’s the strangest man I’ve ever met, she thought. And I still don’t even know how old he is. He’s a little bigger than me—which used to seem normal-sized before I showed up to this godforsaken place—but Priestess Rem treats him like an overgrown child. Is it even right for us to be going to his room without permission?

Certainly, she didn’t like the unspoken air that floated between him and Goda. There was a tension of some kind there, and Kanna didn’t want to even imagine what it implied.

“The priestess seemed bothered last time she saw the three of us together,” Kanna mumbled.

“Oh, that’s just because she’s old fashioned! Goda won’t do anything to me.” He grinned and looked over his shoulder at Kanna. “Trust me, I’ve tried plenty of times.”

Upon hearing that, Kanna finally couldn’t take it anymore. She pursed her lips and shook her head. “How old are you, anyway?” she blurted out. “Should you really be running around trying to seduce grown women, when you’re, what? Sixteen, seventeen?”

Parama’s eyebrows flicked up. Goda laughed. They had both turned around to look at her, and Kanna didn’t like the amused smirks that they were throwing her way. It made her feel dumb—but she had already grown used to the feeling by then.

“You’re about my age, right?” Goda said, turning to Parama. “Two or three years younger?”

“I just turned twenty-two this past year,” he said.

“Right, three years younger, then.”

They kept walking, but Kanna’s steps slowed to a shuffle as she stared at them both. She wasn’t sure which she found more disturbing: the fact that Parama was actually older than she herself was, or the fact that Goda was only twenty-five at the most.

How had the woman been through so much in such a short time? The priestess had held a grudge against Goda for at least nine years, it seemed. What could Goda have possibly done at the age of sixteen that would have warranted such hatred? And how could they have then assigned the dangerous job of a porter to a teenager?

There were so many unanswered questions—but because it was none of her business, she merely trudged on, turning her gaze to the ground, shaking her head.

When they reached Parama’s house, it looked more like a shack than a cabin. The wooden walls shook and groaned as the wind blew, and Parama had to kick the bottom of the front door to get it to slide open all the way.

“Well, here it is!” he said. He hopped onto the bed—a simple mattress on a platform of wooden slats—and patted the space next to him while looking up at Goda.

Instead of sitting down, Goda nudged Kanna to take the spot. Kanna sighed and conceded, if only because she wasn’t in the mood to witness any other advances from him towards her master. When she sat, he didn’t seem at all displeased with her, though; in fact, he looked at her with a welcoming curiosity.

“So, Slave Kanna Rava, is it?” the boy—or the man…or whatever he was—said with a strange tone of respect.

Now that Kanna thought about it, his air was much more girlish than it was boyish, anyway. Maybe he had actually been a woman this whole time and Kanna simply had misunderstood. Words in the Middlelander tongue did not have an inherent gender like they did in Upperlander, so it wasn’t always easy for her to tell.

But she certainly wasn’t about to look under his robes to find out, either.

“I know you’re not in the Middleland officially yet,” he continued, seemingly taking her silent stare as polite attention rather than rude speculation, “but how are you liking it so far outside your native country?”

Kanna glared at him. “Is that a serious question?”

“I kind of get the impression that you’ve never traveled much before. Isn’t the Outerland just beautiful?” He gave her knee a friendly smack. “The sunrise every morning tints the cliffs in such a wonderful purple hue. I could just sit there and bask in it for ages!”

Kanna had absolutely no idea how to respond. She would have lashed out at him perhaps, or called him insensitive to her predicament, had she not known that he was also enslaved. She wasn’t sure what to make of someone who seemed so ignorant and oblivious to the injustice of his own situation.

She cleared her throat and looked around the room for help. Goda had wandered into a corner and had begun ignoring the both of them in favor of the contents of a small bookshelf, so Kanna gave in with another sigh.

“How…long have you been a slave, exactly?” she asked. Maybe the boy was still in some kind of denial that he had yet to wake up from, because his trauma might still have been fresh.

“Oh, about three years now, I think. They arrested me when I was nineteen.”

Kanna made a face. Same as me, she thought. She had been nineteen for barely a single season before the Upperland government had officially dissolved and conceded authority to the Middleland. Not long after that, her family members had split up to avoid their respective punishments for years of resistance.

Besides herself and her father and his fourth wife, she wasn’t sure who else had been caught trying to hide in the desert. Of course, avoiding the Middleland had become nearly impossible at that point, as the culture had spread to nearly every part of the continent. There had been nowhere to hide, really.

Still, Kanna felt the need to resist at all cost—just as her father had resisted, and her grandfather had, and his grandfather. For hundreds of years, they had dodged the encroachment of the Middleland. But now that their lands were taken, and their connections had dissolved, and their family name was tarnished, she wasn’t even sure in whose name she was resisting anymore.

Will all the defiance that’s still left in me slowly peter away? Kanna thought to herself. Will I lose my will to fight? In three years, will I be just like this young man? Ditsy and simple-minded and amused by something as mundane as the rising sun?

The boy stared at her with that simple-minded smile, as if he were waiting for some reply. Kanna looked down at her hands and tried to swallow through the empty feeling in her gut.

“You’re older than I thought you were,” Kanna told him. “I’m sorry I made so many assumptions about you. People look and act a lot different around here, and I’m only starting to get used to it.”

Parama giggled and waved his hand. “Oh, that’s quite all right! From what I hear, grown Upperland men look beastly and hairy and old compared to the women, so I can see why you would make that mistake.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. She had never heard anything like that before, and all the men she had ever known looked quite normal to her. She decided not to comment about it, lest they end up in some racist argument.

Instead, she glanced directly at his face and studied his features again. She decided that it wasn’t so much that he looked that young physically—although he did pass for younger than he claimed—it was more that his eyes held a spotless innocence to them. She found this supremely disturbing. It was like a feminine version of Goda’s masculine indifference; she couldn’t fathom the blind acceptance that they both projected, the emptiness, the complete lack of conflict.

“Still…,” Kanna found herself saying. “Even if you were arrested at nineteen, what could you possibly have done to warrant slavery?” More importantly, how can you just accept it? she thought—but she didn’t say that part aloud.

Parama made a face. For the first time, he looked slightly troubled, and though Kanna hated herself for it, she actually found herself feeling relieved at the barest sign of his pain. She wanted to see more of it, but the better part of her overrode her morbid feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Kanna said quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Goda looked up from a book that she had been perusing, but after she glanced briefly at Parama’s face and seemed to make some kind of snap judgment, she looked back down and continued to ignore them.

“No, no, it’s quite all right,” Parama said, scratching the back of his head. “What happened was…I was arrested for aiding and abetting a criminal. They found my sister to be in possession of a stash of Samma Flower, you see. I don’t know where she got it from, or why she had it, or even how the authorities found out about it, but since I lived with her and I hadn’t turned her in, they claimed that I knew about it and must have been helping her hide it.”

Kanna took in a sharp breath of indignation. “What? How could they just assume that about you?” she cried, in a voice a bit louder than she had intended. She tried to calm herself down, but she found the whole ordeal so ridiculous, that she couldn’t believe it. “That’s entirely unjust! What kind of country is this?”

She glanced up at Goda again and found that the woman still had her eyes glued to a book—but that there was a tiny smirk growing on her face. Indeed, it had been exactly as Goda had said: Parama’s crime was so minuscule—even nonexistent—that Kanna felt outraged for him.

Parama, for his part, shrugged. His face had returned to its usual base level of nonchalance, except for an edge of empathy, which Kanna realized with some horror was meant for her. “It’s all right,” he said, patting her on the shoulder, as if to comfort her. “Really, it’s perfectly all right. It doesn’t bother me that much anymore, to be honest. I may have no free will of my own, but I was able to do many things I had never done before, and I met a lot of great people. If I hadn’t been arrested, I probably wouldn’t have met Porter Goda, either.”

“Why are you so sure that’s a good thing?” Kanna muttered, pressing her fingers hard against her face. She fought the urge to rip herself away from Parama’s consoling hand. When she dared to look between her fingers at Goda once again, she found that the woman was gazing back at her this time with a shred of attentiveness.

I myself am not even sure, Kanna thought. I can’t really say whether or not it was a good thing that I met Goda Brahm, or that I didn’t burst her skull open with that steel baton on the first night, or that I didn’t accuse her of some false crime to Priestess Rem when I had the chance.

In truth, she could not judge; she knew almost nothing about Goda. That was the real problem: She knew nothing, but she wanted to know everything, out of some morbid curiosity that she still couldn’t understand.

And yet there seemed to be no one behind those eyes to get to know. It wasn’t that Goda was hiding some grand mystery. It was that Goda was almost certainly empty and stupid and shallow, just as the boy was. Otherwise, how could they have survived their respective situations—one, a slave, and the other banished by the clergy of her own religion?

When Goda had turned away again, Kanna felt Parama leaning suddenly close. “Do you not like Porter Goda?” he whispered, low enough that he seemed to be trying to keep Goda from hearing. The question sounded genuine.

“I don’t know,” she said, because she didn’t. Should she have liked the person who was assigned to drag her away from her old life?

“Maybe you’re afraid of her, like I was,” he murmured, his voice still soft, “but sometimes fear and curiosity come from the same place, you know?”

When he said this, Kanna didn’t know how to reply. She sat up a little straighter and gave him a look of uncertainty.

He responded with a smile. “I hope you get what you want from her.”

“What I…?”

A loud thump broke through Kanna’s words and severed the small connection she had made with Parama all at once. Kanna blinked, as if jerked awake from a trance, and she turned to the other side of the room to see that Goda had smacked the book closed in her hand. She was looking at the both of them with amusement.

“I’m taking this,” Goda announced, holding up the small tome.

Parama tilted his head. “But it’s mine.”

Goda opened her robe and glanced inside, as if she were looking for a suitable pocket. “I know. I’m taking it anyway.”

“You can’t just steal that right in front of me!” Parama shot up off the bed and took a few marching steps towards Goda. Kanna stared at him. His anger seemed to have come out of nowhere. Within seconds, he had switched from empathy to rage.

Goda looked unimpressed by the antics, but Kanna’s disapproving glare only appeared to buttress Parama’s outrage. He reached out and clasped his small hand around Goda’s wrist before she had fully dropped the loot into a pouch in her robes.

“Give it back!” he said.

Goda appeared to be taken by surprise, but her answer was typical: “No.”

“Well…I’ll make you, then!”

“How?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. He tugged at her hand futilely. “I’ll try to stop you somehow!”

“Oh, then I’ll hit you.” She didn’t sound very serious, though.

“Fine, hit me then, but I’m not letting you just take what you want from me!” He pushed two open palms against Goda’s torso and glared at her with gritted teeth, until Goda took a step back with a mixture of bewilderment and laughter on her face.

Kanna felt similarly bewildered. Just a moment before, the young man had been so complacent, to the point that it had even disturbed her; now he was trying to pick a fight with a woman who was nearly twice his size, over one tiny book that she had pilfered from his shelf.

He pushed Goda again and tried to reach into her robes, but she grabbed him by the arm and jerked his hand away. He rammed his body into her and she pushed him back. He tried to grab her sleeves and she took him by the wrists instead. After letting out a cry of frustration, he wrestled away from her and started to run—and to Kanna’s astonishment, Goda actually chased him.

The woman pursued him into a corner, and seized him with a grunt, and pressed him against the wall with a fury so ardent that Kanna could only hope that the violence was exaggerated.

It was only then that she noticed how they grinned at each other.

“What are you even doing, boy?” Goda huffed, seemingly a bit out of breath, pinning his struggling arms to his sides and trying to stifle his half-hearted kicks with her knees.

The young man was squirming, but he had locked his gaze with Goda, and an odd, intense energy had filled the room. Parama’s eyes were no longer empty as they had been before; they were quite full…of something.

Kanna felt her heart beating wildly in her chest. For a split second, she felt the pressure of Goda’s hands on her own arms, as if it were she herself who had been pressed against the wall in the boy’s stead. She wanted to tear her eyes away, but she couldn’t. A strange feeling vibrated in her, a jolt of aliveness.

She had to do something. She didn’t know what, but some force inside of her wanted to act—or to be acted upon. Without thinking, she jumped off the bed and rushed Goda, intent on pushing her way between the two of them.

“Stop!” she cried. “Let him go!”

Again, Goda seemed taken by surprise. She lifted an arm to hold her back, but the force of Kanna’s inertia hit them both hard when they crashed together. Like usual, Goda barely moved. Kanna stumbled backwards into a nearby table, as if she had collided with a boulder at full speed. The contents on top of the pedestal shook; a few wax candles tumbled onto the floor. Kanna winced when she realized that the back of her leg had hit a sharp corner of the wood.

It had clearly been an accident—Kanna’s own fault, mostly—but still, some disproportionate fury came over her. She slammed her hands hard against Goda in retaliation, enough that it made the woman’s tall frame jerk in place. Goda took a few steps back, but she didn’t respond. She only stared down with an expression that had grown abruptly serious.

“What?” Kanna snapped. “Are you going to hit me or something?”

“No.”

The energy dissipated when Goda turned away. The woman stomped back over to the other side of the room, and it was suddenly like nothing had even happened. Internally, Kanna could not completely let go of the aggression. That strange electric buzzing still rushed through her bones.

Parama had not moved from his place against the wall. Kanna’s first instinct was to charge at Goda again, but when Parama grabbed at Kanna’s sleeve, she came to her senses soon enough.

“Stop,” he pleaded, his voice emerging as a whisper.

Kanna let out a loud huff. “I’m sorry,” she said to him.

Because the scuffle had soured the mood, it wasn’t long before Parama had explained that he was getting tired and Goda had quickly accepted his excuse. She ushered Kanna out the door and they made their way through the open plain in silence.

Kanna seethed as she shuffled through the sand, kicking up dirt that danced around in clouds before landing on the back of Goda’s robes. She was still angry, but she didn’t know why. Some deep frustration had been slowly overcoming her, and watching the struggle between Goda and Parama had triggered her into action.

She came up closer behind the woman, her hands clenched at her sides. “Why won’t you fight me?” she finally shouted. “Why will you fight him, but not me? Why will you push him, and chase him, and hit him, but you won’t even react to me?”

Goda spun to face her, the gravel billowing up all around her feet. She stopped so suddenly that Kanna nearly ran into her. “Because he’s just playing with me,” Goda said, her voice deep and severe. “You’re actually serious.”

When Goda turned and walked again, Kanna only sped up her own furious steps to keep up with the woman’s long strides. “You’re damn right I’m serious! How can I not be? Every second with you is like a hanging threat that never bears fruit! Every time I look at those looming shoulders of yours and that unfeeling, insolent face, I feel like I’m on the verge of being attacked. It makes me sick! It makes me wish that you would just tear me limb from limb already, so that I can finally rid myself of this constant fear!”

“Are you insane?” Goda said without looking at her. Hearing Goda raise her voice gave Kanna an odd satisfaction. “You actually want me to beat you?”

“No! I want you to—”

And then Kanna stopped dead in her tracks. Suddenly, she knew exactly what she wanted.

But she erased it from her mind before she could fully picture what it was. It felt too dangerous. Her chest tightened from sensing even just the surface of it. The echoes of her throbbing heart were growing ever more distracting inside her.

There were other parts of her that were throbbing, too, parts of her that burned with a strange hunger. She couldn’t understand it—but she couldn’t ignore it anymore, either. She was anxious that Goda had also figured it out.

Thankfully, Goda didn’t ask for further clarity. She only kept walking, and so with some relief, Kanna followed from a few paces behind until that intense, unnameable feeling began to fade. Still, some edges of it remained that were hard to shake off.

Once they wandered close to the inn, that low rumbling inside of her blended with a louder rumbling outside. The ground was moving beneath her feet. She lifted her eyes from the sand to find the source of that sound—but instead she found the hot, noxious breath of a monster striking her in the face.

It was the tailpipe of a truck that coughed out smoke. Many times larger than Goda’s rig, a searing heat emanated from every corner of the beast, as if the whole thing was bursting with some internal fire.

From the side of a truck that hovered over them like a building, a woman with bulky shoulders emerged. She was wearing the uniform of a soldier and she looked down at them from the open door.

“Are the two of you temple assistants or some’in?” the woman asked. Kanna had trouble understanding her regional Middlelander accent at first, and it didn’t help that the woman was chewing on a cigar.

“Nope,” Goda answered, much too casually. “Try someone else, sister.”

The soldier scratched her head and looked across the plain. “Well, someone’s gotta bring us dinner, nah?”

Kanna followed the soldier’s gaze and she saw an expanse of dozens of trucks, all just as huge as the first, some filled with cargo, and others heavily armored. All of them rumbled with life, as if they had only just pulled into the compound. She gaped at the scene, but because Goda had ignored them and kept walking, Kanna could not stare for long.

As they cut across the yard to reach their quarters, Goda muttered with irritation, “Behold, your father’s poison in action.”

Again, Kanna had no idea what she meant, but she was too exhausted to inquire any further. For all she knew, it was just another one of Goda’s riddles.

* * *

That night, Goda was even more stoic and quiet than usual. While Kanna ate her dinner, Goda ignored her and washed her own tunic in a bucket of cold water. They said absolutely nothing to each other for the rest of the evening. After Goda hung her clothes up in the storage room to dry, she crawled into bed naked and huffed out the light in silence.

For awhile, Kanna couldn’t sleep because the sounds of the soldiers making merry with Innkeeper Jaya were disturbing her. Goda appeared to not even notice them, her body still, her breaths turning steady in no time at all.

Kanna could see the entire spread of the woman’s nude back in the moonlight. She had seen it before, but never so closely, and never for so long. Even when the voices next door finally died down and the whole of the compound seemed to go to sleep, Kanna found it hard to close her eyes. Instead, she watched Goda’s body—the back of her shoulders, the sides of her torso, the edges of her hips—rising and falling with each breath.

Kanna couldn’t fathom how, in spite of it all, Goda could be so serene. Even in that moment, in the dead of night, all that Kanna could feel simmering in her own body was some rush of tight frustration. It had never left her since their fight. It had kept her awake. She tossed and turned in bed, and even as the moon moved in the sky framed by the window, she still could not overcome the feeling.

So she watched Goda calmly sleeping, and she felt the frustration grow. But something in the energy of that frustration moved through her more and more. She found herself reaching across the small distance between them.

Her fingers lightly grazed Goda’s back. It was warm. She pressed her hand fully against the muscles of those shoulders and slid her fingers along the flesh. The skin itself was surprisingly soft to the touch—young, flexible—but the meat underneath was hard and overworked.

That strange sensation was creeping back up Kanna’s legs. It spooked her enough that when Goda stirred a little, she snapped her hand back.

