A single drop fell down from the sky. It hit the back of Kanna’s head coldly, and it broke trails through her hair on its way down the back of her neck. The water sucked the warmth out of her skin, made her muscles stiffen.
It was then that she noticed the curtain of mist that had been falling between her and Goda. The rain had been faint at first, but the longer that Kanna allowed the silence to widen, the thicker the curtain grew, until it both obscured and reflected some of the moonlight that struck the giant’s face.
Even so, she could still see the white of Goda’s clenched teeth. She could see the look of pain.
“Goda…,” Kanna whispered. Many instincts warred together inside of her. She was too shocked to move at first, but the impulse to stretch across the gap won out, and she reached through the curtain of rain towards the woman who was hiding behind it. “Look, Goda, I don’t understand. I—”
The giant stepped back.
“Just now, you said—” Kanna found herself blinking against the water, looking closely at Goda’s face, trying to determine how she might have misheard. She watched the tiny rivers trickling down from Goda’s forehead and onto her jaw. She looked closely at Goda’s mouth and tried to envision it repeating the words.
Then, there was something else that came together.
Taga Murau.
Those two words echoed in Kanna’s head above the rest, and she found that she was the one repeating them to herself aloud. She felt the familiar shape of the surname on her lips—and then she seized up with realization.
Murau?
“Priestess Rem Murau’s…sister?” Kanna blurted out. “Her twin sister?”
Goda remained motionless in the dusting of rain, in that thick mist that billowed and blew across the side of her face. She let out a sharp breath, a single convulsion that seemed to explode from her chest before it was quickly repressed, but the air blew out from between her teeth and the burst of steam made it look like she was some beast about to charge.
Still, it sounded like a sob, Kanna thought. It sounded like a sob that had been cut short—but it couldn’t have been, because it had come from the mouth of Goda Brahm.
Kanna brought her hand to her chest and clenched at her own robes with nervous tension. “Goda,” she whispered again, “I didn’t hear you right.”
The grimace on Goda’s face grew tighter. Because she was leaning back, because her chin had tilted up, she looked like some creature baring her fangs. “You heard me.”
Goda jerked her head to the side and spat onto the earth. Her robes whipped as she turned around. She disappeared into the mist again, into the dim trail that was flanked by trees and shadowed by the crag.
Kanna took off after her, but it was too dark to see where the woman had gone. She ran along the foot of the cliff, her feet digging into the moist ground, her heels kicking up the leaf litter beneath her. She listened closely past the sound of her own struggles. She listened for Goda’s strides, and before long she had spotted the giant again near the moss bed where they had lain together.
“Goda!” Kanna shouted through the loud bursts of wind that had swooped down between them. “Goda, wait!”
The woman had turned her back, but Kanna reached out to her, grabbing two fistfuls of her robes and pulling back on the cloth with all her strength. She had managed to make Goda slow down, and so she started craning her head to catch those eyes that, for once, had some overwhelming emotion in them that was too powerful to suppress.
“What you said can’t be right! It doesn’t make any sense! You accidentally killed Rem’s sister? How? Was it with Flower? Did you make Flower brew and she drank it and she died, and then they blamed it on you?”
“No.” Goda kept walking. Kanna stumbled and had to readjust her footing to not start dragging behind.
Her snakes were churning. The stories were twisting in Kanna’s mind, growing more elaborate by the second. She had to make sense of it. None of it made sense on its own.
“Then she provoked you?” Kanna asked. “She attacked you and you defended yourself, but because you’re so big you didn’t know your own strength, and you hit her too hard and you—”
“No.”
“Then you were defending someone else? She threatened someone, and so you tried to stop her, but you—” Kanna’s voice was desperate. She did not know why, but it felt like it was she who was being accused of some heinous crime. She was grasping and grasping.
And Goda wasn’t helping her to reach.
“No,” Goda said a final time. She spun around to face Kanna again, her robes twisting in Kanna’s hands. The giant’s features were covered in a slick smear of rain or sweat or something else. Her jaw had grown so tight that her neck was pulsing with tension. “Stop looking for a justification. There is none. I slit her throat. I went into her room while she was asleep and I slaughtered her in her own bed.”
The bones in Kanna’s fingers lost their warmth. She dropped the tail of Goda’s robes. Staring up at the giant in disbelief, she couldn’t stop herself from shuffling backwards on reflex, because the fear that she had fought so hard to dissolve was rising up again.
“No,” Kanna said, more firmly this time. “That can’t be true. Only a monster would—” She found very suddenly that she was uncomfortable in the giant’s stare. Her voice erupted from her much more loudly than she had intended when she cried, “You’re not like that, Goda, you’re not like that! I know you!”
Goda huffed. “You don’t know me, Kanna.”
After a long, spreading moment where the rain seemed to grow harsher, where the tiny wisps that licked Kanna’s face had started to feel like the points of a hundred needles, Kanna dared to look at her directly. The mirthless smile on the giant’s face made her chest seize with horror.
“You only know this,” Goda continued. “This is all that’s left of me: I’m a cold-blooded killer.” Her eyes were narrowed as she peered at Kanna through the haze, but her face had once again become expressionless. “Days ago, I warned you that the moment you found out, your feelings would waver. Has that not come true? Do you still want my hands on you, knowing what I’ve done? Now that you see what I am, are you still so eager to lie down with me, when I could easily kill you the moment you close your eyes?”
Goda finally approached Kanna, looming over her in the dark. The frame of the monster’s shadow blocked out part of the moon. Indeed, Kanna could not fight the urge to recoil. She stumbled, nearly slipping into the mud.
