Nobody's Goddess (The Never Veil)

by Amy McNulty

  Only once had I gotten close enough to look at one’s face. It was there that I saw the only hint of color: blood red eyes.

  I shook my head clear of the image. In any case, at least we had an image to put to the specters—unlike the lord, whom no one had ever seen.

  The heartless monster. She called him that. Was it all just Ingrith’s delusion?

  “Damn you, you crazy ol’ crone! Ingrith!”

  There was no mistaking that voice, muffled and angry and distant though it might have been. Fish Face. I wondered if this time someone in the quarry had gotten hurt—or worse. And they would come with their anger, itching to find Ingrith, and they would find me. Just me.

  I released the shawl from my fingers and stood up, ignoring the soreness in my muscles. Before I could even stop to think, my feet kicked up the dress and flew farther into the fields. If I could just get out of sight before they came. If I could just pretend I’d been long gone before the second earthquake.

  They knew you were with her beforehand. They’ll see you running through the fields. There’s no reason for them to keep their eyes down.

  I ran, though, as if there were no other choice. I couldn’t deal with all of the questions. I couldn’t deal with the stares, the hatred. Not on this day.

  Thanks to the hills, I might have gotten out of sight before they found her clothing. I made for the eastern dirt path as soon as I could, ready to insist I’d just been walking homeward. Home was so close. I was running at a speed I’d thought I’d lost, staring at the ground all the while, fighting through my body’s struggle to breathe. Ready to pretend I’d never even cut through the fields.

  My dress! There were tears and grass stains all over the skirt.

  Home was right there. Mother and Father might still be inside; there had to be a little time before dusk yet. I could cover the skirt up with an apron. I could grab another dress when Mother wasn’t looking. They’d notice. We don’t have any other nice dresses.

  I kept running, straight past the house and into the woods. The trees kept the castle from view, so I looked up at last. I found the well-worn foliage to the side of the path and burst through the trees. I didn’t care that stray branches scratched my arms and ripped at already-torn seams. I was going somewhere where I could rest and think, where I could quiet the insanity running through my head, where I could figure out what choices were left to me, if any at all.

  A shriek, or more like a giggling squeal, tore through the air as something fast and hard slammed against my abdomen. I felt a sharp poke in my leg and heard a snap.

  “Noll!” The little girl whose bushy, twig-filled head had just rammed into my abdomen stepped back and looked up, rubbing her forehead with one hand. In her other hand, she held a branch. The top of it dangled by a thread.

  My pulse was still racing, and I shut my mouth, worried my heart might escape through my throat. I ran a palm over the pain in my side, swallowed my heart back inside me, and spoke, breathless. “Nissa.” A farmer’s daughter. A friend of Luuk’s. We’d all played together before. “What are you doing here?”

  It was a dumb question. I was the one who’d shown her the cavern in the first place.

  Nissa tilted her head, pointing the branch at the cavern’s dark mouth behind her. “Slaying monsters.” Her mouth pinched. “It broke.” She tossed the branch onto a nearby pile of moss and rocks.

  I smiled, even despite everything. “Elgar’s always broken. It’ll mend next time you pick it up.” Pick it up somewhere else entirely. My smile faded. “Were you in there alone?”

  Nissa shrugged and clutched both hands behind her back. “Everyone else is getting ready for the Returning.” Her gaze fell on my dress. “Aren’t you going to get ready?”

  I was ready. But maybe I’ll never be ready, not really. “I will.” I stood beside her and nudged her gently onward. “You go get ready, too.”

  Nissa walked a few paces, then stopped and turned around. She stared at me quizzically with her large, brown eyes. “Aren’t you coming?”

  I shooed her onward. “Not just yet. I’ll be there soon. Go on.”

  Nissa shrugged and skipped forward through the foliage, humming a tune as she went. I watched her until she blended into the trees and vanished from sight.

  Vanished. Right in front of me.