Goda did not awaken. She stayed relaxed, seemingly unaware, unconcerned with what was going on beside her. A mix of emotions fluttered in Kanna’s chest, but her burning frustration rose above them all as she watched Goda’s oblivious face—and then it reached a climax.

Kanna made a fist. She sprung her arm so far back that her shoulder nearly popped from its socket.

Then the sound of her knuckles slamming against taut flesh cracked through the room. She slammed them so hard against Goda’s back—with all her strength—that the force of the pain alone overwhelmed her rage.

The anger died instantly. Instead, it felt like all the blood had drained from her body.

What the hell did I just do?

Goda flipped around in bed. Before the sound of the punch had even echoed through her brain, Kanna was pinned to the ground. A hand grasped her neck, a warm breath bathing her face as hotly as the trucks outside had. Kanna stared up at her bedmate, terrified.

“Are you some kind of masochist?” Goda growled through gnashing teeth, her eyes locked with Kanna’s. “Do you have a death wish? If so, then maybe it would be less painful for you to find a patch of Samma Flower and swallow it!”

“What are you going to do, ram it down my throat? Make me swallow it?” Kanna asked insolently as soon as she had found her voice—but as she forced the words out, her throat began to hurt against Goda’s grip, and she actually began to panic. “You’re not going to do anything,” she stammered. “You won’t even fight me! You won’t even—!”

Kanna couldn’t finish. There was a wild, naked woman on top of her, she thought. Goda had pounced as soon as Kanna had hit her, but the feeling of the woman’s heavy body pressed to hers had taken much longer to register. Maybe that had been because she had resisted the sensation at first, but after the shock wore off, she found herself wanting to relax into it instead. The throbbing had returned to her bones, to her chest, to her belly. Along with it, a warm sensation spread somewhere else, at the place were Goda’s leg had fallen between both her own.

She could no longer ignore what it all meant. Her eyes widened with fear.

“Get off me! Get off me!” she cried.

But Goda had already retreated. She stared at Kanna across the small space, her eyes shining in the moonlight, her claws digging hard into the fabric of the mattress.

“Sleep,” she commanded. Kanna saw that Goda was wincing. The woman was gripping the back of her own shoulder with her hand.

I’ve hurt her, Kanna thought. She didn’t know whether she felt ashamed, or whether she thought Goda deserved it, or whether she thought the woman was going to kill her in the next five seconds.

Regardless, all the energy had drained from her in the midst of her terror. She closed her eyes and the image of Goda Brahm crouching beside her dissolved into nothing.

---

Onto Chapter 9 >>

In the morning, an uncomfortable beam of light found its way into the room, and it struck Kanna right in the face. She opened her eyes. When she looked around, she realized that the sun had come up, and that white light was leaking in through the cracks in the threshold.

The door was unblocked. The swan idol that had guarded her all night was gone, and as Kanna turned over, she noticed that Goda was also missing. She felt relief at first, as if she had awoken into a different world, as if the past day had merely been some kind of bizarre dream.

But the bed was not empty, and there was evidence of Goda’s presence still: Her outer robes—along with the rest of her clothes—were strewn about on the mat. As Kanna hovered over them, she could still pick up traces of Goda’s scent, but it was a gleam of metal in the folds of the robes that had captured her attention.

Curiously, she leaned closer. It was an eight-sided symbol etched in bronze, the face of a pendant that was buried in the rolling hills of the fabric. It might have fallen out of a pocket, she thought, but it looked more like something that belonged strung on a chain, around someone’s neck. A religious emblem? Kanna wondered.

She reached out to touch it, but the moment she disturbed the tousled clothes, the pendant slipped off the side of the mat. It was attached to a heavy iron key ring. On that same rusty loop, a set of keys were also strung.

Kanna’s breath cut out. Her eyes darted to the cuff on her wrist. Her fingers grasped at the oval-shaped opening that made up the keyhole of the cuff lock.

She did not hesitate. Grabbing the key ring with shaky hands, she shoved the first of the keys against the hole. It was far too big, so she tried the next, and then the next. Nothing fit. She looked furtively over her shoulder and towards the door every time she tried and failed. Her heart was pounding in her throat; her hands were fumbling; she dropped the set of keys more than once and the jangling sound sent her into a panic.

When she reached the last of the keys, she had grown so frustrated that she tried to force the piece inside. It resisted her. It went in, but it wouldn’t turn. She jiggled it futilely, an unexpected swell of tears coming up into her eyes. The instant she pulled it out with an angry jerk—the instant she was about to try every single key again—she was surprised by the sound of some shuffling beyond the door.

Kanna dropped the keys, as if the metal had been red-hot. She froze in place, but when the door did not open, she crept over to the tiny window on the wall. She was barely tall enough to stretch up on her toes and peer through the hazy glass, but even still the scene beyond it made her chest seize up again.

It was Goda. She was crouched not far away, over a bucket of water, bathing herself next to a boulder. Just as she had been the morning before, she was completely naked, only this time she was slathering herself with clean water instead of the contents of a murky rain puddle.

Kanna noticed her legs. From that angle, they struck her more than any other feature. They were flexed hard into the crouch, as if Goda were hovering mid-motion, as if the woman were about to snap into an explosive leap any second. Kanna found it so disturbing that she couldn’t help but stare.

She was distracted enough that it took her a moment to parse the creaking sound that was suddenly filling her ears. She whipped her head to the left, to face the door. Kanna nearly cried out when she saw it opening, and as the bright light of the morning expanded in the threshold, she raised a hand to shield her eyes.

When the door closed again, there were spots in her vision. They painted the innkeeper who was standing in front of her, holding a familiar tray in her hands.

“What? You’re recoiling like I’m some kind of intruder,” Innkeeper Jaya said. “Or perhaps…like you’ve been caught doing something questionable.” She responded to Kanna’s look of surprise with a teasing smile. “What are you up to?”

Before Kanna could make something up, the innkeeper had already surmised from Kanna’s posture, and she stepped over to the window. She didn’t need to stretch. In fact, she hunched down slightly to look out. Her eyebrows flicked up when she seemed to catch sight of Goda.

“Ahhh,” she said, pulling back and nodding her head. “I see, I see.” She had a tone that held a complete lack of surprise. “Well, I wouldn’t even give that a try if I were you. Indeed, she’s as ferocious as she looks, and she’ll utterly undo you if it comes to that—but it won’t come to that. She’s far too stoic and hard to provoke.”

Kanna felt a blush creeping up into her face. She tried to fight it; the embarrassment felt unjustified. “I have no idea what you mean.”

The innkeeper offered her the tray, which held much the same contents as the night before—but this time, it was served with a dismissive smirk. “So you’d rather play like you haven’t looked at her like that?” she said after Kanna had gratefully accepted the food. “You may be an Upperlander, but you’re not blind, are you?”

Kanna’s fingers tightened around the tray. “I don’t understand.”

“Goda is a very handsome woman. Surely that hasn’t escaped your notice, even if she does have a dreadful personality.”

“I find her face unpleasant to look at.”

“Is that so? Then how do you look at the rest of her?”

“Similarly.”

Jaya’s smile was still laced with much skepticism, but she shrugged in superficial acceptance as she reached for the doorknob beside her. “Very well,” she said. “Goda could be hideous by Upperland standards, for all I know. We all differ in our tastes.”

“I have no taste for her.”

“So you’ve already said. No need to repeat yourself so much, my dear!” As the innkeeper slipped out the door with a laugh, the light from outside bothered Kanna a little less. She had left the entrance open a crack, and the wind was pushing some sand in from the plain, so Kanna balanced the tray on one arm and reached out to close it—but a hand appeared out of nowhere and swung the door back open.

Kanna nearly dropped her plate.

“Hey, watch it!” she said without thinking.

When she saw that it was Goda who had appeared in the threshold, she took an automatic step back. The woman was completely naked, so Kanna tried to avert her gaze, putting a hand up to shield herself from further indecency as Goda passed by.

“What are you doing running around without any clothes on?” Kanna grumbled. “Are all Middlelanders this shameless, or is it just you?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Goda shrug. “It’s not just me. We have to wash ourselves every morning. It’s a religious thing.”

As the woman rummaged through her strewn clothes, Kanna held her breath and watched, remembering the ordeal from just moments before, nervous that Goda might realize that the keys had been moved. When the woman said nothing and merely began toweling herself off before throwing on her clothes, Kanna let out a sigh and tried to relax.

But then Goda reached over and plucked the yaw root straight from Kanna’s tray. She smiled before taking a bite. “Don’t waste your time,” she said. “You’re not going to find it.”

Kanna stared at the newly-empty space on the plate below. “Find what?”

“The key.”

* * *

Outside, Goda used the greywater from her bath to drench some of the shrubs in the innkeeper’s yard. The plants were leafless, and their tangled branches looked so dry that Kanna privately thought to herself that it was a lost cause.

“I wasn’t trying to escape, you know,” Kanna said quickly as she followed Goda into the shriveled garden.

Goda didn’t look at her. “You’re lying.” Still, she didn’t seem at all angered. She had stooped down; she was prodding at the roots of the shrub with her fingers.

“Fine, I was,” Kanna admitted with a sigh. “But what else was I going to do? The keys were just sitting there. Am I supposed to ignore a glimmer of hope like that?”

“Hope is for the weak.” Goda dug her hands into the sand and started dislodging some thorny vines that had taken root nearby. “Hope keeps your focus trained on some fantasy, so that you miss what’s right in front of you.”

“Well, I had hoped that the key would be right in front of me.”

“It was,” Goda said, finally looking up at her with a cryptic smile. “That’s why you’ll never find it.”

“Your riddles are tiresome.”

But Goda didn’t reply right away. Instead, she knelt down further into the dirt and stared at the bushes in front of her. “I planted these for the innkeeper a while back,” she murmured, shaking her head, “but since I only come here every few months at the most, no one has been looking after them.”

“What are they?”

“Medicinal plants. These are native to the desert, so I thought they would be harder for Jaya to kill, but she’s a relentless murderer when it comes to this sort of thing. Even just her presence seems to weaken them.” Nonetheless, Goda’s smile seemed good-natured as she dumped some more of the water on them. As the drops rained down onto the thirsty sand, a piece of what looked like dried up husk seemed to catch Goda’s interest. She picked it up and pushed some seeds out of the withered flesh. “At least these gave fruit before they died. Maybe they can have children after all.”

Kanna watched her silently, a new feeling coming over her that she couldn’t quite name, an uncomfortable softness. She looked around the garden, at the rows of dead little trees, at the thriving cactus blooms that represented the last bits of greenery that had survived.

Then the obvious finally struck her.

“You made this garden, didn’t you?” Kanna asked.

“It was a long time ago. It was back when I used to visit more frequently.”

Kanna knelt down at her side. She stared at the shrub before them, but she couldn’t recognize what it was, or any of the other plants. “Did you avoid coming when you heard that Priestess Rem was living here?”

It was just a guess, but by Goda’s silence, Kanna wondered if she might have hit an unexpected nerve.

“It was only a matter of time until I would have to come back,” Goda mumbled, entranced by the seeds in her hand. “The prisoners that they assign me—a lot of them are Middlelanders, so I can take them to any border crossing. But you’re a foreigner. You need to be cleansed or else they won’t let you through. This is the only monastery in the Outerland that will perform it.”

Kanna rolled her eyes. “You Middlelanders and your obsession with Death Flower. You’re wasting your time with these cleanses. Just let people risk their lives if they want. What does it affect anyone if people want to get drunk on the flower, or kill themselves, or whatever it is that they do?”

Goda shook her head. Her eyes were squinting in the light, and her pupils had grown small, but Kanna could see the ring of the sun reflected in them. “Samma Flower doesn’t make people drunk. It’s nothing like that. And in spite of the name and all the rumors, it doesn’t actually kill most people if it’s processed carefully. Taken in the right way, it’s a powerful medicine, which is why some people will accept the risk.”

“Well, if it’s possible to take it safely and it doesn’t make you drunk, what’s the problem? Why is it illegal?”

“When people eat enough of it, they can see the Goddess for themselves. It makes them unruly, because they’re surprised by what they see, and She’s nothing like what the priestesses tell them. So they stop believing.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why does the government say that it kills you, then?”

“It can kill you—in high enough doses. And in order to see the Goddess, the dose is massive. You must basically poison yourself and then try to live through it. Most people can’t swallow that much raw Flower; they purge before anything happens. If someone is able to hold it down, they might find what they’re after, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll live,” she said. “But there are some people who have a tolerance to Samma Flower—the government calls them vessels—and they consume huge amounts, doses that could kill a hundred people. When they excrete the flower’s essence from their bodies, the toxins are neutralized, but the magic still remains. Other people drink these excretions and have otherworldly experiences. It’s the only safe way to have it.”

“‘Excretions’?” Kanna asked, though she already had an inkling; she just didn’t want to picture it.

“Their body fluids: blood, saliva, urine. It all remains potent for several days after the vessel has eaten Samma Flower, enough time for them to smuggle it over the border. That’s why they’re keeping us here for three days. Most vessels are foreigners, so they’re making sure you’re not one of them, and that no one will take Death from you.”

The turning of Kanna’s stomach nearly overwhelmed her disbelief. “That’s disgusting. I could never imagine what would drive someone to drink another’s body fluids, for goodness’ sake.”

“You drank from your mother’s teat, did you not?”

“That’s different, clearly.”

“Is it?” Goda’s expression was empty again, and Kanna wasn’t sure if she was teasing her or not.

But Kanna stared right back at her without flinching. She didn’t allow herself to be provoked this time. “You seem to know a lot about Death,” she prodded slowly. “If I didn’t know better, I would say that you’ve experienced the flower yourself.”

“I have.” When Kanna recoiled at the blunt confession, Goda laughed, though Kanna could not find the joke anywhere. “I hardly remember any of it, though. I was a child the first time.”

Kanna’s eyes widened. “What kind of child takes illegal drugs?”

“It was an accident. My mothers had gotten hold of some soil imported from Samma Valley—the soil is volcanic, so it’s very fertile—and they were using it to grow some herbs in the garden. A patch of Samma Flowers sprouted up without their noticing at first. The seed must have traveled with the dirt. I was milling around in the yard, back when I was stupid and wanted to eat everything, and I happened to pluck a flower and put it straight into my mouth.”

“You what?” Kanna asked, already horrified by the story. She added quickly, “Then what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Goda said, her gaze growing a bit unfocused as she seemed to piece the memory together. “I was young—maybe five or six—so it’s hazy now. I remember that the ground started to move, like it was breathing, like my breath had become the Earth’s breath. Then I passed out.” She shrugged. “When I came to, one of my mothers was holding me down and the other was trying to make me vomit. I did, and so I survived.”

Kanna leaned back on her heels until she was sitting in the dirt. “You had such a close brush with death, and yet you act so casual about it.” She paused then; she remembered Goda’s exact words. “You said the first time you ate Samma Flower, you were a child. There were other times? What was that like?”

Goda said nothing for a long moment. When she stood back onto her feet and her body was framed by the blue sky again, her gaze wandered towards the emptiness of the desert, towards some mirage that Kanna could not see. Eventually, just as Kanna thought that she might have struck another sore spot, the woman replied: “I never found the Goddess, if that’s why you’re asking. I swallowed a lot, but not enough.”

“You were willing to risk your life over and over, just to see some spirit that you don’t even believe in?”

“It was only one other time that I did it, and I didn’t care if I died then.”

Kanna looked closely at Goda’s dark eyes, and for the first time she thought she saw an edge of sadness in them. This only added to her discomfort, so she trained her own gaze back on the ground. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Goda walked towards the opening of the fence, the loose sand billowing up with each of her steps. “It was a long time ago, and after that I vowed to never do it again.”

Kanna stood and dusted herself off. When she looked up, Goda had stepped outside the barrier and was seemingly expecting her to follow. There was a thoughtful look on her face, a look of interest—and it was intense enough that Kanna felt awkward under the stare.

“Careful,” Goda said. Her tone was strange, a mix of severity and amusement, as if she were watching someone walking straight into the path of a viper. “You’re curious about Death. It shows on your face. This isn’t something you should ever advertise to others.”

The words had been so unexpected that Kanna could not even deny them properly as Goda turned away.

“Come. We’re going to fetch some more water.”

* * *

In the evening, Kanna found herself once again kneeling in front of a temple assistant. This time, there was a low table between them, and a smattering of papers covering nearly every edge of the surface. She tried to keep her stare from glazing over as the assistant explained the meaning of every paragraph on every page, but ever so often, Kanna’s gaze wandered over her shoulder towards Goda Brahm, who had stopped just short of the gateway once again.

Because Priestess Rem was not there, however, Goda had made no ceremony. Without so much as a bow, she had merely sat upon the ground, lounging against the outside of the stone fence with her elbow resting on the top ledge. They were close enough to each other that Kanna easily caught Goda’s glance. When they met eyes, there was no smile, but the ever-present neutrality on the woman’s face was what Kanna searched for; she had come to find it reassuring.

“…And on this one,” the assistant said, passing her a sheet, knocking Kanna a bit out of her daze, “you need to fill in your full name, the name of your mother, and the exact location of your birth.”

“How exact?”

The assistant looked at her with irritation. “Exact. The province in the Upperland, the town, the farm, the exact address of the house if it has one.” Her tone made it sound as if it had all been obvious somehow.

“Do I need to mention which room in the house, or that it was on my mother’s kitchen table?” Kanna was being facetious, but the assistant merely shook her head and started sifting through another stack of paperwork.

As Kanna’s pen hovered over the sheet, the assistant’s twitchy hand stopped her.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, “you don’t know how to write in Middleland script, do you?”

“Excuse me?” Kanna huffed and pulled her hand back. “I know how to write.”

“You can’t use Upperland script on a government form. It has to be written in native Middlelander.”

“I know how to write both scripts just fine, thank you. What do you think I am, some kind of ignorant peasant? You know who my father is, don’t you?” Kanna blurted out. She could hear Goda laughing behind her.

“Well, excuse me, then,” the assistant muttered. “You’re the first Upperlander I’ve met who knows how to write our language.”

Kanna rolled her eyes and confidently pressed her pen to the paper. In truth, her skills in written Middlelander actually were a bit rusty, and she found the language nonsensical half the time, but it was the principle of the thing: She was well-educated, and she wasn’t about to tolerate any further insults towards her upbringing.

Kanna slowly carved the words, biting her lip with concentration. She tried to remember how her name was transliterated into Middlelander. When she had been arrested, the guards back at the detainment center had filled out most of the forms for her and had asked only for her signature, but now she regretted not looking at the script more closely.

Still, she persevered. After methodically etching what felt like her entire life story, she handed the page to the assistant, who appeared rather impatient.

“What’s this?” she asked, tilting the page sideways. “Everything looks fancy and hard to read.”

