She sighed, looking troubled, and belatedly I realized there was no need to ask. If she’d had the power to reverse my transformation into a mortal, she would have used it, no matter what harm it did her. But what did it mean, then, that the goddess who had supreme power over mortality could not erase mine?
“If I were older,” she said, and I felt guilty for making her doubt herself. She lowered her eyes, looking small and vulnerable, like the mortal girl she resembled. “If I knew myself better, perhaps I would be able to find some solution.”
I sighed and shifted to lie on my side, putting my head in her lap after awkwardly pushing my hair out of the way. “This may be beyond all of us. Nothing like it has ever happened before. It’s pointless to rail against what you can’t stop.” I scowled. “That would make you Itempas.”
“Nahadoth is unhappy,” she said.
I suspected she wanted to change the subject. I sighed. “Nahadoth is overprotective.”
She stroked my hair again, then lifted the tangled mass and began to finger comb it. I closed my eyes, soothed by the rhythmic movements.
“Nahadoth loves you,” she said. “When we first found you in this… condition… he tried so hard to restore you that it damaged him. And yet…” She paused, her tension suddenly prickling the air between us.
I frowned, both at her description of Nahadoth’s behavior and at her hesitation. “What?”
She sighed. “I’m not certain you can be any more reasonable about this than Naha.”
“What, Yeine?” But then I understood, and as she had predicted, I grew unreasonably angry. “Oh gods and demons, no, no you don’t. You want to talk to Itempas.”
“Resisting change is his nature, Sieh. He may be able to do what Nahadoth could not: stabilize you until I find a cure. Or if we joined again, as Three—”
“No! You’d have to set him free for that!”
“Yes. For your sake.”
I sat up, scowling. “I. Don’t. Care.”
“I know. Neither does Nahadoth, to my surprise.”
“Naha—” I blinked. “What?”
“He is willing to do anything to save you. Anything, that is, except the one thing that might actually work.” Abruptly she was angry, too. “When I asked, he said he would rather let you die.”
“Good! He knows I would rather die than ask for that bastard’s help! Yeine”—I shook my head but forced the words out—“I understand why you’re drawn to him, even though I hate it. Love him if you must, but don’t ask the same of me!”
She glared back, but I did not back down, and after a moment, she sighed and looked away. Because I was right, and she knew it. She was still so young, so mortal. She knew the story, but she had not been there to see what Itempas had done to Nahadoth, or to the rest of us Enefadeh. She lived with the aftermath—as did we all, as would every living thing in the universe, forever and ever—but that was entirely different from knowing firsthand.
“You’re as bad as Nahadoth,” she said at last, more troubled than angry. “I’m not asking you to forgive. We all know there’s no forgiving what he did, the past can’t be rewritten, but someday you’re going to have to move on. Do what’s necessary for the world, and for yourselves.”
“Staying angry is necessary for me,” I said petulantly, though I forced myself to take a deep breath. I did not want to be angry with her. “One day, maybe, I’ll move on. Not now.”
She shook her head, but then took me by the shoulders and guided me down so that my head lay in her lap again. I had no choice but to relax, which I wanted to do, anyway, so I sighed and closed my eyes.
“It’s irrelevant in any case,” she said, still sounding a bit testy. “We can’t find him.”
I did not want to talk about him, either, but I dredged up interest. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. But he’s been missing for several years now. When we seek his presence in the mortal realm, we feel nothing, find nothing. We aren’t worried… yet.”
I considered this but could offer no answer. Even together, the Three were not omniscient, and Yeine and Nahadoth alone were not the Three. If Itempas had found some scrivener to craft an obscuration for him… But why would he do that?
For the same reason he does anything else, I decided. Because he’s an ass.
“I don’t,” Yeine said softly after a while. I frowned in confusion. She sighed and stroked my hair again. “Love him, I mean.”
So many unspokens in her words. Not yet the most obvious among them, and perhaps a bit of not ever, because I am not Enefa, though I did not believe that. She was too drawn to him already. Most relevant was not until you love him, too, which I could live with.
“Right.” I sighed, weary again. “Right. I don’t love him, either.”
We both fell silent at that, for a long while. Eventually she began to touch my hair here and there, causing the excess length to fall away. I closed my eyes, grateful for her attention, and wondered how many more times I would be privileged to experience it before I died.
“Do you remember?” I asked. “The last day of your mortal life. You asked me what would happen when you died.”
Her hands went still for a moment. “You said you didn’t know. Death wasn’t something you’d thought much about.”
I closed my eyes, my throat tightening for no reason I could fathom. “I lied.”
Her voice was too gentle. “I know.”
She finished my hair and gathered the shed length of it in one hand. I felt the flick of her will, and then she put her hand in front of my face to show me what she’d done. My hair had become a thin woven cord short enough to loop about my neck, and threaded onto this cord was a small, yellow-white marble. A different size and substance, but I would recognize its soul anywhere: En.
I sat up, surprised and pleased, lifting the necklace to grin at my old friend. (It did not like being smaller. It missed being a kickball, bouncy and fat. Did it have to be this puny, rigid shape just because I wasn’t a child anymore? Surely adult mortals liked to kick balls sometimes. I stroked it to still its whining.) Then I touched my shorter hair and found that she’d reshaped that, too, giving me a style that suited the older lines of my face.
I looked up at her. “You’ve made me very pretty—thank you. Did you play with dolls as a mortal girl?”
“I was Darre. Dolls were for boys.” She got to her feet, unnecessarily dusting off her clothes, and looked around the now-empty chamber. “I don’t like you being here, Sieh. In Sky.”
I shrugged. “This place is as good as any other.” Nahadoth had been right about that. I couldn’t leave the mortal realm in my condition; too much of the gods’ realm was inimical to flesh. Naha could have kept me safe by taking me into himself, but I would not tolerate that again.
“This place has Arameri.”
Resisting the urge to bat at the marble on its cord, I slipped it over my head and let it settle under my shirt instead. (En liked that, being near my heart.) “I’m not a slave anymore, Yeine. They’re no threat to me now.” She shot me a look of such disgust that I recoiled. “What?”
“Arameri are always a threat.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really, daughter of Kinneth?”
At this she looked truly annoyed, her eyes turning a yellowy, acid peridot. “They cling to power by a thread, Sieh. Only their scriveners and armies allow them to keep control—mortal magic, mortal strength, both of which can be subverted. What do you think they’ll do, now that they have a god in their power again?”