  I walked over to the broken branch Nissa had discarded and picked it up, turning the wood in my fingers. It’d been so long since I’d been the one to clutch Elgar. But there were monsters ahead; there were monsters behind.

  ***

  When the queen and her retainers were brave enough, they’d chase monsters into the blackest pits. The cavern off the main path in the woods held countless monsters and endless secrets, and the queen, who lost her retainers one by one, had never explored all its vast depths.

  She’d tried to crown another generation of queen and retainers after her, to keep up the adventures, but good retainers were hard to find when they kept falling in love with goddesses one after the other. Nissa, in any case, just wanted to be her friends’ equal, and although they battled monsters, she’d never called herself queen.

  The queen was gone. It wasn’t the same anymore. I swished the stick in front of me, not even bothering to pretend it was a blade, and certainly not screaming a battle cry.

  This is stupid. I got bored and tossed the stick to the side. Because I’d had the wonderful idea of taking the stick instead of one of the candles the kids left by the entrance to light their way, I was marching forward in total darkness. But my eyes adjusted, and after all those years of playing as a child, and then watching after Nissa and Luuk and their friends, by now I knew the path well enough to navigate it in the dark.

  If only there was somewhere I could go. But what was there, beyond the mountains, beyond the thick air that covered the edges of the land in mist? Nothing. There was no place for me to run and hide.

  Nowhere but the “secret” cavern. The cold, dark, neglected cavern. Perfect for me.

  ***

  I found a stalagmite on which to lean my back and sat down on the floor of the cavern, hugging my knees against my chest. My mind was blissfully blank for a time, for how long, I didn’t know. I shut my eyes and listened to the drip, drip, drop of some distant source of water that fell from the cavern ceiling and the dangling stalactites. I laughed quietly. We could never say those words as kids. We just called them “ground spears” and “ceiling spears.”

  “Hey.”

  I nearly tipped over. My palms shot out to steady me as my eyes flew open.

  Jurij stood over me, his man-mask on, a lit candlestick in one hand. He slipped down beside me, carefully resting the candle atop a rock.

  “Hey,” came my brilliant reply. No “How did you find me?” “Why did you bother looking for me?” “Am I wanted for killing some quarry workers?” or “Don’t you have a Returning to get to?” or “Tell me you won’t die today!”

  I went back to hugging my knees.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jurij hugged his knees and looked up, where traces of his flickering candle caused shadows to dance on the ceiling. “I’d forgotten. I haven’t been here in a while.” Jurij stretched his arms and then his legs. “Luuk tells me you take him and his friends here on occasion, though.”

  The corner of my mouth twitched. “Probably not the safest thing to do, considering they could get hurt in here.” I thought of Nissa, playing alone.

  Jurij shrugged. “You and me had a lot of fun here.”

  I smiled, despite myself. “If by ‘a lot of fun,’ you mean I let you hold the candle while I did all of the sword-swinging, then yeah.”

  Jurij laughed. “Hey, the queen once told me that carrying a candle is an important job on any quest to the secret cavern. What was it? The candlelight keeps the monsters at bay?”

  I pointed at the flickering shadows on the cavern ceiling. “That’s what I told you, but the candle actually made the monsters come out in the first place.”
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  “I wasn’t stupid, Noll. I knew that. I just let you believe otherwise.”

  I always thought I was ever so clever. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Jurij let his man-mask scan the dancing shadows on the ceiling. “I liked being told what to do.”

  “It got you ready for life with a goddess, I guess.” That was low.

  Jurij didn’t seem hurt so much as amused by my statement. “Always so much hatred for goddesses. You won’t feel the same when your man finds you.” He laid a hand on my knee.

  I tore my leg out of reach. “Oh, please, not you, too.”

  Jurij’s arm was left awkwardly reaching toward me without anything to touch. He pulled it back and ran it through the top of his dark curls. “Sorry. What happened with Ingrith?”

  So that was why he was here. Everyone thought I’d killed her, and Jurij knew right where to find me. “She’s dead.”