“Oh, I learned the Middleland script in a calligraphy class. I write Upperlander the same way. My tutor always said that beauty is never frivolous when you’re—”

“Fine!” the assistant interrupted her. She pressed the paper to the table. “I can read it—barely—but please print the words next time using the plain block style.”

Kanna gave her a wry look. The assistant handed her another sheet, and Kanna racked her brain to try to remember any alternative styles of the Middlelander script—but before she had set her pen to the paper again, the woman’s hand whacked the table with exasperation.

“What are all the names here on the first line? I don’t understand. Which one is yours?”

Kanna leaned over to look. “Oh, they’re all mine,” she explained. “It’s my full name.”

“Kanna…Leda…Raba, er, Rava…Aura…Boros…of the North-Facing Mount of Eburnea?”

“Yes, that’s right. There’s more, though. I wrote the rest underneath because I ran out of space.”

The assistant rubbed her face. “All right, which ones are your real names?”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about? They’re all real. Kanna is my given name. Leda was my mother’s name, which is a first daughter’s sacred name in the Upperland. Rava is my family name. Aura was my mother’s father’s—”

But before Kanna could finish, the assistant had taken a pen and struck through every name except for “Kanna” and “Rava.” The woman ignored Kanna’s shocked expression and said brusquely, “Middlelanders only have two names.”

“I’m not a Middlelander.” Kanna leaned across the table and pressed a fist to the wood beneath her.

The assistant seemed to meet her challenge. She leaned closer as well, enough that Kanna could smell her breath when she insisted, “You’ll be living in the Middleland, and all the forms have only space for two names: your given name and your family name.”

“But I’m not a Middlelander,” Kanna repeated. “You can’t just erase my identity with the stroke of a pen!”

“All right, then,” the woman said, gesturing towards the page, re-reading the scrawl conspicuously, “you can tell me which names you want out of all of these—but it can only be two of them. Who do you want to be? ‘Kanna Rava’? Or perhaps you’d rather be ‘North-Facing Mount’? Does that suit you more?”

Kanna’s anger boiled into the back of her eyes, where it had started to transform into tears against her will. She slammed her hands on the table. She was opening her mouth again, to shout at the woman, but then a voice came trickling smoothly from behind her shoulder.

“She’s right, you know,” Goda said. “People only have two names in this culture. They really have no other way to process your paperwork. If they don’t shorten your name now, then they certainly will at some office in the Middleland, and in that case you may have no choice in what they decide to call you.”

Kanna sighed and retreated, until she was sitting flatly on the ground once again, though a single pair of angry tears had managed to spill over. They left a trail of heat on her face.

“‘Kanna Rava’ is fine,” she said finally, her tension deflating.

“Listen, I…I didn’t mean to be….” The assistant looked alarmed by Kanna’s emotions. “There’s no reason to cry, all right? I’m not trying to insult you or your culture. It’s just that this is the way things are.”

Kanna nodded in acceptance. She was staring at the table with unfocused eyes, so at first she didn’t notice the presence that had fluttered into the courtyard.

“What’s all the ruckus about, hm?” The tall figure of Priestess Rem loomed over the assistant. She was smiling the same as always, not a hint of trouble on her face. “I’m sure you don’t mean to disturb the silence of the monastery, but we are about to sound the chime to end the prayers, and the priestesses need to be able to hear it.”

Kanna’s face grew warm with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed Goda glancing up at the woman in black—though her master’s gaze did not linger for long.

“We were just wrapping up the paperwork, Priestess,” the assistant mumbled, her expression similarly laced with shame.

Priestess Rem regarded Kanna for a long moment. “Does she appear free of Death?”

“Yes. I examined her myself before we started.”

“Good. I trust your judgment, Assistant Finn. Her cleanliness is far more important than this bureaucracy.” She waved a hand. “Look, the sun is already waning. We can finish all of this tomorrow.”

“Oh?” The woman’s tone was measured in her superior’s presence, but she was clearly suppressing her annoyance. “We’re almost finished. I only need a bit more information, and then I can fill these out myself.”

The Priestess made a gesture of acceptance and waited.

“I have your mother’s name, but I need to know how many siblings you have, and all of their names as well,” the assistant said, looking over at Kanna again.

Kanna opened her mouth at first to name every one of her father’s children—but then she thought about it and asked instead, “Do my half-siblings count?”

“Your what?”

“My father had four households with four different wives. Do the children from my father’s other wives count as siblings?”

The assistant threw a confused look at Priestess Rem, but the priestess did not return it. She was observing Kanna with that same fixed smile, that same quiet patience.

“Eh, well, did either of your mothers—I mean, did your one mother,” Assistant Finn corrected herself, “have any children besides you? We consider any children from the same mother to be siblings. Men can’t have children, after all.” She had mumbled the last part.

“I…was an only child, then.”

The assistant seemed to have sensed her hesitation. “Are you sure?”

“Well….” Kanna’s shoulders slumped and she leaned her weight against the table. She looked off towards the side, at the edge of quickly-dimming twilight that hovered over the desert. “I had a twin. She died during childbirth and so they never wrote her name down anywhere, and I only knew it because my mother told me. Does she have to be listed as well?”

“No,” Finn said in a quiet voice, her expression awkward, if lightly sympathetic. Before long, she had gathered the pages that were strewn across the table and began to make notes on them. Kanna could hear the vague scratching of the pen, a sound that made her wonder what other lies of omission those papers were telling about her.

Thinking that she was being dismissed, Kanna stood, but before she could turn around to the gateway, the priestess waved her over.

“Come.” Her face looked friendly. “Let us go into the sanctuary of the temple for a moment, so that you may get to know the Goddess.”

This seemed to finally stir the giant who had been lurking beyond the threshold, and Kanna could hear the sand flowing down from the woman’s clothes as she stood up.

“My priestess,” Goda said, her tone respectful, but nonetheless laced with an edge of displeasure. “Kanna Rava is an Upperlander, and she doesn’t share our faith. We may be able to compel her to walk on temple ground because she’s a slave, but is it not the law that she may choose to keep her own religion?”

“Isn’t it said that in every word a priestess speaks, there is a seed of the law that should be obeyed?” the priestess openly chided her. Even still, the woman’s smile hadn’t changed. “And I am telling you right now, Goda, to be still—and shut your mouth. Kanna Rava can come inside and see the Goddess Mahara for herself, and then Kanna Rava can decide if she loves the Goddess the way you and I do.”

Goda’s jaw tightened, but she said nothing more. It seemed she had given in.

“Now, tell me, Goda,” the Priestess said, after glancing at the cuff on Kanna’s wrist, “how far of a space do we have to wander? Can we make it to the sanctuary without incident?”

“Probably, though I may have to walk along the outside of the fence to accommodate my priestess.”

“Then please do so, if the cuff begins to alert you. We don’t need a foreigner screaming and twitching all over the floor of the temple. It would interrupt the evening prayers.”

With that, the Priestess turned and began walking further into the grounds, as if she were expecting Kanna to follow. As Kanna shuffled after the figure in black, she glanced back towards Goda one last time, to gain some kind of clue from her expression, but the woman’s face had only turned empty again.

“It pains me to hear about your sister,” the priestess said without looking at her. “I am also a twin myself.”

Kanna tilted her head, not yet sure how to accept a Middlelander’s sympathy. “What an odd coincidence,” she murmured in reply, settling for something neutral.

“Not really. Twins and triplets are very common in the Middleland. Most of them are fraternal, but many are born identical as well. You may have noticed that a few of the assistants look alike, have you?”

Kanna reflected on this, but all of the faces she had seen on that first day had blurred together. “I’m sorry. They all look very much alike to me.”

The priestess chuckled into the back of her hand, but the more Kanna thought about it, the more this revelation actually made sense. At the very least, it made the question of how the Middlelanders had spread themselves so quickly across the continent a little less mysterious.

Kanna’s bare feet scraped against the stone as they followed the path between the towers. She looked up at the structures, and now that she saw them up close, they seemed to change shape yet again. They were less like the cylinders she had originally perceived, and more like tall, rounded humps that jutted out of the earth.

Tucked behind one of the towers, the walkway turned into a clearing surrounded by looming stone walls, and Kanna let out a breath of surprise when they entered. It was a garden, lush with greenery that didn’t match the desert in the least.

Water flowed nearby into what looked like a tiny, man-made pond. Bushes and vines adorned the barriers that encased the yard, and different plants that Kanna did not recognize lay all throughout the space. Electric lights sprouted out from the ground like flowers themselves, lighting everything in a warm, violet-tinted glow.

At the very center, there was a fountain. It sputtered with the energy of a geyser and it pattered Kanna with the cool mist of its waters as she walked past.

“What is this place?” she whispered—though a second later, she noticed the rows of kneeling priestesses in the corner, all of them with their eyes closed in prayer, and she felt some shame for breaking their peace.

“It’s the temple garden,” Priestess Rem told her. “In most monasteries, it lies close to the sanctuary. It’s where we grow all the herbs, and flowers, and fruits that please the Goddess.”

As she walked through the oasis, Kanna felt a faint twinge of pain radiating from her forearm, but it faded in a matter of seconds. She pressed her hand to the cuff on her wrist. Goda must have moved, she thought.

The priestess led her up a stone staircase. It was only half a dozen steps high, and as soon as she had climbed to the final ledge, the sanctuary lay wide open to her, not a single door closed in a corridor arched with a dozen thresholds. She could even peer down the hallway and see the form of a Goddess gazing back at her.

Kanna’s breath hitched. The idol was made entirely of gold. It shimmered in the warm lamp light of the sanctuary, and its eyes regarded Kanna with love, one hand stretched out in what seemed like a gesture of welcome. The Goddess’s other hand was pressed against her chest, holding up a breast as if offering a drink—as if offering to spill a chalice filled with her heart.

Kanna met the statue’s gaze directly, shamelessly. They stared at each other for a long time across the corridor, with the many layers of open doors between them. The force of the idol’s gaze never wavered, until Kanna could not take it anymore and had to tear her eyes away.

She had never seen anything like it before in her life.

“Come deeper inside,” Priestess Rem whispered. The woman advanced down the open hallway, but even without this encouragement, Kanna would have felt compelled. There was something drawing her in, as if some invisible force were trying to join her with the Goddess.

As she slipped further into the sanctuary, the air grew warmer, and she realized that the lights inside were from torches with searing fires. She and the priestess were the only mortals in the otherwise empty room, but Kanna didn’t find the privacy uncomfortable with the Goddess watching over them.

When they reached the foot of the altar, the priestess told her to kneel. Without a second thought, she did, and she stared in awe up at the idol. It didn’t even seem like a statue, Kanna thought. The Goddess felt fully alive. Up close, Kanna could almost sense the heat of that golden skin.

Her concentration broke only when she heard strange words hissing softly through the chamber, too softly for her to understand. She thought at first that it had been the Goddess speaking to her in some incantation, so she lifted her head to gaze at the idol’s lips.

But then she realized that the voice was human. The words were familiar, too, and the accent sounded strangely like…

“As beautiful as it is to see another soul connect with the Blessed Mother,” Priestess Rem said in Kanna’s native tongue, “I didn’t actually bring you here to convert you. I hope the Goddess can forgive me for using this sanctuary as a pretense for a private conversation.”

---

Onto Chapter 8 >>

“Rem.” Goda’s voice was husky and low, and the edges of the word were swallowed by the wind. “Priestess Rem,” she corrected herself.

The woman in the black robe had fixed her gaze on Goda, to the point that it made Kanna wonder if she had even noticed anyone else. “My dear Goda, don’t act so tense,” she said, still smiling. “I’ve already seen you twice today, and I haven’t lashed out at you yet, have I?”

Goda did not reply. Her face was emotionless—but just behind her, Parama had cowered, his posture tense with enough panic for the both of them.

“Goda Brahm.” The priestess drew closer. Her steps were so soft and deliberate that it made her seem like she was hovering more than walking. “The name tastes a bit strange to me after all this time. Then again, maybe it really hasn’t been so long. You look exactly the same.”

“It’s been nine years.”

“Has it? Then I’ve lost track. When you’re in the presence of the Goddess, time falls away. There is only one eternal moment, and you’re left without any thoughts of the past, so you forgive everything.” Her eyes traced the whole of Goda’s face. “Even the worst things.”

Kanna jumped when the priestess finally moved, but the woman did not strike out, and she merely pushed onward after she caught Parama’s gaze, as if she were expecting Kanna and Goda to make way for her. Kanna quickly shuffled to the side to avoid any touch.

Goda instead leaned in front of the young man. The movement was subtle, smooth, barely more than a shrug–but Goda’s body was massive enough that even this blocked the path of the priestess.

“Ah, still the same Goda, I see,” the woman murmured with a trace of unfriendly amusement. “Always the troublemaker, aren’t we? Step aside and let me see the boy’s beautiful face.”

But before Goda could either give in or refuse, Parama emerged from behind her and sheepishly approached his master. Priestess Rem took the sides of his face in a pair of thickly-gloved hands, her stare as stern as it was parental in its intensity. It made Kanna twist with sympathetic discomfort; had she known nothing else about them, she could have easily assumed that she was witnessing a mother about to scold her son.

“My boy,” the priestess told him, her gaze squarely meeting his, “have you brought shame to every one of your masters in this way, or is it simply that I have yet to deserve your respect? Why are you wandering alone in the middle of the night with two strange women?”

“They’re not strangers, Mistress. I’m friends with Porter Goda.”

A twitch came over the priestess’s face. It was so brief that Kanna barely caught it. “Ah, is that so? Well then, playtime is over. You’ll have dinner with us at the temple, and then you’ll go to your cabin alone and turn in for the night. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Parama fidgeted a little against her touch. “I was going to eat dinner with Porter Goda. We caught a snake.”

“A snake?” Her eyes fell on the limp, scaly rope that hung around Goda’s neck. “So I see. But a serpent is unclean for a temple worker to eat. You may not be a clergy member, but I encourage you to follow our standards nonetheless.”

Goda rudely pressed a hand to the crown of Parama’s head. Her fingers lay spread, just a hair’s touch from where the tips of the priestess’s gloves rested at the boy’s temples.

“He helped me kill it,” she said. “Are you going to deprive the boy of his fair share, Priestess?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her hands tightened against Parama’s face, and because his skin was smooth and alive, the harsh leather gloves looked strange pressed to it. “You feed your slave, Goda, and I’ll feed mine.” Her smile had not faded.

Without saying anything more, she led the young man away, and Kanna stared after them. A sense of relief washed over her as they grew smaller in the distance, but even still she could not push away her confusion.

“She must not have seen that we were coming out of that forbidden place,” Kanna mumbled, shuffling quickly to catch up with Goda, who had already started back towards the inn.

“No. She saw exactly where we came from.”

“Then why didn’t she say anything about it? That scribe made it seem like the priestess would tie us to a whipping block if she found out.”

Goda shrugged. “There could be an infinite number of reasons why. I’m not one to speculate on the thoughts of a witch.”

A bit taken aback at the bluntness of the epithet–and not sure whether to take it literally–Kanna glanced again at the two silhouettes that had just about disappeared. “Well,” Kanna said, “it doesn’t take much speculation to realize that the woman can’t stand you. What happened? Did you ruin her life or something?”

“Yes,” Goda answered without a shred of emotion in her tone.

Kanna made a face. “You’re not going to deny it, at least?”

“Why would I deny it?”

“I don’t know, maybe because then it would seem like you have an ounce of shame, like you’re a normal human being?” Kanna second-guessed herself as the words came out. With a bit of curiosity mixed in with her trepidation, she trudged faster, trying to come up along Goda’s side, to see the woman’s face, to see if she had provoked her. When Goda didn’t react, Kanna sighed. “Fine, I guess it’s none of my business.”

For all she knew—which was very little—the priestess had deserved whatever it was. Even a brute like Goda had to have reasons, Kanna figured. Still, the fact that her temporary master appeared to be so unpopular made Kanna worried about why that might have been.

“Nobody seems to like you around here—except maybe that boy, and he doesn’t exactly strike me as the best judge.”

Kanna remembered the young man’s bright face when they had first run into each other. The most disturbing thing about him was how high his spirits seemed to be in the midst of his slavery. She could hardly believe that he was in the same situation that she was in.

“What did he do?” Kanna thought to ask. “I mean, what made him a slave? You have to be a criminal to be a slave, don’t you?”

“Yes. He’s serving seven years.”

“Seven years? I can’t imagine someone as harmless as he is could have deserved that. Was he even an adult yet when they arrested him, or did he have to grow up enslaved?”

Goda huffed with amusement. “You judge so quickly. How do you know that his innocent face isn’t deceiving, and that his crime wasn’t outrageous?” She gave Kanna a twisted smirk. “For all you know of him, he could have kicked his own mother into a raging volcano.”

Kanna nearly stumbled on her next step. “Did he really do that?”

“No. There’s only one volcano in the Middleland, and it’s dormant.”

Kanna pursed her lips and gave Goda an irritated side-glance.

Before she could say anything else, though, Goda continued, “If I tell you what he did, then right away you’ll find it to be minuscule, even silly. Then, you’ll complain that he doesn’t deserve his punishment, and you’ll pretend you feel compassion for him, when really you just want another excuse to be self-righteous. That’s much too tedious for this time of night.”

“What?” Kanna said, her irritation growing. “Of course I feel compassion for him. How could I not? He’s barely started his life, and already he’s in chains.”

Goda looked unimpressed. “So you say—but the only reason you would even give his situation a second thought is because you’re in the same one. How often did you consider the plight of slaves before you were arrested?”

“Well, obviously, it wasn’t something that I had to think about. We don’t have slaves in the Upperland. We don’t treat people like that—even criminals.”

“So you say,” Goda repeated, offering a dismissive smile. “Did your father have workers?”

“Yes, of course.” Kanna wasn’t quite sure what Goda was getting at. “But we paid them. They were not enslaved.”

“How much did you pay them?”

Kanna felt her jaw tensing against her will. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “How am I supposed to know that? We paid them with food, lodging. Some of them came from far away because grain didn’t grow well where they lived, so my father gave them work and let them eat part of the harvest, from what I understand of it. That’s hard to quantify, and I had nothing to do with it.”

“And if they didn’t work, then what would become of them? Would they starve, then?”

“I…I don’t know, I wasn’t—”

“Could they leave, at least, if they wanted to? Could they go somewhere else to grow their own crops?”

“Well, my father owned all of the land in the area, so they would have to go back to where they….” Kanna stopped talking.

Goda nodded in response to her silence.

A few steps went by wordlessly. Kanna stared at her own feet as they sunk into the sand.

Then she clenched her fists. “How else do you expect society to work, then? Food has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? It’s only natural that everyone had to earn their living at my father’s property.”

“Did you?”

Kanna went silent again, but the anger still hadn’t faded. She realized then that it was a background anger that had always lingered in her. She could usually ignore it, but Goda was very good at bringing it to the surface with her stupid remarks.