Goda laughed and leaned into another heavy step.
“Ah, yes, that’s what I thought,” she said, stalking forward to make up for the space that Kanna was putting between them. Her shoulders had stretched out into a broad silhouette. “You’re thinking back to what you did only a day ago, to the life that you spared by risking your own. Would you have done that knowing how easily I had taken a life myself? And not just one life. Many have perished because of me, one way or another. Now you question yourself, don’t you?”
Kanna opened her mouth to protest even as she stepped back—but then she noticed the thoughts that had been roiling up inside her, the snakes that had been agitated by Goda’s words.
It was true. She was questioning who Goda even was. She was questioning everything.
“There, you see? You see it now?” Goda told her. “That is what your love is worth. It was strong and burning and powerful yesterday, wasn’t it? You were willing to jump out of a train for it. And now, what is it like? What did it take for your love to turn into fear? A different story. A different image for you to project onto me, as if I’m some statue in a temple that you can paint with the colors of your thousand anxieties—something you can wrestle with instead of yourself. But this time, the story is true: They made a huge mistake when they punished me—but not because I deserve better. I should not be loose out in the world. Even this ounce of freedom is far too dangerous. I’m a killer—and I will kill more.” Because Kanna had averted her eyes to the ground, Goda grabbed her by the chin and forced their gazes to meet. “Look at me. Look. Open your eyes and stare the devil right in the face!”
But Kanna smacked Goda’s hand away, sending droplets spraying in every direction, making Goda laugh even more.
“This is your unconditional acceptance, is it?” Her tone was mocking. “Now, I’m not blaming you. Everyone has their limits. I don’t expect you to accept a murderer, especially one who kills for the self-serving reasons that I did. That would be ludicrous.”
Still not recovered from the shock, Kanna inched back further, faster. She needed space to think. She needed to understand what Goda had said, to make sense of it all. It simply couldn’t have all been true, it simply…
Some tense energy shot through Kanna’s body and stiffened her neck and altered her gaze. She saw the dark, widened eyes of the beast staring down at her—and in those bottomless voids, she caught sight of a small image. She could barely make it out at first, but then it began swirling, writhing, pulsing, rearing up with an open mouth.
It was the most hideous snake Kanna had ever seen.
She turned and ran.
She ran through the sopping earth, even though she could hear that Goda was not behind her. She ran until she was standing somewhere near the side of the road, until she had exhausted her limits, until the first twitch of hot current buzzed through her arm. It was painful, but she shook it off quickly and took a step back to ease it.
Kanna looked down at her wrist.
The rain was pelting softly. It had not been as strong as the other times, and though the clouds overhead were dark, they had left enough space for the moonlight, and so she could watch the way the tiny drops bounced off the metal of her cuff. Things were a little clearer than before.
Priestess Rem was right, she thought. The truth was that Kanna hadn’t known anything all along. She had trusted her own eyes and ears and gut over someone who had known Goda for far longer. She had even judged Rem right after she realized that the woman intended to kill Goda. But now, knowing the full reason why Rem had offered her the key, it struck Kanna that the priestess had actually shown much restraint, considering what Goda had done to her sister.
“She will hurt you the way she has hurt countless others if I don’t put a stop to it now,” Rem had told her the night Kanna had crawled out of that first cave. “She does not care about you. Her intentions are darker than you can imagine, 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.”
Kanna saw it now. She could see the devil that Rem had tried to show her in Goda, and indeed it seemed just as real as every other image that Kanna had constructed of the giant—and just as false as every graven image she had seen of the Goddess, too. She stared down at the cuff, and if she looked closely, she could see a dim reflection of herself. It was just a shadow projected on the metal, like the puppets behind the curtain at the bath house, like the silhouette of the monster who had not chased her.
She put her hand on the latch.
The Goddess wouldn’t blame me for this, Kanna thought. It’s not killing. It’s not killing because it’s not my fault that it’s the only way to be free. And besides, does a killer deserve to live? Who could blame me? Even Goda herself doesn’t blame me.
Kanna peered a ways down the road at the truck, and she noticed that a tarp was now draped over the back, like a makeshift tent in the storm. I could uncuff myself now, she thought, and I could take the truck and leave with the Bou twins on some other adventure. I doubt the Middlelanders would ever catch me. I doubt they would care enough to look for me. I could follow the Bou twins back up to their hometown. I could pretend I was some undocumented Outerlander and marry some cute, desperate woman and live the rest of my life out in some boring little house in some small town in the North.
Kanna’s fingers trembled against her wrist.
But if I did that, a voice inside of her whispered, I would never really know.
I would catch glimpses of it, but never hold it steady in my gaze.
I would hear others talk about it, but I would never see it.
Not with my own eyes.
“See what?” Kanna said aloud. She shouted the question into the wind, into the rain. The answer didn’t come from outside.
It was a realization that made her drop her hand from the cuff. She looked towards the shadows that surrounded the crag and the curtain of rain that shut her out of it. It was the cage that held back the devil, but she knew in that moment that it held something else, too.
Knowing for a fact that she had gone insane, she dashed back into the path of the forest. Her spirit hovered loosely in her body again; her sense of self had begun to fuse with the dirt beneath her. Her heart was pounding—but it was big, and she felt it in a chest that was not her own. She felt it pulsing together with the core of the earth.
She thought, I want to see the Goddess for myself.
And so Kanna ran back towards her demon. Surely, the voice told her, the spirit of the Goddess lay behind those bared teeth.