  Jurij’s man-mask bobbed up and down. “I know. She vanished after causing another earthquake. Luckily the men in the quarry were just leaving to get ready for my Returning and no one else was hurt, but they had no reason to believe Ingrith knew that. They ran to her cottage, but all they found were her clothes in the field. They figured she might have had a heart attack from the shock.”

  Or an always-watching lord punished her as she’d asked. At least no one else was hurt. Maybe they’d let me off with a lecture, after all. “What about me?”

  Jurij’s mask cocked slightly. “What do you mean? Nissa stopped by to talk to Luuk, and she told me you were headed into the cavern, which I found odd. So that’s what I was asking. Did Ingrith tell you she was going to cause an earthquake again before you left her? I’m not too sure I believe her about the bird now that she went and caused such a tremor. We felt it halfway into the village this time.”

  No one saw me leave. “No. I … ” I bit my lip. It wasn’t like I’d killed her. And I’d barely looked. That crazy old crone did it to herself. “She was rambling about something awfully weird, so I left.” What if Ingrith wasn’t completely crazy? What if a goddess who just thinks she’s in love can still kill her man when he takes off his mask? Jurij’s life could really be in danger.

  Jurij put his palms back on the cavern floor and leaned back. “You look worried.”

  I blushed. I’d gotten so used to never being able to see his expressions that I’d forgotten my face was as legible as an open book. “I’m worried about your Returning.”

  Jurij’s mask bobbed slightly. I could almost picture his eyes rolling behind those soulless black eye holes. “Noll, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, I’ll be fine.” He sighed that rare and frustrated sigh. “Can we try focusing on how this is the greatest day of my life for once? Please?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek as the heat rose to my face. “Of course you think it’s the greatest day of your life. But you could die, Jurij! You just don’t realize that because you don’t have a mind of your own!”

  Jurij sat up straighter. “You’re some friend, Noll. You don’t know anything about what it’s like to have a goddess. So why don’t you keep your opinion to yourself for once?”

  I jumped up. Jurij wasn’t like this. He wasn’t bratty like the other boys had been. But he was blind, so blind. Blind to all of my suffering. “I’m only trying to make you think for once because I care about you!”

  Jurij shook his mask-face and leaned on a stalagmite to stand up. “Do you think I don’t realize that my life is in danger from the moment I open my eyes in the morning to the moment I shut them at night? Do you think I’ve never worried that some girl or woman not related to us will burst in one morning and kill me, my brother, and my father while we’re eating together? Do you think I’ve never worried that Father’s mask might fall off while he’s sleeping, and Mother might look over and kill him where he lays?” He clenched his fist. “I know when love exists between a coupling, Noll, and when it doesn’t. We men adjust. We’re careful. We know what we’re doing.”

  I grit my teeth. “You all spend so much time worshipping your goddesses, I doubt you know much of anything.”

  Jurij threw his hands into the air. “When has a man ever died at his Returning? When has a man ever died from a woman looking at his face at all?”

  An excellent point. How did we even know men had to cover their faces? Maybe this was all some twisted game of the always-watching, never-present lord and his imaginary “first goddess.”

  Haelan. “Ingrith. She told me she killed her man at their Returning. And no one but her remembers the man ever existed.”

  Jurij tapped his fingers impatiently against his thigh. “You’re using the ramblings of a crazy woman to try to delay the greatest day of my life?” He pointed at me. “With your own sister, I might add. Why do you hate Elfriede so much?”

  Because she took the only thing that ever truly mattered to me. And she doesn’t even realize what a treasure she stole. “I don’t hate her!” I don’t. I don’t.

  “Then why are you always talking as if she’s lying about loving me and is going to kill me?”

  “I don’t think she’s lying.” My throat felt parched, but there was no hope for the dryness to ever be quenched. “I just think she doesn’t even know herself. She never knew you before you found the goddess in her.”