“Look, just because I didn’t have to work, doesn’t mean that my life was easy or that I didn’t suffer. There are some problems in life that can’t be solved even by wealth. You must know that.”

“I didn’t say your life was easy.”

“Then why do you mock it? Why do you push back on everything I say about it?”

Goda shrugged. “Someone has to. You certainly won’t do yourself that favor on your own.”

At that, Kanna didn’t know how to respond. She gave Goda a confused look, but Goda merely stared back at her with the same mostly-unreadable expression, with eyes that held a touch of puckishness.

“I don’t like your face, you know,” Kanna said. The words had stumbled out of her mouth suddenly, but she didn’t regret them.

“Oh?” As usual, there was no interest in Goda’s voice; there was only the ghost of a smile. She was peering out across the clearing as they neared the innkeeper’s side-yard, and then she appeared to hone in on a dead vine at the fence. She grasped a handful of the spiny stems and yanked them out at the roots.

Seeing her unaffected look only made Kanna grow bolder. “Your face repulses me, to be honest. Especially when you look like that—when you claw at things and yank at things like you’re some kind of feral beast. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to look straight at you; it makes my eyes water.”

But Goda didn’t seem to be paying attention. Once they were inside the yard, she dug around through the broken flower pots, collecting dry sticks that she found along the ground, until she had a bundle tucked under her arm. They walked by a tiny tree in the sand that had clearly been dead for awhile, and when Goda noticed it, she finished kicking it over, pressing her boot on its slim trunk until it cracked so loudly that Kanna jumped back in alarm.

“What are you even doing?”

Goda let out a savage grunt. It rumbled from low in her throat, and it was so exaggerated that it startled Kanna yet again–but the wicked smile on the woman’s face did not match the sound’s aggression at all. “The feral beast is making a fire!” she said, her tone mocking, and all these contradictions only bewildered Kanna even more.

There was a pit at the center of the yard, encircled by some old broken chairs. It was there that Goda threw the twigs on a bed of leaves. She produced some lint from inside one of her pockets to use as tinder, and with the quick spark of a flint rod, she nursed a fire to life. Only once she had settled on the ground did she finally pull the serpent off her neck.

Kanna grimaced as she watched the woman peel the skin off with a knife. When Goda sliced the belly open, she paused, her eyes narrowing with intrigue.

“Huh. She was pregnant.”

At first Kanna wasn’t sure what Goda had meant, but when she came to lean closer to the woman, she could see by the light of the fire that there were indeed tiny snakes clustered in the serpent’s gut. Though she quickly realized that they were dead, for a split second she thought she had seen them squirming. She decided that it had been a trick of the flickering light.

Either way, Kanna felt her heart grow heavy. That odd feeling of dread had returned to her. “I thought snakes hatched from eggs,” she murmured over Goda’s shoulder.

“They do. But in some snakes, the eggs hatch inside the mother and her children come into the world fully formed.” Goda grabbed a handful of the little serpents and dropped them onto a rock that sat near the edge of the fire. “I would have given these to Parama, but you can have them instead.”

Kanna looked away with disdain. “You really are an animal. Have you no compassion at all?”

“For the snakes or for Parama?”

At this, Kanna gave her a wry glance. “Both?” She sighed. She gave in and sat down next to Goda in the sand. “I’m not going to lie,” she said, “this is why I was a little shocked when that boy said that you used to be a gardener. I can’t exactly picture you prancing around a bed of flowers all day, singing to yourself and tending to the roses.”

Goda actually laughed. “You have quite the imagination.” She began cutting the naked snake into pieces, which she placed carefully at the edge of the fire along with its children. “I was a horticulturist—but just an apprentice at the time. I did grow flowers, but not a lot. I grew food for the priestesses mostly.”

“Even still, it seems a bit…soft for my impression of you. I can’t picture it at all.”

“Maybe you have the wrong impression of me, then,” Goda replied, poking at the fire with a twig. “You don’t really know me, after all, or anything about our customs here. You only have naive assumptions to go by.”

Kanna stared into the fire. “But how am I supposed to survive this strange place without making any assumptions? What am I to do instead? Should I just think nothing at all about what I see and who I meet? Walk around with the empty-headed look of a basking salamander, like you always do?”

Silence followed. Kanna grew a bit anxious that she had offended the woman, but then she mentally chastised herself for caring about that. Indeed, she was afraid of Goda—she could admit that much to herself—but she had yet to decide whether or not the fear was even rational.

When Kanna glanced over, Goda didn’t seem bothered. She was precisely giving Kanna one of those empty looks. “You say such silly things,” Goda told her, “that I can’t help but be amused. Still, you’re getting too familiar.” Her eyes grew hard even as they widened slightly with an unspoken threat. “You should probably stop.”

Kanna swallowed and looked back towards the fire. Her mouth had become dry. She brought her knees up to her chest and rested her chin atop them.

Goda’s dark eyes repulsed her—but the urge to look into them still tugged at her somehow. She turned towards the sand some paces away, where she could only see Goda’s flickering shadow.

* * *

The snake tasted like charred fish. She was convinced that there was more black carbon in it than there was flesh. Still, she was so hungry that she bit into it anyway and smacked her lips to get the grainy coal off her teeth.

Goda had cut the head off the snake. At first, Kanna thought that she was going to cook it with the rest of the body, but instead she had buried it in the sand. “It could bite,” she explained when she sat back down. Her smile was a teasing one, so Kanna didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Still, it gave her a vivid mental image, and she was so delirious from exhaustion that she couldn’t put it out of her mind.

“Such abuse!” a voice erupted from the darkness.

Kanna choked and whipped around with surprise.

There was a woman towering over her, her features partly obscured in shadow, her eyes gazing down disapprovingly at the both of them. It took Kanna a moment to recognize the innkeeper. There was a steel tray in her hand and the flames glared harshly along the metal.

“Is that really all you’re feeding her, Goda?”

“If she’s still hungry, then she can go find another one.”

“Look at that skinny thing!” At first, Kanna thought that the woman was talking about the snake, but then she noticed that the innkeeper was actually gesturing in Kanna’s direction. “Do you really think she’s cut out to hunt an animal? She’s the prey herself.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes, but said nothing. She swallowed past the urge to cough again, then she shoved another piece of the snake into her mouth.

“If it bothers you that much,” Goda said, “then why don’t you feed her?”

“Clearly, I’m going to have to.” The woman laid the tray down at Kanna’s side. On top of it, there were a few slices of hardtack bread with a small block of cheese. A tiny cut of some root that Kanna didn’t recognize sat off to the side of the plate.

Kanna looked up at the woman stupidly, her eyes welling up against her will, a swell of confusion and gratitude filling her chest.

“Just because this savage lives without dignity, doesn’t mean that you have to follow her example,” the innkeeper said to Kanna. A mildly sheepish look came over her face. “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t introduce myself before, but my name is Jaya Hadd and I’m the owner of this inn. It’s a shame you happened to…catch me at a bad time. Had I known that you were a daughter of the Rava family, I wouldn’t have been quite so harsh. You poor thing. They’ve done you such an injustice.”

“Being pitied and coddled won’t prepare her for what she’ll be facing over the next ten years,” Goda muttered, “nor will it free her from bondage.” She was staring into the fire, and it was then that Kanna noticed that Goda hadn’t touched any of the food.

“You’re always so heartless.”

“Well, if you have a heart, then let us sleep in a proper room.”

The innkeeper pursed her lips. “You know I can’t do that. I have real guests staying tonight—the kind that pay.”

“The people who own that truck?” Goda tipped her head towards the dark clearing beyond the yard. Curious, Kanna looked off in the same direction, and though she had to squint to make sense of the shapes in the dim moonlight, there was indeed a truck parked beyond the innkeeper’s cabin, one that had not been there before.

“Yes,” the innkeeper replied, “so please don’t wander in.”

“Are they the same people who brought the fuel that I saw the assistants hauling away for you?”

Kanna almost laughed, taken aback by her audacity, and though the innkeeper’s eyebrows shot up with a similar jolt of surprise, the woman seemed much more offended than amused.

“What on earth do you mean? There’s a shortage, of course. Nobody is selling fuel.”

“Then what did you do to get it?”

“Nothing, because I don’t have any.”

“You should give me some,” Goda said. That was all she said, but there seemed to be an unspoken second phrase, something that hung in the air like a threat.

“I told you,” the innkeeper muttered, her tone nearly as threatening, “that I don’t have anything. And even if I did, I would hide it from your thieving hands.”

But then, after a long silence and an unfriendly stare, the woman’s tight expression seemed to lose its tension. Something like realization came over her face. To Kanna’s surprise, the woman trudged over to Goda’s side and dropped into one of the broken chairs before the fire, slapping Goda on the shoulder and heaving a loud sigh. “My, my!” she said with exasperation. “Won’t you look at us now? How pathetic! Arguing about some noxious liquid. Addicted to the sound of rumbling motors. When our grandmothers were young, the world wasn’t like this. There was less greed.”

“There’s always been greed.”

“But never so thoroughly rewarded, don’t you think? This industrial revolution may have saved us from starvation, but it didn’t bring us any closer to the Goddess.”

Goda laughed. “You say this and yet you hoard fuel from the rest of us.”

The innkeeper sighed again and stared into the flames. “I’m sorry, Goda, but I can’t help you. My hands are tied, and you already know that this world doesn’t make room for charity.” She cleared her throat conspicuously. “Besides, I told you: I don’t have anything.”

“If I find it, I’ll steal it from you. Not all of it, but enough that it will probably inconvenience you. You should give me some now, that way you can decide how much I’ll take.”

“Fair enough, but you won’t find it—because there’s nothing to find.” She stood up again, but turned to Kanna before leaving. “And you, child of Rava: I really do wish you luck. I’m sure you’re not a vessel for Death, so your cleanse should turn out fine, but watch your back around this barbarian.”

Kanna said nothing as the woman headed back towards the house, too confused by the awkward conversation to reply, but knowing better than to complain about both women’s poor manners. Instead, one of the innkeeper’s comments rose to the top of her mind, and it seemed a reasonable change of subject.

“She talked about your ancestors,” Kanna said with mild curiosity. “Is that just a figure of speech in the Middlelander tongue, or do you actually share a grandmother with that innkeeper?”

Goda looked distracted, rearranging some of the embers in the fire. “We do,” she said, with little inflection or interest. “By coincidence, my lower mother is her higher mother’s sister.”

Kanna raised an eyebrow. Though she still wasn’t sure what this business of “lower” and “higher” really meant, she could surmise the gist of it, and she wasn’t in the mood to sound ignorant again, so she didn’t ask for an explanation.

“But doesn’t that make the innkeeper your first cousin?” she asked instead.

Goda paused in thought. “Huh. So it does.” She shrugged dismissively and kept tending to the fire.

Kanna stared at her. She wasn’t sure what was worse: the fact that Goda was stealing from her own family, or the fact that they had both seemed so nonchalant about being family in the first place. She shook her head with disbelief and turned her attention back to the plate of food.

Over the course of the bizarre conversation, Kanna had already begun shoving food into her mouth without even realizing. Only a bit of cheese and some of the unknown root remained.

Kanna picked up the root. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s called yaw. It’s a tuber. All Middlelanders eat it as a staple with every meal, so you should probably get familiar with it.”

Kanna brought it closer to the fire to take a look. It was a purple-tinged white on the inside with a thin brown skin, and it didn’t seem much different from other root vegetables she had seen. She had imagined that the Middlelanders must have had a staple food; it was one of the few similarities they had with the Upperlanders, who gorged on a grain called mok every day and made spirits from it.

So she shrugged and put the root into her mouth.

When she immediately gagged and spit it out into the sand, Goda laughed at her.

* * *

Every time they stepped into the dusty old storage room, Kanna had to get used to the smell again. She stood against the wall, next to the small window, and picked at her teeth as Goda tinkered with the door lock. Some of the tiny snake bones had been particularly tenacious, and Kanna hadn’t been able to dislodge them with her tongue just yet.

“That meal was horrendous. Do you always eat snakes like this?” Kanna asked, sucking on her own teeth.

“Only if I happen to catch one.”

“Why? Are they easy to catch?”

“Not at all. They’re quite fast,” Goda said, her tone pensive for once, even though there was a strange smirk growing on her face as she headed for some crates at the far end of the shed, “but one time I was in the open desert and I discovered a snake eating her own tail. That one wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Can’t say that I’m surprised you would take advantage of such a pathetic sight.”

The smirk widened. “Oh, she wasn’t pathetic at all.” With a loud rattling, Goda pushed away the boxes, but it was too dark to see what they concealed. “She was full of theatrics. When I came upon her, I tied up her arms, and she started to put up a fight, writhing and screaming. Even when I tried to pull her up into a hollow, so that we could spend the night out of the rain, she bared her fangs and resisted me all the way to the top. It’s a miracle I didn’t get bit.”

Kanna stopped pressing her tongue against her teeth, confused by the woman’s cryptic ramblings. But as soon as realization set in, she narrowed her eyes, and though Goda’s words were followed by a harsh scraping along the floor as the woman dragged something huge out of the shadows, Kanna could hardly pay it any attention.

“If you don’t like getting bit, then don’t go hunting snakes,” Kanna said coldly.

Goda dropped her burden with a casual shrug. “Who says I don’t like getting bit?”

A torrent of warm blood rushed to Kanna’s face in reply to the woman’s playful grin, but she was quickly distracted from her embarrassment by the giant wooden sculpture that Goda had placed in front of the door. It was nearly as tall as the woman herself.

“What’s all this for?” Kanna demanded, looking away from Goda’s insolent face and at the new barrier that blocked the threshold. The carved wood was clearly more ancient than even the shed, its features so cracked and weathered that Kanna had to stare for a long moment to make out the feathered lines of its winged body. Only the details on the statue’s head remained relatively intact, perched on a long swan-neck that rose up from its spreading breastbone, the wooden eyes of a huge bird staring right back at her with an expression that looked equally as offended as she was. “What is it, a carved idol?”

“Insurance. You could probably tip it over eventually if you pushed hard enough, but it would take you awhile, and your grunting and groaning would wake me, so I would easily catch you if you tried to escape. I’m a light sleeper.”

“This is hardly necessary,” Kanna complained. “What if there’s a fire or some other emergency?”

Goda laughed. “Would you prefer that I tie you up again instead?”

And so Kanna fell silent. She looked over at the two sleeping mats that lay side by side in the aisle before them, and it reminded her of just how alone they were, how they were locked in a room together in the middle of the night with no one but a statue to witness them.

The feeling of privacy was not comforting at all. It made her chest seize up with an edge of fear. She didn’t think that Goda would do anything to her, but she was fully aware that without much of a struggle, the woman easily could do anything she wanted. Even from just their brief handful of scuffles, the difference in strength between them was alarming.

That thought brought a different sensation all of a sudden. It was very brief. It was like a pulse in Kanna’s gut—or maybe somewhere lower still—a swelling that was uncomfortable in its fullness.

Kanna tried to put it out of her mind, to not let her anxiety show. “Am I really supposed to sleep here, right next to you like that?” she asked with as steady a voice as she could manage.

“Yes,” Goda said. She gave her an amused look, as if the question had been stupid. She walked over to the bedding and knelt down onto the mat, peeling off her outer robe as she settled in.

Kanna looked away. “Can’t I sleep in one of the other aisles or something?”

“No. You’ll stay where I can see you.”

Once she had stripped down to her tunic and slacks, Goda glanced over at Kanna, who was still hesitating near the door. To Kanna’s surprise, the woman did not bound towards her yet; instead, she watched Kanna carefully, her stare alert, her expression losing its strange mix of mirth and authority.

“Look,” Goda said finally, “what you’re afraid of—I’m not going to do it. I have no interest in that sort of thing, so you can relax and go to sleep.”

“I didn’t say I was afraid of you,” Kanna snapped. She didn’t like how quickly Goda had guessed, and she certainly didn’t like what Goda was implying. Kanna hadn’t even put a shape to her fear yet, or speculated on what, exactly, she was afraid that Goda would do. “I just don’t know you that well, that’s all. In the Upperland, sleeping directly beside someone is an overly familiar gesture. Only married people do it.”

Goda patted the mattress beside her. “We’re not in the Upperland,” she said. When Kanna didn’t move, Goda started to get up. “Of course, I can just make you do it if you’d prefer a struggle first. I’m sure there’s rope in here.” She began to look around.

Kanna heaved a deep sigh and rushed forward. As if there were some kind of invisible force both pulling her and repelling her at the same time, she slipped carefully around Goda without brushing against her, and she plopped down onto her side of the aisle.

This seemed to satisfy her master well enough, and Goda stretched out on her own sleeping mat before blowing out the candle.

Kanna lay there, awake in the dark, merely inches from the woman who was already breathing deeply beside her. She could feel the heat of Goda’s body radiating through the air and bathing her skin, warming her against the drafts that trickled in from beyond the doorjamb, but nonetheless making her shudder with discomfort.

When her eyes had adjusted enough, she could see just the basic shape of Goda’s form: the side of her face, the thin cloth of her shirt that covered her back, a bare shoulder that stuck out over the sheets. She stared at that sun-bronzed skin and felt the sudden urge to reach out, to see what it felt like against her fingers, to dig her nails deep into that naked flesh and draw the blood out.

She quickly turned away.

Her heart pounded. A part of her couldn’t fathom why, and another part was hesitant to acknowledge the feeling at all. Instead, she stared up at the ceiling until her exhaustion had overwhelmed her thoughts.

* * *

That night, Kanna had a dream. She dreamt that she was standing in a winter forest near a flowing river, her bare feet digging into the snow. Stars filtered in from the tops of the trees as a weak twilight—dawn or dusk, she wasn’t sure—but all she could see in the water was the form of a white swan, which floated serenely downstream towards her. When she tried to approach with curiosity, the bird took off in flight, soaring over her head and deep into the jungle behind her.

She spun around to see where it had gone, but instead she came face-to-face with a void. There was a figure swallowed in shadows, hovering over her like a giant. Paralyzed, she could not even recoil, and she could not make out the ghost’s features until it was so close that the mist of her own gasp mingled with its hot breath, which tasted of wet earth.

It was a living ghost.

It was Goda.

There was a white flower in her hand. The center was yellow like the yolk of an egg. She seized Kanna stiffly by the neck, and before Kanna could cry out, Goda shoved the flower into Kanna’s mouth and drowned out the sound. That massive hand filled up her mouth, but then the woman pushed deeper, across Kanna’s tongue, into her throat, stretching her from the inside.

Kanna choked and yet the woman only stared and smiled and pushed deeper. Goda reached inside of her, as if Kanna were some vessel and the woman were trying to touch the very bottom.

