Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(33)

Tara ate another carrot.

“Have you ever loved someone?” the goddess asked.

She set down the bowl.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be down here when he’s up there. With so few faithful left, I live at your speed. I think the way you think. Even”—she gestured at her body, Tara’s body—“reduced like this, my mind’s wider than those meat brains of yours, but I should be deeper, bigger, the way he is. Thinking in this register feels like talking after a helium hit. I sound ridiculous to myself. Imagine being so close to your other half, and still so far below. Can you blame me for wanting more?”

“If it hurts the city? Yes.”

The moon-Tara crossed her arms and waited.

“Fine,” Tara said. “You want to be public, we can do that. You have an interview with a Crier tomorrow night.”

“What?”

“A woman named Gavriel Jones.” She felt very tired. She took that feeling, crushed it in a vise made of will, and tossed it into the corner of her mental attic with all her other weaknesses. “We jump the news cycle, come clean. Tell the people of Dresediel Lex you’re here for them. You’re back, to heal forty years of wounds.”

“You want me to preach through the news.”

“Maybe that’s not how things worked back when you were starting out.”

“When I was starting out,” she said, “there were still—what’s the Kathic name for those big furry things with the tusks?”

“Mammoths,” Tara said. “The Crier wants a story. Give her yours. After what you did tonight, our only option is to go public as fast as possible.”

“Thank you,” the goddess said.

“It’s nothing.”

“It isn’t, though. Craftswomen don’t believe in gifts.”

“Some of us do.”

Seril could look awfully patient when she wanted. In the pits of those shining eyes, Tara saw herself as her mother might have seen her, complete in all her flaws.

“I do need help,” Tara admitted at last.

The goddess, to her credit, did not laugh.

“I need your archive. Your old records.”

“I don’t have anything like that.”

“Impossible.”

Seril shrugged. “I was never the bookish type. I lived in shadow and claw and moonlight. My children were poets and mystics and warriors, not accountants.”

“You must have left some scripture, some trail.”

“Why would I need scripture? My children are living sermons.”

“In case you ever wanted to prove your claim to what you own.”

“If I have a thing, it is mine. What does a claim matter?”

“Gods,” Tara said.

“Clearly.”

“You can’t possibly be this dense.”

“Excuse me?”

Tara’s apartment wasn’t large. She squeezed between her stained red couch and the bookcase. From the top shelf she took a slender black notebook and tossed it onto a skull-embroidered end pillow. “That’s the notebook I used to jot down my first experiments with Craft. Take it, if you can.”

The goddess raised one eyebrow.

The room darkened and spun. Shadows danced. The walls shook, and dust rained down.

Dust ceased to rain and shadows stilled and light returned. The notebook had not moved.

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” Seril asked.

“That book’s mine. I wrote every word myself. My name’s inked on the inside cover in my own blood, and worked in glyphs I created back when I thought I’d invented a game of catching stars and stealing souls. No one can take that book from me unless I let them, and even then there’s a limit to how much they can do with it. This book here,” she pulled a thick red-and-black tome labeled “Contracts” from the shelf, “this bears my name, but only in pen, and my first name, too, and lots of people share it. Besides, there are a few thousand copies of this edition. You could lift it without much effort. And this,” she returned the textbook and selected a dog-eared Cawleigh paperback from the lowest shelf, “I got this for two thaums from a secondhand dealer dockside. You could beat me half to death with this if you wanted.”

“I’m considering it.”

“The more proof you have something’s yours, the more you control it. That’s not even Craftwork, it’s basic Applied Theology. I can’t believe you don’t know this stuff.”

“How do your cells do what they do, Tara? How do the impulses that bounce around that magnificent magic-addled hunk of ganglia atop your spine work together to be a person? What laws do they obey? Can you describe them to me?”

“You used to be bigger than Justice. I want to learn what happened to all that power.” She realized, then, that Seril had grown very still. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine.”

Tara squeezed back around to the couch and sat, hands interlaced, not looking at the goddess for a while. When she trusted herself to continue, she said, “I got carried away.”

“It’s fine, I said. Do you mind if I sit down?”

“No.”

She did, beside Tara. “There was a war, you know.”