  Jurij waved a hand. “That’s not important.”

  “Yes, it is! You were nothing to her! She only convinced herself she loved you because it was you or no one.”

  Jurij shrugged. “So? It’s the same for me. It’s her or no one. Her or the commune. Her or death.”

  “But you have no choice but to love her! You don’t realize what it’s like for a woman. We have the choice to love or not, to not even know if what we think we feel is real or just some crazy mixture of desire and filial affection.” Tears formed at the edges of my eyes, and I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. “Jurij, I love you!”

  Jurij sighed and shook his head. “I love you, too, but—”

  “Not like that!” I dug my fingers as deeply into my arms as they would go. “I love you, like you love Elfriede.”

  Jurij ran a hand up and down his forearm. Before he spoke, there was nothing but the drip, drip, drop of the distant source of water. There was no horrible past, no terrible future. Time was standing still, and in my mind, an impossible future was still a possibility. I love you, too. Say it.

  “Noll, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish by telling me that. It’s weird enough that I still feel like being your friend after finding my goddess. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks now, and I didn’t know what made me angrier, him just standing there with that stupid wooden expression or the fact that he could see the tears streaming down my face. “Is that just to make Elfriede happy? What, did she command you to stay friends with me just because she didn’t want me to lose all of my friends? Did you think—”

  Jurij’s hand stopped moving. “Yes.”

  My mouth snapped shut. “I’m sorry?”

  “Elfriede commanded me to remain your friend, back when I first told her I loved her and she was overwhelmed by my confession. ‘Go with Noll,’ she told me. ‘Keep being her friend. This is all so sudden. Please go.’ She might have forgotten about it. Or not realized she was issuing a command when she stated it. But she hasn’t told me to stop or said to forget that command, so I’m still bound by it.”

  Something bubbled up from my stomach and forced its way out of my mouth, like the simper of a dying wounded animal. It was quiet, but in the echo of the cavern, it grew louder and repeated, reflecting my pain back at me over and over again. I clenched my teeth as hard as possible, not caring about the pain in my jaw, doing everything I could to stop myself from making that sound again.

  Jurij snapped up straighter and held his arms outward as if ready to embrace me. “Let me comfort you, Noll.”

  I could barely see throug
h the torrent of tears building. “No! You’re just saying that because the command is making you!”

  Jurij shook his head and lowered his arms. “Look, Noll, after the Returning, a goddess’s command isn’t really so absolute.”

  Tears were spilling out. I thought of stupid Father and the stupid dishes. “What does that matter? You’ll still do everything you can to make her happy.”

  “Yes, but … ” He moved closer. “I’m just saying, I’ll show you, I’ll still be your friend. It won’t be because Elfriede commanded it of me.”

  I jumped backward out of his reach. “Leave me alone!”

  “Noll, I’m sorry!”

  I stepped around the stalagmite and farther into the cavern, to the very edge of the candle’s glow. “Go away! You have a Returning to get to, don’t you? Hope you live through it!”

  Jurij lunged toward me, desperately grabbing for my arm, but I jumped back, back into the darkness. “Noll, I really do think of you as a friend. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please—”

  I turned and ran, not caring that I stumbled over rocks and dips in the ground and whatever else was thrown out there to trip me. I ran as fast as I could, deep into the darkness, farther than I had ever been before. We’d been too afraid to go this far as children. But there was nothing in this cavern more terrifying than the future that lay outside of it.

  “Noll!” His voice echoed and faded into the distance behind me.

  I ran and ran. There was only darkness for yards. But then, there was a violet glow. It grew closer with each footstep. At last I neared it, putting my hand on the last stalagmite blocking my view as if I could tear it down with my fingers.

  A pool, awash with bright violet. A light source, like a roaring, searing fire that burned underneath the depths of the waters. And something else. The laughter of children, the sound of Jurij calling my name. Only his voice was high-pitched, shy, and inviting. Like he’d not yet been corrupted by his goddess.