She burst her way through Kanna’s guts and snaked her arm into the depths. She took Kanna’s womb in her fist and squeezed it, until a torrent of blood and water poured out from between Kanna’s legs.

Kanna looked down in horror. She had given birth to a serpent.

* * *

Kanna awoke crying out in pain. Her blood pounding in her head, she jerked upright in shock, pressing her hand between her legs, grasping to see what was left of her—and finding that nothing familiar was gone, even as the feeling of being torn open had not faded entirely.

Goda stirred next to her. In the dim moonlight that leaked in through the tiny window, she peered at Kanna with alarm. “What is it?” she said groggily. Her eyes traveled down to Kanna’s hand where it pressed to her groin, and she looked a bit perturbed. “Did you piss yourself or something?”

Kanna blinked a few times, still not quite free from the dream. “No,” she whispered with irritation. “Blood came out.” She tried to shake it off, but the pain had felt so real.

Goda paused. “Oh,” she said. She grabbed a rag from the bottom shelf beside her and tossed it into Kanna’s lap. “I don’t keep those supplies. We’ll ask the temple assistants in the morning.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

It was only after a few seconds of dead silence that Kanna realized exactly how Goda had misunderstood her. When she picked up the old rag and felt dirt caking between her fingers, she threw a glare at Goda’s back. She crumpled the cloth in her hand with a burst of rage.

But as she began to turn away again, her eyes took notice of Goda’s satchel, which was sitting at the foot of the woman’s bed. Even in the moonlight, she could still see the outline of the cylinder inside. A steel baton, she thought.

This time, when she imagined herself cracking it against Goda’s skull, she felt less guilty about it.

---

A Note From the Author:

Enjoying it so far? If you know anybody who is into this kind of thing, feel free to spread it around. This draft of Goda’s Slave will always be available here, free to read. If you want to support me in this labor of love, consider becoming a patron on Patreon! Every bit helps!

Onto Chapter 7 >>

Kanna didn’t have time to react. A hand had already seized her, and without any will of her own, it dragged her deeper into the pitch black. When she fell down onto the ground with her back against stone, a pair of quiet breaths huffed away on either side of her—one rapid, one slower.

She had landed inside an alcove just at the bend of the wall, where the path seemed to fork into another tunnel. Kanna could no longer see the mouth of the cave from where she sat, though as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see Goda glancing around the corner. The woman muttered one of the few vulgarities that Kanna happened to know in the Middlelander tongue. This made Kanna curious, so she followed suit and peeked around the wall as well.

Instead of just one figure, this time a small gathering had accumulated at the entrance of the cave. A group of women surrounded a small cart, forcefully maneuvering it through a patch of rocks and into the dark. Their pale robes made them look like ghosts in the moonlight, and the solid sound of that metallic clacking did not match their billowing presence at all.

A hand tightened at Kanna’s collar and jerked her back behind the wall.

“Hide,” Goda warned her. “Have some sense.”

“Who are they?”

As it usually happened, everyone seemed to ignore her, and instead Parama whispered, “Do you think they saw us?”

“Can’t be certain. The light was already dimming, and I turned it off before the rest of them came, but the first one was facing our direction. She looked like the head temple assistant.”

“Oh! Temple Assistant Finn? We’re safe, then, I think. If she had any inkling that it was us, she definitely would have come running in here to give me a slap by now. She never lets anything slide the second she sees it, trust me, but she’s pretty nearsighted from doing all the temple paperwork. Maybe she mistook us for another group of assistants.”

“Maybe.”

“What now? They can’t find out that I showed you this place, Porter Goda. It’s not open to the public, and to be honest I don’t think it ever will be after what we found in it a few days ago.”

The crunching squeak of rusted wheels echoed through the cavern again. A rush of footsteps came along with it.

“Sounds like they’re coming this way,” Goda said. She pushed Kanna flat against the wall. “Be still. Try to be invisible. They’re probably carrying a light.”

Kanna gave her a dumbfounded expression—because she certainly couldn’t just make herself disappear—but the woman didn’t seem to catch her look. At first, Kanna felt the urge to push back, but the sound of the wheels advancing in the void spooked her more, and she pressed herself hard against the stone as Goda had told her.

Where they all sat, the moonlight did not reach, but Kanna could see shadows advancing along the cave wall. The vague edges of those white robes came around the bend, and slowly—amidst a noise of great effort—the first of the caravan appeared before them. Nervously, Kanna slid further back, but the ghosts did not seem to notice her in the dark, and the tiny parade began passing along without so much as a pause.

One of them carried an electric lantern that bathed the path in an eerie glow, but the light didn’t spread very far. They walked two abreast, in consistent rhythm, all six of them with their hands pressed firmly on the sides of the cart. When one of the wheels hit another snag, the entire group of temple assistants jerked along with it. Some heavy piece of cargo—a metal canister—landed hard onto the ground.

It clunked and splashed and sent a spray of cold water against Kanna’s face. It rolled so close to her feet that she had to scramble back to avoid the pair of assistants who had rushed over to fetch it, but as she retreated further into the dark, she was overwhelmed by a burst of fumes.

It was not water.

As the smell of the harsh spill burned the inside of her nose, all she could do was turn around and bury her face hard into Goda’s chest to suppress her cough. She was met with a mouthful of the woman’s scent, which mixed with the air just enough to calm her reaction.

In all the commotion, the ghosts hadn’t heard her. With one side of her face still buried in Goda’s robes, she watched the temple assistants dragging the canister into the light, where they reunited it with the rest of the cargo and carried on.

They had left behind the smell of the strange water, which lingered for just a moment after they passed. In fact, what struck Kanna the most was that it was more than a smell: It was a bitter taste that filled the back of her mouth, a taste with an edge of familiarity that she could not place because as soon as she grasped for the memory, the dry fumes had begun to dissolve.

“What on earth was that?” she whispered, once she felt certain that the assistant women had gone far enough down a different tunnel of the cavern.

“What do you think it was?” Goda said, as if it were obvious. “You should already know.”

I don’t know anything, Kanna thought, although she was too proud to voice this. Goda had been right; she was completely ignorant, and every single turn of events seemed to show her yet something else that she had missed.

Goda peeked around the corner one last time. “There’s two of them at the entrance still, probably waiting for the others.” She took Kanna by the arm and pulled her to her feet, and Parama stood up along with them, as if he were also obeying some unspoken command.

“Do we wait here until they’re all gone, then?” he asked.

“No. We can’t risk being so close to the entrance when they come back around, especially since there are others who might wander in. If they switch to a brighter light, they could easily see us.”

“What do we do, then?”

Goda appeared to contemplate this. She turned to the main hall of the cavern, and then down the tunnel they had just ducked into. “Do you think they’ll come down this path?”

“Probably not. This is where the serpents lead, to a belly in the cavern. No one has any reason to come down this tunnel except for me and Priestess Rem. Even the assistants aren’t allowed there.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go.” Without turning on the lamp, Goda stepped into the pitch darkness, until all but her voice had fallen into shadows. “Hopefully, when it’s time to come back out, we won’t have those two patient midwives waiting for us.”

* * *

It wasn’t until they had rounded a corner, and even the little bit of light that had filtered in from the entrance disappeared, that Kanna realized she was afraid of the dark. She couldn’t so much as see her own hands in front of her face, so she followed the sounds of Goda’s leading footsteps entirely on faith.

Every tiny noise—every faraway drip, or even the vague echo of her own movement against the walls—put her on edge. She jumped a little when Parama began whispering again:

“Do you think it’s safe to turn on the light now? They probably can’t see it from here.” He sounded nervous.

“There’s not much juice left in it, but it can last if we keep it low.” Kanna heard Goda flip the switch. A soft halo of light rained over the ground, but it was so dim that they couldn’t see more than a few paces in either direction.

Kanna could barely make out the designs on the walls anymore. Instead, she reached out and felt the intricate indentations with her hands as they walked, surprised that the etchings continued so far into the cavern, on every surface. The deeper they went, the more faint the echoes of the ghost-women’s wheels became, until Kanna could no longer hear them at all—though, seemingly, Goda had not forgotten them so easily.

“Where were the assistants taking all of that cargo?” Goda asked without turning around.

“How am I supposed to know that? I’m just a silly temple hand, Porter Goda. Nobody ever tells me anything. I don’t even know what they were up to in here.”

“They were hoarding fuel, obviously. Where did they take it?”

“Fuel? My goodness! How dare you accuse us of that, Porter!” Parama smacked her arm, but she did not seem touched by either his outrage or his hand. “You know fuel is too impure for the temple to hoard so much of it, especially on sacred ground. What if a priestess were to touch one of the containers by mistake? Besides, do I need to remind you that there’s a shortage? It must have been something else, maybe blessed water. We should just get out of here as soon as they leave, don’t you think?”

“If you’re going to lie, then at least make up a good story. They even spilled one of the canisters. The smell was unmistakable.” Goda’s steps slowed a little, as if she were considering a different path, but she didn’t stop. “You know where they took it, don’t you?”

“Look,” Parama said with a sigh, “I didn’t expect them to be here tonight. You didn’t need to find out about this, and I’m sorry, but I’m definitely not telling a habitual thief where they store it so that you can go steal it.”

“Who said I was planning on stealing anything?”

“Who said that I thought you even had a plan, Porter Goda? You just walk around taking whatever you want like everything is already yours! It’s terrible.” Strangely enough, though, Parama was smiling at her. He adjusted his pace until he could press his shoulder against Goda’s side as they walked. “If you want to get technical, the fuel doesn’t belong to the temple, anyway. The temple can’t hoard fuel, like I said. It’s Innkeeper Jaya’s fuel, and she’s just letting us…borrow it.”

“Is that some kind of loophole in the rules?”

“What do you expect during a shortage? The generator that powers the well pump inside the temple needs to run somehow.”

Kanna stared ahead at the both of them. That smell, she thought. So the smell had been spilled fuel. Why had it seemed vaguely familiar to her then, even when the fumes had made her eyes water? She had never driven a truck before, and since the entire Rava family complex used a central generator that stood far from her mother’s house, she had never clearly understood what magic they used to make the electric lights turn on.

“So that’s what you were doing at Jaya’s house: buying favors for the temple.” Goda’s strange tone burst Kanna from her thoughts.

“Oh, don’t insult me, I’m not that cheap! That was…something else. She’s been in a bad mood ever since her wife got promoted to that fancy position in the capital. Quite prestigious for a foreigner, you know? I guess it makes her feel like the lesser wife by comparison.”

“So?”

“So, I went in to cheer her up with some of my cooking.” Parama shrugged. “Also, she’s kind of desperate to assert her status now, so she wants to hurry up and have the first child. I’ve been helping her with that lately, too.”

Kanna couldn’t see Goda’s face anymore, but she noticed a subtle shift in the way she held her shoulders. They seemed a bit stiffer. “I assumed as much, but she shouldn’t ask for those kinds of things from a slave.”

“Since when are you concerned with the law? Everyone breaks that rule, anyway. You’ve broken that rule yourself, haven’t you?”

It took Kanna a moment—but then it all connected. She stared at Parama with a horrified expression.

“Aren’t you a little too young to be a father?” Kanna blurted out before she could stop herself.

In truth, she was not sure how old this boy actually was. By Upperland standards, he was a man of normal size, but considering how huge the Middlelanders were, surely his growth had been stunted somehow. Perhaps he had been starved. At any rate, he did not seem fit to be a parent with the ditsy air about him, and with the way he leaned against Goda as if he were pretending to be too weak to stand on his own.

Parama laughed. He looked up at Goda with confusion. “What is she going on about?”

“In the Upperland, if you lie down with a woman and it results in a child,” Goda explained, “then you stick around after her baby is born and spend all your money to help raise it to adulthood. If that same woman has more children, then you have to do the same for those other children as well. I imagine it gets expensive if there are a lot of them, so it helps if you’re older and have some savings.”

“That’s not how it happens!” Kanna protested, though she wasn’t exactly sure how to correct her. What Goda had said was true on a certain level, but there was so much more to it, that Kanna didn’t know how to explain the misunderstanding.

“Oh, I see,” Parama said, ignoring Kanna’s interjection. “Well, what if there is more than one man who has been visiting the same woman? If she has a child, then how do they decide which man is supposed to spend his money on the baby? Or do they all just pool their resources? Now, that sounds more reasonable.”

“No! We actually—”

“Wait, in that case, wouldn’t the second mother just pick up the slack?” Parama continued over Kanna’s stuttering. “I can’t imagine Upperland children are so needy that they each need three parents.”

“You’re forgetting that Upperlanders only have one mother. They need the man to pretend that he’s the second mother, you see,” Goda told him. “I would think that if a woman is friends with more than one man, then they must just randomly decide. Maybe they take turns.”

Kanna opened her mouth in disbelief. “What? No, that’s completely wrong. We don’t even—”

“Ah, yes, that makes a lot more sense,” Parama said. He paused for a moment in thought. “Wait, if the man has to play the role of one of the mothers, then does that mean Upperlander men produce their own milk, or do they borrow it from the real mother?”

“Stop!” Kanna cried out. “For the love of God, now you’re just pulling things out of your imagination!”

Goda gave her a disapproving glance. “Stop getting so excited. Voices can carry far in these caves.”

“Then stop disrespecting my culture!”

“Disrespecting?” Parama asked, genuine bewilderment in his tone. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m a bit ignorant, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to fix. Porter Goda was just telling me all about it.”

“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you,” Kanna said with a huff. She noticed then that Parama was clinging onto Goda’s hand, and something about that bothered her even more—it seemed wrong—but she couldn’t understand why, so she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she explained, “Upperland men marry women, and then the women have children with their husbands.”

She really couldn’t fathom how this concept was so difficult. If anything, the family dynamic of her own culture was the simplest of all: One man marries one woman, and they have children—well, unless the man was rich like Kanna’s father, then he might collect a few wives and a few dozen children. Even with that added complication, it certainly made a lot more sense to her than women marrying other women only to run around with random men.

“Oh.” Parama scratched his chin in what seemed like deep thought. “Oh, yes, that makes everything clear.” The cavern became quiet for awhile as they trudged along, and Kanna thought it a little strange that the young man had been so easily satisfied with her short answer. Still, she was pleased with herself, until he glanced at her again and asked, “So what happens if a woman is already married? Does the man have to marry the woman’s wife, too?”

Kanna pressed her hands hard against her face and groaned. With gritted teeth, she whispered to Goda, “What does he even do around here?” Hopefully not anything too mentally demanding, she thought.

“You’re a scribe, aren’t you, Parama?”

Kanna tilted her head in mild confusion.

“I’m a translator,” he said, his smile widening. “They brought me in to translate some of the scripts in the ruins around here. There’s this obscure dialect of Southern Outerlander that I picked up a long time ago, and they needed it to decipher the more recent carvings, so I got lucky. Most male slaves get sent to the textile mills.”

“Ah, so the script in these caves can be deciphered,” Goda said. She brought the lantern a bit closer to the wall, and Kanna could see the etchings with some clarity again. The paint that had survived on them glowed in response to the light. “This shrine must be more recent than the ones in the open desert, then.”

“Yes. We can read the script…kind of. It’s still much older than any modern language, and to make things more complicated, it’s most closely related to an Outerlander dialect that doesn’t even have a written language anymore. Thankfully, there are plenty of drawings to help, and Head Priestess Rem is able to understand some of it, too. She’s quite a genius with that sort of thing, I must say!”

“Couldn’t they have just hired an Outerlander to translate it?” Kanna asked.

Goda huffed. “Most foreigners—Outerlanders and Upperlanders alike—can’t read and write, and they certainly don’t know the Middlelander tongue well enough to be able to translate to it. Educated foreigners like Jaya’s wife are a rarity.”

Kanna narrowed her eyes. “We learn how to read in the Upperland.”

“You learned how to read in the Upperland—but most Upperlanders are illiterate. I’ve never met an Upperlander besides you who can make sense of any written language, let alone one who can speak Middlelander conversationally. Did you really have no idea what was going on in your own lands?”

Newly offended, Kanna didn’t know what to say at first. After a few false starts, she finally spat, “Oh, and you understand what’s going on somehow, Porter? That’s a ridiculous thing to say when your kind doesn’t even know the first thing about us! All you’ve ever done is invade and encroach. You have no right to judge us.”

“It’s not a judgment. Your people are oppressed and starving. We may be invaders—I won’t deny that—but at least now with the Middleland taking over your government, the average Upperlander will have a chance of attaining an education and basic sustenance.”

“Keep it. We don’t need your Middlelander language, or your education, or your sustenance.”

Goda smirked. “That’s easy to say for someone who has enjoyed the privilege of all three.” Again, her tone was frustratingly neutral, as it usually was, with no trace of accusation.

Kanna said nothing, too angry to reply, and too fearful of the darkness to turn around and start walking in the opposite direction. Still, she crossed her arms and remained rebellious: As they advanced, Goda and Parama’s crunching footfalls fell into sync, but Kanna kept her feet pounding stubbornly off-rhythm.

In a short while, they reached a dead end: a small, round chamber where the geometric scripts and the serpentine ribbons had followed them. All of that chaos along the walls reached a climax in the room, the etchings growing more elaborate and surging into the floor beneath them in explosive spirals of color.

Goda dropped the lantern at the center of the space. Its waning light shined a dim perimeter around them, but what caught Kanna’s eye was the spot directly on the ground where the lamp had fallen. It was a circle drawn in the stone, bright like the yellow of the afternoon sun, with tones of blood-red nectar mixed in. Along the edges of the circle, long white petals flowed out in eight directions, each touching the boundaries of the walls, overwhelming the serpents that seemed to twist beneath them.

She felt that she should be perplexed by what she saw, but something deep inside of her knew, even though she had never laid eyes on it before.

“Death Flower.”

“Yes,” Goda said. She was looking down at the mural intently, as if she too was surprised to see it. She turned to Parama, who had wandered near one of the walls. “I can see now why you were told not to show this place to anyone.”

“It was Priestess Rem and I who first discovered this. Imagine our shock to see a Samma Flower painted on the floor of an early Maharan site. This brings the Goddess’s will into question, doesn’t it?”

Kanna turned to Parama with confusion. “Samma Flower?”

“Death Flower,” Goda answered for him. “‘Samma Flower’ is its actual name.”

“Yes, it’s named after Samma Valley,” Parama explained, “the only place in the Middleland where it grows, although it’s been nearly eradicated now. It also grows in the Lowerland, but…well, no one goes there.” He gazed down at the flower with a complicated expression. “I remember when I was young, no one ever called it ‘Death Flower.’ It was only once we started having problems with people smuggling them into the country and using them for ritual suicide that this sort of propaganda stuff spread around.”

“Suicide?”

Parama lowered himself to the floor, just at the edge of the flower, but he seemed cautious not to kneel upon the image itself–out of reverence or fearful superstition, Kanna did not know. “There’s a death cult that uses it,” he said. “Some kind of mystery religion popped up in recent years, here in the Outerland, and somehow people are bribing savages to bring them Flower from across the Southern border. No one knows how they do it, but the government has really been cracking down lately.”

Kanna felt an uncomfortable twinge in her spine, a fullness in her throat. “Why would someone want to kill themselves?” she found herself helplessly asking for the second time that day–and once again, she repressed the faint memory of her own morbid desires.

“I wouldn’t know, but it’s against the law in the Middleland. It’s against our religion, too. Killing yourself is high blasphemy to the Goddess—worse than touching the bare skin of a priestess, worse than stealing temple property, even worse than possessing Samma Flower. Nothing will send you to hell faster, except maybe doing something crazy like attacking a clergy member.”

Adding nothing, Goda had wandered away, towards one of the walls. Perhaps it was the shadows playing against her face, but her expression looked a bit darker, and her stare had grown blank.

“I can hear them,” she said.

At first, Kanna didn’t know what Goda had meant, but once she quieted her thoughts, she felt the subtle vibrations along the walls: It was the sound of a rolling cart. If she concentrated, she could even hear the temple assistants’ footfalls growing louder, but before she had the chance to grow too anxious, she also noticed Goda’s lack of urgency. The woman sat on the ground with her back pressed to the freezing stone, her expression more bored than anything else.

“We’ll wait until we hear them rolling in the direction of the exit,” Goda said, “and then we’ll give them a half hour to make sure the coast is clear. That should be enough.”

Kanna let loose a sigh of both relief and irritation. She muttered, “Why does the temple even need assistants?” It wasn’t so much a real question as a complaint, though Goda answered anyway:

“You’ve seen for yourself that there are rules the priestesses must follow. They can’t touch certain kinds of objects—like anything that can make a person drunk—and they can’t have skin-to-skin contact with any non-priestesses. This limits the kind of work they can do, so their assistants must do it for them.”

“I hardly think truck fuel will make them drunk,” Kanna said, remembering the noxious fluid that the assistants had nearly spilled on her. “No one in their right mind would drink something like that, I hope, even if you people have the weirdest rituals.”

She plopped herself down on the ground a few paces from Goda—but not too close. Parama seemed to have no such reservations, sliding along the floor until he could lay his head heavily on the huge woman’s shoulder, grasping her hand once again, relaxing into the folds of her outer robes and pulling them around him like a half-cocoon.

Kanna winced. Once again, the scene before her seemed…wrong. There was something about Parama’s posture, about the way he had thrown himself on Goda—as if he were aching to be picked up—that she instantly disliked. It was unbecoming, she thought, unmasculine.

“If they can’t touch anyone, what do the priestesses even do here, then?” Kanna asked, trying not to look at them. “When I was getting inspected, the assistant prodded me left and right, but that head priestess just lurked over her shoulder and watched. Is that all she does? Just stand there while other people work?”

“Well, of course not,” Parama answered. “Head Priestess Rem can’t get too close to the visitors, but she still does most of the clerical and translation work here. She’s very educated in ancient languages, you see, since it’s a specialty at the monastery she grew up in. In fact, that’s why they placed her here a few months ago when she was up for promotion, after Head Priestess Akkaya…disappeared.”

“A disappearance?” Kanna had heard rumors of this before. “Was she taken by savages?”

“Nobody knows. She was visiting a temple near the Southern border last year, and then one cloudy morning she went to go meditate in the woods, from what they told me. When the mist cleared in the afternoon, no one could find her. It was the strangest thing. They looked everywhere, too–for months and months, but there was no trace. And…well, they had to give that up eventually. They sent Priestess Rem to fill her spot this year.” He sighed wistfully. “I get along with my new master all right, but I do miss Priestess Akkaya. She was a lot older and gentler, and she had been here for a long time, so everyone liked her. She was a lot less overbearing than Priestess Rem, too, I have to say.” Parama glanced at Goda. “Ah, that’s right, you haven’t come here in more than half a year. You haven’t met the new priestess yet, have you? She transferred from Samma Valley Monastery, that temple complex in the ancient settlements, west of the capital.”

“I had heard.”

“Samma Valley?” Kanna asked. “Where the flower comes from?”

“That’s right. Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?” He paused in thought again, scratching his chin. “Actually, Porter Goda, didn’t you tell me once that you used to work at that same monastery? Now there’s the real coincidence!”

Goda was staring blankly at the opposite wall, even as Parama was trying to catch her gaze insistently.

“It was a long time ago.”

“So then maybe you do know Priestess Rem, after all.”

“Maybe I do.” But her tone was flat and her expression offered no trace of recognition.

Kanna felt awkward. If Parama had wandered near some kind of minefield, she couldn’t completely tell, but the air had changed all of a sudden. It was also the first time she had heard any personal information about this Goda woman.

“You used to be a porter at a monastery?” Kanna asked, trying to fill in the painful silence.

“No, you had a different job back then, right, Porter Goda?” Parama replied, because Goda had not answered. “What was it that you were involved in? Farming or something like that?”

“Horticulture.”

“Right, right. Because both your mothers did the same, you told me.”

“My higher mother was a botanist and my lower mother was a gardener, so when I went to work at the monastery, that’s where they placed me.”

Parama smiled and laid his head back down, this time against Goda’s chest. The corpse of the dead snake—the one that was still draped around Goda’s shoulders—dangled near his face. For a split second, Kanna had a strange mental image of the thing coming back to life and lashing out at him.

“You act so stiff when we talk about the past. I feel like I don’t know anything about you, even after three years.”

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

“Oh, come on now, you stingy brute,” Parama said, his soft voice growing more cajoling, “don’t you think I deserve to know about the past after putting up with you in the present? Besides, you already know everything about me. How is that fair?”

Kanna stared at them, not quite sure of the undertone that she had detected in Parama’s words or what it might have suggested. It was then that she realized that she had been sliding progressively closer to them without being entirely conscious of it. It must be because it’s cold in here, she thought. Her arm was brushing against Goda’s robe, and she looked over at Parama who was joining her in flanking the woman’s other side.

Kanna hesitated, then finally asked the obvious question: “Is this scribe your lover or something?”

Goda turned to her slowly. To Kanna’s surprise, a strange little smirk had come over the woman’s face, but in her eyes there was an edge of confusion, too. “You Upperlanders and your romantic notions,” she said dismissively—but she said nothing else after that.

* * *

When the caverns had fallen into complete silence, and they had waited in the belly for what felt like too long to Kanna, Goda finally gave them the signal to get up. By the time she picked up the lantern again, the filament had become a dull spot of light, and it did little to illuminate their way back out of the tunnel. Kanna could only make out the vague outline of the Samma Flower on the ground as they passed.

Kanna stayed close to Goda as they advanced through the hollows of the caverns, traveling directly in the wake of her flowing robes. She was irritated to find that Parama walked beside her, clinging to the back of Goda’s sleeve, smiling lightly at Kanna with too much trust—but again Kanna made no comment.

Once they emerged into the main path, which was touched by the moonlight, Kanna let out a sigh of relief because the assistants were indeed gone. She wasn’t sure what would have happened if the three of them had been caught, or even what kind of punishment she would have faced, but something about the prospect of seeing those ghostly pale rags unnerved her more than any months added to her sentence.

Goda had turned out the light after they had left the cavern, but even without its dim shine, Kanna could see everything in the moonlight as they made their way down the crag. In particular, she could see that a woman was waiting for them when they reached the bottom.

Kanna’s stomach dropped.

The stranger’s robes were jet black instead of white, which served to soothe her nerves at first, but then she recognized the face quickly after. She didn’t know why she felt such a surge of irrational panic, considering that she barely knew the woman. It may have been because of the way both Goda and the boy stiffened beside her.

“Parama,” the woman in black said, smiling pleasantly, “how is it that you’ve escaped me, only to fall into the hands of Goda Brahm?”

---

Onto Chapter 6 >>

“Don’t look back at the innkeeper’s door,” Goda said.

They were walking across the side of the yard, a space that was littered with empty pots and flower boxes filled with shriveled weeds. A fence made of dry wood encircled the garden, but it was tipped over in places and seemed to no longer serve any purpose. Some furniture was strewn about, fallen from the wind. Most of it was half-buried in the sand from what must have been months of disuse.

Kanna couldn’t fathom that they were sauntering around the grounds of what was supposed to be an inn. She had heard that the Outerland region was poor, but she had never imaged such squalor could be offered to members of the public.

Upon hearing some muffled voices coming from the cabin, Kanna tried glancing towards the entrance once again, but Goda wasted no time grasping the back of her head to stop her.

“I said don’t look. Give the woman time to rid herself of her visitor. We’re pretending we haven’t seen anything.”

Throwing Goda an annoyed glance, Kanna wriggled her head free. “What on earth are you talking about? Sometimes I wonder if you’re coming up with these random demands just to see if I’ll obey them.”

“You don’t know this culture, Rava. You can’t see the big picture yet, so you’ll have to trust what I say. If you cause the innkeeper to lose face, then she’ll be even more uncooperative, and we don’t have much of a budget to spare for different accommodations.”

“You’re telling me this? Isn’t it you who has already insulted her?” Kanna kept her eyes on Goda, but as she heard more commotion behind her and the sound of an unlatching door, she was tempted to look again.

“She knows me. I’m already aware of all the rules she breaks and I’m discreet about it, but if someone else were to see—especially an ignorant foreigner—she would worry that they would tell the priestesses.”

“Tell them what?”

Goda didn’t answer. Instead, she pressed against the small of Kanna’s back to hurry her along as they rounded the corner to the back of the house—but before the front yard was out of view, Kanna snapped her head back with the intention to disobey.

She caught a quick flash of a figure running across the sands—a delicate figure, unlike any Middlelander she had seen before. The person’s frame was small like Kanna’s own, draped in multicolored robes, and the stranger bounced with a dainty quickness that tousled the messy waves of their short hair.

Another foreigner? Kanna guessed, but she could not get a better look before Goda grasped her by her collar and sharply dragged her behind the cabin.

Kanna nearly fell over. The bucket that she was carrying slipped from her hands, spilling water across both their feet, splashing newly-formed mud onto Kanna’s ankles.

As soon as Kanna regained her footing, she shot a furious glance up at Goda. Out of some unconscious impulse, she thrust her hands out and smacked her palms hard against Goda’s chest—to push her back, to force her away—but the woman barely shuffled from the blow. It was as if Kanna had rammed with all her strength against a boulder.

“What the hell are you doing?” Goda asked.

“You can’t just yank me around, Porter!”

Kanna gnashed her teeth, and when she launched herself forward to push against Goda once more, Goda caught both her hands. The woman clenched her fingers tightly around Kanna’s wrists, and she held them steady even as Kanna tried to wrench them away. The lack of effort that it seemed to take only infuriated Kanna even more.

“Fight me, at least!” Kanna shouted up at her, trying to strike her fists against the trunk in front of her, but finding that it was futile. “Don’t just stand there like you’re a goddamn rock!”

Goda pulled Kanna up sharply by the wrists. Face to face, their breaths mingling together in the cool air, Kanna had to stretch up onto her toes just to avoid the pain of a dead hang. Goda loomed over her, eyes wide, mouth tight.

“That is what I am: a rock,” Goda muttered, so low and calm that Kanna could barely hear it over the whistle of the breeze around them. “I’m just a heavy rock that you have been tied to. Do you scream at a rock? Do you blame a rock? Do you fight a rock? Act like you have some sense and don’t waste your life resisting me. Accept your fate and you’ll at least be able to change it going forward.”

Before the tension in Kanna’s body had fully died, Goda let her go. Kanna dropped down into the sand and fell to her knees. She grasped at Goda’s robes in order to steady herself, but the fabric slipped from her fingers when Goda turned towards a steel door a few steps away and began fiddling with the lock as if nothing had happened. Seeing no other choice, Kanna rose up from the wet earth, brushing the grit from her clothes, listening instead to the silence.

“That person you saw,” Goda said as she finished breaking open the lock, “he’s a slave.”

She turned the handle and pushed her way into the shed. A gust of dusty storage room air rushed out against them, but Goda walked into it with no hesitation. It was dark. Kanna couldn’t make out every object in the room with complete clarity, but she could see that the place was lined end-to-end with wooden shelves and that there wasn’t much room as they both squeezed inside. Even still, Goda managed to crouch down to take off her shoes before pulling a match from one of her pockets. She used it to light a half-spent candle in a holder bolted near the door, beside a tiny glass window on the wall.

She closed the door. They were alone.

To distract herself from the sudden awkward feeling, Kanna peered down the rows of shelves crammed with boxes and avoided Goda’s gaze. “The innkeeper has a slave?” she asked, if only to break the silence. She had not yet met anyone in her same situation.

“No.” Goda plucked the candle from its holder and held it out, closer to a rack that had seemed to catch her interest. “Civilians ordinarily cannot keep slaves, and certainly not a low-class innkeeper like Jaya. The man you saw works at the monastery. He belongs to the head of the temple, which is currently Priestess Rem, the woman who took our money and gave you your new clothes.”

Kanna tilted her head. She tried to make out Goda’s face in the dark, but through the shadows, all she could see was the straight line of her tensed mouth. “Then why was he in her house?”

“Why, indeed.” The light wavered with Goda’s movements and painted her face with wild flickers. It was only then, seeing the edge of contempt that had come over her expression, that Kanna realized Goda was irritated. Nonetheless, the woman said nothing else and pushed past her to rummage through the contents of a box on a nearby shelf.

“Do you know him?” Kanna asked, inching towards her with curiosity.

“I’ve known him for a few years, yes. I see him when I come by here. Sometimes Jaya asks him to help her with chores, but I’ve never caught her alone with him in her cabin until now.” Seemingly unsatisfied with what she found in the box, Goda moved onto another right beside it. “This is why male slaves are normally segregated from women.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you probably don’t. Hold this.”

She offered Kanna the candle, and Kanna took the stick gingerly between two fingers, avoiding the hot wax that had started to dribble down the sides.

“Were they doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing?”

“Probably,” Goda said—but again, she didn’t elaborate.

Kanna could take a guess. She wasn’t entirely sure what the local stance was on adultery, but from what she had heard, Middlelanders took their marriages rather seriously because divorce was uncommon and there was no polygamy as far as she knew.

Either way, she couldn’t imagine that the person she had seen running off into the plain would be fraternizing with a middle-aged married woman, considering his apparent youth. He had been around Kanna’s size, and she figured that if Middlelander women were so tall, then a fully-grown man would have surely been gigantic. Perhaps he had been a foreigner after all, as she had first assumed.

It was only then that it struck her that she hadn’t actually seen a male Middlelander before. Whether it was simply a coincidence or a deliberate feature of the culture she wasn’t sure, but even the soldiers who had arrested her and the guards who had watched over her had all been women. She tried to think back to her childhood, to the bureaucrats who would visit her father or to the tutors who had come to teach her the Middlelander tongue, but she realized that they had all been women as well.

No, that couldn’t have been a coincidence, she decided.

“Why have I never seen one of your men before?” Kanna ventured to ask. “All of the Middlelanders I’ve met have only ever been women. Even at the confinement center where they held me for two weeks, every investigator who came to interrogate me was a woman, too.”

Goda looked over at her with a crooked smirk. “You expect them to leave you alone with a man?”

“Would that really be a problem? I can take care of myself.” It hadn’t occurred to her that Middlelander men might have been especially untrustworthy. She had found that the women were aggressive, so perhaps the men were beasts themselves, but she still thought that the degree of segregation was ridiculous. The fact that she had never even seen a Middlelander man, now that she thought about it, seemed increasingly strange, considering how far the culture had spread across the continent just over the course of her lifetime.

But Goda’s expression didn’t change. She was either unconvinced, or she had meant something else entirely. “You’re a criminal,” Goda said, crouching down towards a large box on a lower shelf. “It would be dangerous to leave you alone with a man. What if you took advantage of him?”

“Hah?”

In that moment, an edge of wax slithered hotly down the back of Kanna’s finger and sent a trail burning across her skin. She cried out in surprise and let go of the candlestick on reflex.

The spark went out.

In the thin light that filtered from the dusty window behind them, she could see the outline of Goda’s hand grasping the candle and storing it somewhere out of sight. “Pay better attention,” she said to Kanna. “You’ve just arrived in a world that you don’t understand.”

Kanna tried to peer at her through the dark. She wasn’t sure what Goda had meant, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with candle wax. Moments later, she heard the box jostling, and then a rustle of fabric.

When Goda relit the candle, they were both standing over a pair of sleeping mats that had been unrolled onto the floor. There was barely a hair of space between the two beds and they took up the majority of the narrow aisle, so Goda had to step all over them as she made her way out.

She slipped past Kanna and over to the next row of shelves.

“You really have slept in this dirty shack before,” Kanna said with a wry look. “You knew right where to find those.”

“I have slept here many times, yes, but that’s not what I was looking for. I usually sleep directly on the ground, but since they’re here, we might as well make use of them.”

Kanna stared after her, watching as Goda craned her neck and glanced into every aisle in turn.

“You usually sleep…on the ground?” Kanna pressed her hand to her face and let out a loud breath. “All right, I really don’t understand this. You work for the government—the Middleland government—a wealthy country that has taken over every single block of usable land in some way or another, with the exception of the savage-infested Lowerland perhaps. You can’t tell me that they can’t spare the resources to give us better accommodations. I won’t believe you.”

“Believe it. Most of our money went to the priestesses for the cleansing, and I don’t get paid again until I’ve delivered you to your new master.”

“Nonsense. Certainly they’ve given you some kind of budget. You’re simply being a miser and hoarding it for whatever reason. Otherwise, on such a slim allowance, how would they expect you to drive me halfway across the continent?”

“They don’t,” Goda said.

Kanna blinked.

Goda ignored her confusion and continued to pace through the aisles, hovering over the rows of boxes, growing further away.

At first, Kanna didn’t know how to address such a nonsensical response, but it was true that half of everything that came out of Goda’s mouth made absolutely no sense, so she thought that she’d had better get used to asking lots of stupid questions.

“What do you mean they don’t expect you to deliver me?” Kanna tried, though she knew that this couldn’t have possibly been what Goda had meant.

“I mean exactly that.”

Kanna gazed at the woman in silence, but Goda seemed unperturbed by this and continued rummaging as she had before.

“If they don’t expect you to deliver me to a master, then what on Earth is the point of all of this?” Kanna said, raising her voice. “They must want something from me if they hired some brute to drag me around and waste my time, don’t you think?”

Finally, Goda acknowledged her—though Kanna quickly regretted it. The woman’s face was still cast in shadow, but it was close enough to the flame that Kanna could see her black eyes delivering an unnerving stare.

“It still hasn’t dawned on you, Rava,” she said. Something about her tone made Kanna recoil. “They don’t care if I deliver you successfully. They don’t care even if you live or die, or if I beat you while I drag you through the desert, or if I force myself on you at night. They don’t care. Your new master is the head of a government-owned motor factory, and she doesn’t care, either. You’re just a pair of hands to pull the levers. They arrested you to comply with the law and to keep you from your inheritance. Other than that, you’re a useless foreigner, a low-level criminal. That’s why you’re being taken across the continent by a low-ranking porter who can only afford to sleep in dirt.”

Kanna shuffled back on reflex, and her shoulders crashed into one of the shelves. She felt it teetering behind her, the contents rattling, but after a moment that stretched on far too long, it managed to stabilize.

She gritted her teeth. “You speak a lot of garbage, Porter. Wasn’t it you who told me that they pay you so much that I could never afford to bribe you?”

“They do. They pay me something that you could never hope to equal—but I didn’t say that it was money.”

Goda turned away and began searching through the shelves again, as if she had decided that the conversation was done, but even then Kanna wasn’t satisfied at all.

“Stop!” Kanna cried out. “Stop that for just a second and tell me what on Earth is going on!” When Goda ignored her, Kanna shuffled down the length of the rows until she had reached one aisle short of the woman. She didn’t have the courage to go further. Something about standing too closely to Goda still unnerved her and made her feel a strange emptiness inside. “What could you possibly be looking for anyway?”

Unexpectedly, Goda answered, “Fuel.”

Some of Kanna’s tension deflated with the abrupt reply. “There’s fuel in a place like this?”

“Yes, the innkeeper sometimes keeps fuel here, and sometimes I steal it from her.”

“She lends you fuel?”

“No. I steal it. Did you not hear me?”

Kanna made a face of disbelief. She wasn’t sure why she bothered to feel indignant about everything Goda said and did, when the woman clearly had no conscience.

Instead of complaining, Kanna shrugged. “The words for ‘steal’ and ‘borrow’ are the same in the Upperlander tongue, so sometimes I confuse the two in Middlelander,” she explained.

This time, it was Goda who looked perplexed. A strange smirk had come over her face. “Then how do you know when someone has stolen something or when they’ve borrowed it?”

“I don’t know. Context, I think. I always seem to be able to tell the difference in my native tongue.”

“Is that because you’re the one who is always stealing and borrowing, so you always know which is which?” The smirk had grown.

“You really shouldn’t accuse me of that when you’ve just confessed to me that you steal from your friend.”

“It’s nothing personal. To be honest, in a different world, I wouldn’t steal from her at all,” Goda said, pulling one of the boxes from the shelf and dropping it onto the floor with a thud, “but we live in this world, and I have a job to do.”

“Fine, fine. Don’t let something like integrity get in the way of your job,” Kanna huffed.

Goda looked up at her suddenly. “If you were lost in the desert with your best friend, hungry and fighting for survival because society had brushed you aside, and even the Goddess had abandoned you, what would you do?”

“I don’t know. Starve?”

“No,” Goda told her. “You would eat your friend. I promise.”

There was another strange silence after that, a pause that Kanna didn’t know how to fill. Goda took the moment to crouch down and pull a pair of lanterns from the box. She held one of them up to the light and pressed her thumb against a switch on the side.

A spark blinked to life. The filament gave off a warm, violet-tinted shine that made Kanna squint her eyes.

“Electric lanterns,” Goda said, smiling. “Batteries are expensive and scarce, so we’ll probably only be able to use them for a few hours, but they’ll be helpful if we need to walk around during the night. We might even take them with us when we leave, if the innkeeper doesn’t notice.”

With the lanterns in one hand and the candle in the other, she pushed past Kanna and made her way back to their sleeping mats. She dropped their loot nearby on the floor.

“I’d rather not be an accomplice to such trifling crimes,” Kanna complained. “You may not have any integrity, but I do.” Still, she followed Goda past their beds and towards the exit. She made no move to put the items back herself.

Goda pulled the door open, and the brilliant white light of the sun struck Kanna directly in the face. Even the shadow of Goda’s tall frame did nothing to lessen the blow, so Kanna shielded her eyes from it with her arm—but Goda stared straight ahead, as if she were used to gazing into it nakedly.

“It’s easy to have values and morals,” Goda said without turning around, “when your integrity has never been tested.”

They shuffled out into the sand. Kanna could see then, after her eyes had adjusted, that the sun was hovering much closer to the horizon than she had remembered.

Goda pointed across the plain, towards her truck in the distance. “Let’s get the rest of our supplies and settle in. Evening comes on faster than you’d expect this time of year, and soon it will be time to meet with the priestesses.”

Kanna followed Goda out into the open sands, but as they walked, she scanned the temple complex near the cliffs. She noticed the towers that had overwhelmed her before, and this time she found that they looked squat and unassuming in the distance. From where she stood, Goda loomed much higher.

* * *

Once the light began to wane less than an hour later, they headed out towards those towers again, and they met with the women in black at the threshold. As before, Goda knelt down in front of them, but she would not follow Kanna into the temple grounds.

“Don’t touch any of the priestesses,” Goda had reminded her as she had passed, but otherwise the porter had offered no instructions.

Kanna sat on the stone floor while one of the women in white—who was merely a temple assistant, she had now been told—crouched before her and examined her face. The woman tilted Kanna’s head to and fro, and Kanna bit her tongue and tried not to be offended at all the scrutiny. She took Kanna by the wrists, looked at her palms, prodded her arms in places that appeared random to Kanna’s eyes.

Before long, the assistant looked up towards the head priestess who had been observing over her shoulder. “I see no signs of Death.”

“None yet,” Priestess Rem agreed. She caught Kanna’s glance and smiled, though it was clear that the priestess had actually been staring at Goda at first—and that the porter had quietly fixed her gaze on the stone of the threshold, as if she were meditating about some distant place.

When they allowed Kanna to leave, she stepped back through the gate to find that Goda had pulled one of the electric lanterns out from under her robes. The glow of the lamp cast down brightly on the desert floor with the color of a sunset, and it was then that Kanna noticed how much the sky had dimmed. Across from her in the distance, the heavens were a weak pink, but when she glanced behind her, the cliffs were already disappearing into shadow.

Pebbles crunched with heavy footfalls. Goda headed off into the sands without a word, so Kanna quickly shuffled after her, ever mindful of the cuff’s silent threat.

“Do we have to keep seeing these people?” Kanna complained, still irritated from all the probing.

“Yes, every evening until your three nights of quarantine are over.”

“Why do they even care if I’ve eaten Death Flower? As long as I’m not smuggling any into the Middleland, what difference does it make?”

“That’s exactly how people smuggle it in,” Goda said. “They eat massive amounts of it and then they excrete it on the other side of the border.”

“They excrete it?” She wasn’t sure what that meant in a practical sense, and she couldn’t fathom how anyone could swallow large quantities of Death and survive, when she had heard that even eating a few petals of the flower was tempting fate.

Distracted with her morbid thoughts, Kanna did not notice at first that Goda had stopped for someone, and she nearly collided with a person who was heading in their opposite direction. Unconsciously, she stumbled around to avoid them, but because the stranger was politely offering the same dance with their own scraping sandals, both of them merely shuffled in place.

“Excuse me, uh…,” Kanna began to say, but when she caught sight of the androgynous face and the faint smile, she could not summon a title to call them with.

But she recognized the robes. They were made of the exact same spirals of color she had spied on the person running out of the innkeeper’s house, even if their brilliance was dampened by the dark. Goda’s light reflected in the young man’s eyes—and then Kanna watched those eyes widen with their own realization.

He bolted away, but Goda was quicker. She slid into his path and caught him by the arm, and once she had pulled him to her, he didn’t struggle. She hunched down until her face was close to his, their eyes meeting directly, their postures tense, frozen in mid-motion.

“Why were you in her house?” Goda asked. Her voice was low, but Kanna could still hear her.

“I was polishing the silverware.”

“You were polishing something. Did she threaten you?”

“No,” he said after a pause. “I came inside willingly.”

And then Goda let him go. There was a look on her face that Kanna didn’t fully understand, but she could sense a tint of relief in it.

“You get scarier every time I see you, Porter Goda,” he said with a tiny smirk that did not match his words. “All that time in the wilderness has turned you into a monster.”

“Thanks.”

Kanna stared at the both of them, baffled. Still, as she watched them watching each other intently, it occurred to Kanna that the young man had echoed her own private sentiment. Something about the woman kept Kanna on edge, and she felt like she was constantly on the verge of giving into her instinct and taking off running in the opposite direction.

Most of all, she hated Goda’s face. She hated the blank, insolent stare, the eyes that seemed open and empty like that of an animal.

“Where is this one from?” the boy asked suddenly, breaking Kanna out of her daze once again. He had fixed his glance on Kanna and was smiling pleasantly with curiosity.

“From the North-Western corner of the continent. Her family owned almost all the fertile grain fields in the Upperland, and all of the distilleries. She’s a member of the Rava group.”

“I see, I see. So this is one of the ruthless fuel barons, huh?” He tilted his head, craning his neck to seemingly get a better look at her. “They are an…interesting-looking bunch, aren’t they? Her skin is so pale. And what an odd shape her face has. Quite exotic!”

“Should you really be talking to a stranger in that manner?” Kanna asked him, immediately offended. “And I don’t know what fuel barons you’re talking about. You must have me mistaken for someone else. My family sold wine and spirits to the world. That is all we did.”

The young man turned to Goda with a touch of confusion, and his smile began to fade. “Is it typical to deny one’s crimes in Upperlander culture? Should I just play along with her, then?” He looked at Kanna with genuine concern. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to be impolite. I can lie to you instead, if you’d prefer.”

Kanna’s eyes widened with a jolt of fury. “I’m not denying anything!” she shouted. “What is wrong with you people?”

“Oh my, she’s angry. Maybe we should start again: It’s nice to meet you. I’m Parama Shakka, a slave just like you.”

After he said that, Kanna felt no choice but to hold back her ire. A slave like me, she thought.

“Well, I’ve embarrassed myself enough, I suppose,” he said to Goda. “I really should get going to the temple.”

“You’re heading into the temple at this hour? Isn’t the work day over?”

“Sure, but I have some translations for Priestess Rem that I’ve been working on and she asked me to deliver them after nightfall. All week, we’ve been poring over the text we extracted from the cavern walls, and she’s been staying up all night studying them.” He gestured towards the expanse just East of the temple complex, and though it was too vague for Kanna to tell exactly where he was pointing, she could see some cliffs barely visible in the evening twilight, just beyond the hill that she had climbed with Goda that morning. “Wait, that’s right! You don’t know what we’ve found in there yet, do you, Porter Goda?” He grabbed a handful of Goda’s robe sleeve. “Please let me take you up to the caverns to see the serpents! They look even more brilliant at night!”

“Serpents?” Goda asked, looking as equally confused as Kanna for once. “I’m not sure what you mean, but if we can catch them and cook them up, then I won’t have to argue with Jaya about dinner.”

Kanna gaped at Goda with horror, but before she could object, the young man waved his free hand as if to dismiss the notion.

“No, no!” he said, tugging at Goda’s robes playfully, seemingly having forgotten all about his delivery. “They’re not actual serpents. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll see what I mean when we get there. I told myself I would show you as soon as I had the chance. Please come!”

“I can’t play right now,” Goda said, holding as steady as she always did, though a little smirk had shown up on her face. “I have a prisoner with me.”

“You can just bring her along. I’m sure she’s never seen something like this!” He was gazing at Goda with soft expectation, with passivity, with his eyelashes practically fluttering.

Kanna found it extremely uncomfortable to watch. He was clearly too grown for such antics—his voice well broken, his proportions mature—yet he seemed to not mind how weak it made him look to hang on Goda’s robes with that coy little smile.

To Kanna’s surprise, Goda was not bothered. In fact, his theatrics seemed to amuse her and she conceded with a sigh, “Fine, fine. But this had better not be the kind of serpent you tried to show me last time.”

At that he scoffed, smacking her arm. “As if you deserve a second chance with me after acting so indifferent!” Still, his smile grew wider as the giant in his grasp had finally budged.

Kanna made a face at them both. “What are you people talking about?”

But before Kanna could make any sense of it, the silhouette of a looming monster—being led by a pixie yanking her sleeve—floated into the desertscape, into the darkness.

* * *

As it turned out, Goda did find an actual snake on the way to the caverns. Both she and Parama chased it a few paces off their path, but quickly enough Goda dove down and seized it by the tail, then she swung it over her head and beat its face against a nearby boulder. Parama finished it off by stomping on it with his sandal-clad feet.

Once the snake was very dead, Goda draped its body over her shoulders like a limp scarf and kept walking as if nothing had happened. Kanna had no time to react. Instead, she followed along when they rejoined her, her expression frozen in stunned confusion. She felt like she had just witnessed a murder.

In time, they reached a crag that was not unlike the small cliffs that the monastery was built on. It was higher up than the one Kanna had climbed the night before to get to their shelter, but it had a gradual walking path—thankfully, Kanna thought—that seemed to twist all the way up to an entrance in the stone.

Goda’s light shined a small halo of clarity as they moved up the trail. This was how Kanna kept her bearings, though the light would flicker sometimes and it seemed a bit less bright than it had before. She worried that the batteries were already running low, and because the details on the ground escaped her, she tripped several times—but Goda somehow knew to pause whenever it happened, to allow Kanna to run into the back of her robes and catch herself.

Parama brought them to the mouth of a pitch-black cavern on a ledge. Kanna could barely see a few paces inside because the light didn’t reach, but when she groaned with exhaustion from the climb, the sound took longer than she expected to echo back.

Kanna raised an eyebrow. “How deep does this thing go?”

She could see the outline of Parama’s face as an edge of Goda’s light hit his cheek. “Deeper than anyone thinks it does,” he said. He was grinning with pride.

They entered in a single file with Parama leading—and somehow knowing his way through the dark—while Goda trudged behind him holding the light, and Kanna, who was most hesitant of all, straggled a few paces after.

With only a spot of light to guide them, they walked deeper into the unknown, the entrance growing smaller behind them. Crunching footfalls melded together, every step fusing with the next, until all Kanna could hear were a series of smeared echoes that disoriented her. Every sound seemed to bounce back from forever away. It made her head pulse with a strange discomfort.

Goda turned the dial on the light until it brightened so much that the glare made Kanna flinch, then the woman lifted it up high over her head.

The ceiling erupted in color. Out of nowhere, dancing neon spirals of bright blue and pink and orange rushed along the walls. The ribbons spread until they coated the entire arch of the cavern, and though Kanna knew it was impossible, to her eyes it seemed like they had not been revealed by the light, but had rather been birthed out of the stone the moment the light touched.

Mystified by it all, Kanna stared. The deeper they went, the more the ribbons seemed to coil and expand and diversify, until she was looking at what appeared to be entangled snakes made of infinite color, etched with infinite geometry.

And they were moving. Kanna blinked, trying to shake off the optical illusion, but no matter how many times she closed her eyes and reopened them, the snakes had begun to glow and swell in time with the pulsing feeling in her head.

“What…what is this?” she asked—but she heard only her own voice echoing back to her in the void. She could no longer even hear her companions’ footsteps.

Kanna staggered closer to one of the walls. Staring into those endless spirals had begun to nauseate her, but she could not look away. Between the tangle of glowing snakes, she finally noticed words etched into the stone. She didn’t know what language and didn’t even recognize the script, but as she pulled away, she realized that the words coated almost every inch of the walls. They seemed to shine with their own source of light, but she could only see them where Goda’s lamp struck directly.

“Goda…,” she whispered. “Porter, do you see this?”

“See what?” Goda’s voice reached her after what felt like a long time. “There’s nothing to see here.”

“How can you not see?”

But then some of the light reached that insolent face. She smirked at Kanna. “You must be losing your mind,” she said.

Parama started laughing.

With that small confirmation of her sanity, Kanna allowed herself to grow entranced. She followed the winding path of the snakes. The rest of the cavern seemed to disappear, and the more she stared, the more she noticed the intricacy of their design. Where at first she had just seen colored ribbons, she now saw tiny scales etched into the serpents, and tiny shadows where each row overlapped the other. The deeper she looked, the more she could see, until she realized that the lines that formed the snakes were themselves made of smaller snakes—and that those snakes were made of even smaller ones—forever, in seemingly endless detail.

After while, it felt like she had been drawn up into the serpents, like she had been swallowed into that infinity to become one of them.

But before she could come back to reason and remember where she was—before she could judge herself for becoming as insane as the woman who trudged in front of her—a deafening sound knocked her out of her trance. She wasn’t sure how loud it had really been, or if she had simply perceived it as a roar because it broke her concentration.

It came from the mouth of the cave. Goda snapped around to face it. A silhouette blocked some of the moonlight, a figure posed at the entrance far behind them, eyes shining straight towards them.

And then Goda’s light went out.

---

Onto Chapter 5 >>

Tiny whirlwinds blew dust across the plain and into Kanna’s eyes. It muddied her view of the women, but as she blinked through the haze, Goda grabbed her arm and led her out of the truck. This time, she did not flinch against the touch, because she had already come to expect it.

Goda brought her towards a tall threshold made of stone. It was the only break in a waist-high fence that encased the small mob of people, who were all closely huddled in the spreading courtyard until Kanna’s presence seemed to energize them. Black robes whipped and billowed with movement as the group split apart, each of the women producing a large clay vase from under their respective folds, each of the jars ornate with swirling designs.

Kanna could not see what was hidden inside the vessels—only the beginnings of a dark pit visible under the rims—but for whatever reason, in a flash of morbid fantasy she imagined a pair of coiled snakes in each one, ready to dance at the call of a piper.

Boldly breaking through the sea of black, a pair of empty-handed women in white robes had come to flank the edges of the gateway, too. They were so close to Kanna, just on the other side, that their mere presence made her nervous, and she jumped a little when a darker figure emerged suddenly between them. This time, Kanna recognized the face: It was the stranger from before, the one with the frozen smile who had watched Kanna arrive in the truck, though her stare was no less unnerving up close.

At the sight of this woman, Goda dropped to her knees, sending up a burst of sand.

Kanna glanced around with confusion. “What’s going on?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to keep her voice low, but something in the energy of the air did not feel friendly at all.

“Give her this.” Goda reached into her robes and produced a small pouch, which she offered to Kanna with no further explanation—but even through the velvet, Kanna could feel the texture of metal coins clinking and settling when she grasped it. “Just put it on the ground in front of her. Don’t hand it to her directly. Don’t talk to her. Absolutely do not touch her or any of the other people in black.”

Perplexed—and wanting to rid herself of this unexpected tribute—Kanna did not argue. At the line of the threshold in front of her, the loose sand ended and became a hard path, so she placed the pouch gingerly on the stone, right near the robed woman’s bare feet. Just as Goda had told her, she was careful not to graze the woman’s skin, but more out of a sense of avoidance than a respect for Goda’s word.

When Kanna made safe enough room between them again, the woman picked up the bag and met Kanna’s eyes with no sign of the polite caution that a stranger usually offered.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Kanna Rava,” she said—then she turned around and disappeared back into the mob.

Hearing her own name had never made Kanna feel so uncomfortable before. “How do they know me?”

She inspected the small crowd that had formed in front of her and her eyes fell again on one of the clay vases. It had two handles that flared out from the sides like wings, and the woman who held it kept a tense grip, knuckles turned white.

There was most definitely something inside—something that was about to spill over.

Kanna shuffled back.

“Stop,” Goda said. “Go through the gateway now.”

“What?” Kanna stared at the strangers, and every single one gazed back with frozen tension, as if poised to act. A wave of impatience permeated the air, but she wasn’t sure if it belonged to the group beyond the threshold or to the woman who knelt beside her.

“Go. Cross into the sanctuary and meet them. I can’t go in with you. I have to stay outside.”

Thoughts of escape had already flooded Kanna’s mind, but she knew better than to take off running. Even though Goda had cut the rope not long before, they were still tied together by an invisible electric thread, and seeing that she had little choice, Kanna took her first hesitant step through the gate.

The group waited. Their collective posture seemed to adjust as she grew closer. It looked as if a tight coil was being slowly wound up in each of their spines.

Kanna took another step, then another. When she was a few paces beyond the threshold and both her feet were firmly on the cobblestone path of the courtyard, she threw Goda another glance of confusion over her shoulder—but she did not turn very far before she caught some movement at the corner of her eye. Kanna cried out in surprise.

They were rushing her.

As if a clock had struck the time, they had all pushed forward together. Before she could even consider fleeing, four cold hands had seized her. The two women in white yanked at her robes and wrestled her off her feet, forcing her to kneel into the ground.

“Goda!” Kanna shouted, trying with all her strength to twist out of their grips. “Goda, what’s happening?”

But her master was silent.

When the mob closed in around her, their rising shadows blocked both the sun and the open desert. They looked upon her with hunger. It was as if they were aching to tear her limb from limb. Terrified, Kanna thrashed harder, until she managed to rip herself away and hobble onto her feet—but before she could even straighten her knees, an icy punch crashed hard into her back.

It sent her straight to the ground.

Kanna gasped. Freezing water crashed into her face, into her mouth. It flowed down her hair and rushed over her ears. It muffled every sound and chilled every piece of her.

Before she could understand what was happening, or even recover from the first freezing blow, another one came. Ice cold water splashed over her head, roaring like a waterfall, distorting the voice of a woman who cried from above:

“Awaken! Be cleansed by the Goddess!”

Then another woman came to take her place. Kanna braced herself when the stranger began to tip her vessel, but it made no difference. The water was so cold that she couldn’t fathom how it wasn’t solid ice.

“Awaken to the Goddess Mahara! Be cleansed!” the woman declared, drenching her thoroughly.

Then another came, then another. And they all were saying the same things.

“Goda!” Kanna cried out towards the sky, hoping that somehow her voice would carry over the tall strangers, over the rising threshold, over to where her master knelt in the sand. “Goda! What is this? Make them stop!”

Her voice cut out when she was drowned again by a vase full of water.

“Awaken!” her assailant demanded.

“I’m awake, I’m awake!” Kanna screamed, coughing into the ground. “Can’t you see that I’m awake?”

Another rush of cold smacked the top of her head, like a watery fist had come down from the heavens. The freezing sting seeped into her nose. She spat onto the floor and noticed that some of the women near her had moved back—but otherwise, the torrent continued.

One after another, they poured the contents of their vessels upon her until her vision had grown watery and unclear, until her muscles were so shocked that she couldn’t move.

“Goda!” she cried one last time in desperation.

She heard no words in reply. Instead, above the sound of the splashing water and the shuffling feet and the twisted blessings, a laugh sounded through the clearing. The voice was husky and full of life.

She didn’t want to believe that it was Goda.

A long time passed while Kanna braced herself against nothing. The assault had stopped. The rows of feet that had surrounded her dissipated just as suddenly as they had appeared.

She stayed there on her hands and knees, the wind blowing against that slick layer of cold water on her skin. She stared at the ground, her mind free of thoughts, her heart pulsing so hard she could hear its roar in her ears. Tears fell hotly against the ground beneath her, to join the cold water that dribbled from her soaked hair. She hid her sob well, as it folded naturally into her shudders, and she didn’t want anyone to hear her.

The first sign of warmth came as a towel that fell over her shoulders. She flinched at the touch, but when she looked up, she saw that one of the women in black had stayed behind. It was the same woman who had accepted her payment for all the torture.

“Dry yourself up, child,” the woman said. “And put these on.” Though she kept her distance and seemed to avoid leaning too closely, she dropped a neatly creased set of white clothes in front of Kanna’s hands.

Kanna looked past her and towards the path that led through the courtyard, between the two towers and up to a building carved into the nearby cliffs. The other women in black were filing inside the structure with their empty clay jars, though they did not murmur to each other, and they did not seem exhausted from their effort. It was as if nothing had happened at all.

When Kanna finally glanced over her shoulder, through the stone threshold she had left behind, she found Goda still kneeling in the same place as before—but bathed in dust instead of water.

A grin had spread on her master’s face.

“Are you sure you’re awake now, Kanna Rava?”

* * *

When Kanna stepped back out through the gate, fully dressed in white, she refused to look at Goda. Her stare fixed at the ground, she sensed Goda’s movements only by watching the tall shadow on the sand as it stretched out in front of them.

In a daze, Kanna had no idea what had just happened and she didn’t know where she could go—but she decided that she was leaving anyway, so she set her jaw and shuffled faster, pushing through the shudders that came with every gust of wind.

She did not stop even when the weight of a new burden fell on her shoulders, wrapping her in a loose cocoon. It was Goda’s outer robe, rumpled and messy over her much smaller frame, but warm enough to be an improvement as it overwhelmed her with the woman’s scent. She did not find this unpleasant in itself, but the closeness made her feel awkward. She shuddered again—this time, not for the wind.

“Cold?” Goda said, her smile faint.

“What have you done to me?” Kanna asked. It was the first phrase that rose to the top of her mind, though she did not actually know what Goda’s part was in the whole onslaught. Goda took her by the arm and cut her stride short.

“Earlier today, you said you were thirsty.”

Upon hearing that, Kanna didn’t know how to respond. “Are you trying to make fun of me?”

“No—but you wanted water, so now you’ve had some. The Goddess has blessed you, yet you still complain. Why?”

Kanna ripped her arm away and gave Goda a look of disbelief. The woman’s smile did not fade, but Kanna could not make sense of her intentions.

“I asked for a drink of water, not a freezing tidal wave.”

“You’re picky.”

“I can’t imagine you brought me all the way out here just for that. What an elaborate way to humiliate someone.”

Goda huffed with amusement. “It has nothing to do with your thirst for water or your thirst for humiliation,” she said. “We’re nearly at the border, and naturally you have to face a cleanse before you cross into the Middleland. Every foreigner does.”

“A cleanse?”

“Yes, of course. How else do you expect that the temple will stamp your papers? They won’t allow an unclean person into the Middleland.”

At this, Kanna narrowed her eyes. “You’ve slept on the same filthy ground as I have and been pelted by the same dust while we were in that truck, and yet they didn’t pour ice cold water over your head. It’s discrimination. And anyway, if they wanted me to bathe, they could have just said so and I would have done it myself.”

“But it wasn’t your body that they were cleansing—it was your heart.” Goda’s expression seemed entirely serious at first, so much so that Kanna almost missed the subtle wickedness that had come over the woman’s eyes.

“You must be joking.”

“Not at all. You went through the cleanse, and now you will be quarantined for three nights. We’ll have to wait here while they observe you for signs of Death.”

“Signs of…of what? Well, clearly, I’m not dead,” Kanna protested, a bit offended that Goda seemed to imply that she might have been carrying some disease. “As far as I know, there’s only one sign of that, and if I’m speaking to you, then we can rule it out.”

“No, they can tell you’re alive. They just want to make sure you’re not carrying Death Flower in you.”

“They’re looking for drugs?”

“Oh yes. Death is extremely illegal in the Middleland. People try to smuggle it in using different methods, but we can at least tell if someone has swallowed it recently by putting them through a cleanse. Those under the influence can’t regulate their body temperature very well, and so they become ill from the cold water.”

Kanna wrinkled her brow. “I would never eat Death Flower. What kind of person do you take me for, a Lowerland savage?”

Goda laughed at this. “It’s more than just the savages who eat Flower. Otherwise, the government wouldn’t have bothered to make it illegal.” She had already begun to shuffle away towards the truck, so Kanna picked up her own pace to follow.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Goda responded without turning around, “that the only things that are illegal are things that people would actually want to do.”

“I heard that eating Death Flower is extremely risky, that it can kill you if you have too much, and you can never tell how much is enough. Why on Earth would someone want to die?” She asked this, but a part of her regretted it because she had already flirted with the answer herself in recent weeks, and it was something she preferred to forget.

“You’d be surprised,” Goda said—but she didn’t explain any more, and once they reached the truck, she opened the back tailgate, which creaked and wobbled as much as the passenger door had. She pulled a pair of empty wooden buckets down from the bed and slammed the gate closed with her knee. “Come.” She tipped her head towards a sandy mound in the distance. “There’s a wellspring on that hill. Let’s go fetch some water.”

“Oh, I think I’ve had my fill of water today.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s not for you.”

Kanna stood there for awhile, watching Goda walk off into the dusty clearing. It wasn’t that she was refusing to follow exactly, it was simply that it bothered her that Goda had assumed that she would. But as soon as the woman was far enough away, Kanna felt the early sting of warning radiating from her wrist and she remembered that they were still joined by the cuffs—so she chased after her.

When Kanna caught up, they were only a few seconds’ walk from the foot of the hill.

“Who is the water for, then?” Kanna asked once she had caught her breath.

Goda nodded in the direction of a small cabin that sat opposite the temple. Kanna hadn’t noticed it before—but, then again, she had been too distracted to take a good look at their surroundings.

“For the woman who lives in that house. It’s actually an inn, and it’s our best bet for accommodations. She doesn’t like tending to porters, though, and she hates foreigners—even though she married one—so we’ll have to appease her with something.”

Goda pressed her boot against the sand at the bottom of the hill and some of it crumbled below her feet. It was smooth and flowed almost like water, but she stepped up onto the unstable ground with little hesitation nonetheless. Once she was a few paces up the hill, she glanced briefly over her shoulder and waited for Kanna to find stable footing before she continued the march.

“We’re going to appease her with two buckets of well water?” Kanna asked. She thought this sounded odd, but it was true that they were in a desert. Perhaps water meant more in a desert than it did in the meadows of the Northern Upperlands.

“She’s lazy about climbing the hill and squeezing the pump,” Goda said. “She tends to wait until the last minute, after she’s used up every drop, and then she’s so thirsty that the trip up here is even more unpleasant.”

“It sounds like you know her rather well.”

“We’re loosely acquainted.” Goda reached a steep section and pressed one of the buckets onto the ground to ease her balance. “I’ve stayed on her property many times when I’ve come to this border crossing because I can’t stay in the monastery like many people do.”

Noticing then that Kanna struggled, she dropped one bucket into the other and with her free hand helped Kanna climb up. They stood side by side on a flatter section of the hill, and from this higher vantage point, Kanna could see the building beyond the two towers and the courtyard where she had been assaulted by the women in black.

“A monastery,” Kanna said. “Then there must be a temple here. Those were Maharan priestesses, weren’t they?”

“That they were.”

“That’s right, I remember that you stayed behind when I crossed onto the temple grounds—but why is it that I could go in and you couldn’t?”

Goda pressed a hand into the earth and climbed onward. “Let’s just say that I’m also unclean,” she told Kanna with a pained smile, “but it’s not the kind of dirt that can be cleansed with a splash of cold water.”

Before long, they had reached the top of the hill, and though the ground had turned rockier, Kanna could see a small ring of green at the center of the summit. In the middle of the weeds, there was a rusted well pump and nothing else.

Goda grasped the lever with one hand and pushed her weight into it. It gave an angry creak, but cooperated anyway, and before long Goda’s arm and the handle of the pump seemed to meld into one machine. The tunic that Goda wore beneath her outer robes had no sleeves, and the sun was still bright, so soon enough Kanna could see the sweat of the woman’s effort forming on her skin.

Goda’s shoulders flexed tightly as she pulled the lever up, and when the handle reached its peak, she drove it hard back towards the ground, as if she were about to plunge her body into the earth. She grunted softly with mild effort, a sound that seemed meant to coax the rush of water. She looked completely absorbed, completely blind to Kanna’s presence.

Kanna fought the urge to step back. It made no sense, but it felt like she was watching something private, something she shouldn’t have been seeing at all. Don’t be ridiculous, Kanna thought to herself the moment she became conscious of the images that her mind was conjuring up. She’s just pumping water. And yet Kanna couldn’t understand why something so mundane could also appear so obscene.

She slithered out of the robes that Goda had covered her in, because she had become too warm for them all of a sudden and the way they smelled had grown too distracting. The wind quickly gusted against her and cooled her down. She had averted her eyes at some point, but when she looked back up, the scene appeared to change, and instead of a woman driving her body into the earth, Kanna merely saw a woman pumping water into a bucket.

The desert is making me delirious already, Kanna thought—but it was late wintertime and the weather had been cool, with the first warmth of spring yet to show itself. What bothered Kanna more was that her body seemed unable to make up its mind: Was she cold or was she hot? Maybe I did eat Death Flower and didn’t realize it.

When the buckets were filled, Goda handed one to Kanna. Kanna nearly stumbled as she took on the burden and she had to grip the handle with both hands to keep from dropping it.

“Don’t worry,” Goda said as she passed, picking her outer robes off the ground where Kanna had left them, draping them back over her own shoulders with a sweep of her arm. “It’s a lot easier on the way down.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

Goda smiled and trudged back down the hill, the overfull bucket in her left hand putting her only slightly off balance. “To give you some work. You’re a slave after all.”

* * *

Goda knocked the door of the cabin with the side of her fist, hard enough that it made the whole thing shake. This seemed extremely rude to Kanna, but she said nothing, and she wondered if it was simply another one of the strange Middleland customs that she didn’t know about.

“Always remove your shoes before you go into any Middlelander’s house,” Goda had instructed her when they had been making their way back down the hill. “Don’t point to any of her possessions directly with your finger. Don’t call her by her given name unless she tells you to. Most of all, don’t ask about her wife or her family—you probably don’t know how to ask correctly and you’ll end up offending her.”

The way Goda had made it sound, they were already teetering on the edge of being rejected for a place to spend the night. All these extra rules had made Kanna feel a bit uneasy. She wasn’t looking forward to searching for another cave and waking up again with sand in her nostrils, so she tried to look dignified by standing up as straight as she could, even with the full bucket weighing her down.

Still, her efforts made no difference. As soon as the door finally cracked open, it slammed shut again in Goda’s face, as if it were attached to a counterweight. The breeze that rushed out made Goda’s hair fly.

Goda showed no sign of frustration—or even of surprise. She merely pounded on the wood exactly as she had before, with the same unfazed expression. After another series of insistent knocks, the door opened, but the crack was even smaller this time. Kanna could see a single eye peaking out at them. “Go away, Goda,” said a voice that seemed attached to the eye.

Then the door slammed closed.

Once again, Goda knocked as if it had been the first time she had come up on the door, as if it hadn’t been shut twice in her face already. Kanna grew frustrated herself, shifting her weight from leg to leg.

“Don’t you think we should just leave her alone, then?” she whispered to Goda. “Obviously, she hates you.”

“Don’t be silly. She just needs to make a token effort to turn me away, so that then she can tell people that I wore her down and forced her to let me in.”

The door opened yet again, enough that Kanna could see half of a woman with tan skin and a middle-aged face. Her hair was curled and it fell over her eyes and hid some of the details of her features. She looked impatient. Kanna had the distinct impression that they had interrupted something.

“Didn’t you hear me, Goda? Go away. I can’t have any more criminals staying at my inn, and that’s all you ever bring here—thieves and drug dealers and blasphemers. It’s bad for business! What are people going to think when they see that you’re always loitering at my cabin?”

Goda lifted her bucket of water. “I’ve brought you a gift.”

“As if I couldn’t go up that hill and fetch it myself anytime I want. You haven’t saved me any trouble.”

“You seem a bit more disagreeable than usual,” Goda said with a touch of curiosity. She had the tone of someone trying to diagnose a mechanical failure. She tilted her head and peered through the door, past the woman and into the house. “Ah, there’s someone in there with you. Is it your wife?”

“No. My wife is in the Middleland. She had to go across the border to fulfill her residency requirements and she can’t come back yet.”

Goda craned her neck a little more, and the woman shuffled to step in her way and block her view.

“Then she’s a citizen now, is she?”

“Well, almost. She’ll have her papers in less than a month.” Though the woman had responded, she sounded aggravated with all the small talk. “Why should you care anyway, Goda? Are you going to send her a letter of congratulations and a bouquet of flowers?”

Goda smirked and glanced down at an empty basin that was near the door. “I see that you’re out of water, so I’ll leave this here.” She dropped the bucket. “We’re not trying to cause any trouble. If you’re too embarrassed to accommodate us, then I can just take my slave out to the back, and we can spend the night in the storage room. I remember the combination on the lock.”

Before the woman could even reply, Goda began walking. Kanna glanced back and forth between Goda and the angry woman behind the door, and not knowing what else to do, she followed her master’s stride. Before she left, she tipped her head in a slight bow, but the response from the woman was simply a glare.

“I don’t owe you any favors, Goda,” the woman called after them. “Go find some hole in the desert to sleep in, and take that little outsider with you.”

Goda stopped. She did it so abruptly that Kanna nearly ran into her, nearly spilled the contents of the bucket that she was still holding.

“Don’t worry, Jaya,” Goda said, glancing over her shoulder with a neutral expression. “I won’t mention anything to the priestesses about who I saw in your cabin. The Goddess frowns upon gossip, after all.”

The woman in the crack of the door said nothing for a long moment. Her face had turned a bit pale. “Go to hell,” she said finally—then she added, “I’ll bring you the towels and linens in the evening, so don’t come looking for them inside. And don’t make a mess of the place, for God’s sake.”

With that, she slammed the door a final time, and the force sent a rush of sand skidding across Kanna’s feet.

---

Onto Chapter 4 >>