Nobody's Goddess (Never Veil #1)(69)

Pity she was gone now, too. She might have been the only one who could understand me.

For I knew now what she meant when she talked of killing a man no one else remembered. The fate worse than death that lurked around every corner for a masked man was that the eyes of a girl or woman upon his face would make him vanish not from life, but vanish completely from existence. It would be as if he never lived, forgotten to all but the woman who granted him that fate.

I had two visitors once, early on. And only once. Luuk and Nissa stopped by, the cart they dragged full of hides.

Nissa gasped when she saw me. “It’s true! You’re living here!”

Luuk’s bear face tilted slightly. “Why?”

I looked up from my carving and opened my mouth only to find the airwaves cracked and coated with dust, my lips too dry to form words. The kids watched me expectantly. “I have no home,” I said at last.

“That’s not true!” said Nissa, her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to move in with Alvilda, the night of Jurij and Elfriede’s wedding.”

Alvilda told me that herself the first day I’d spoken to her. A new cot still took up a corner of her home, its quilt coated with sawdust.

Luuk pointed to the figure in my hand. “I thought you were going to become Auntie’s apprentice. That you would take up a trade while you waited for your man to finally find you.”

“My man did find me. I killed him. I killed him, and no one remembers.”

One of the men from the commune tumbled out of a shack, his back slouched, his arms practically dragging against the ground. He moaned as he stumbled forward toward the bucket of water the farmers dropped off every few days for drinking, but his aim was off, and he bumped against the kids’ cart, his outstretched arm brushing against Nissa’s waist.

Nissa screamed, and Luuk jumped between her and the cause of her terror. “Let’s go,” he said, dragging her by the elbow toward the cart. The sight made me queasy—the thought of being pushed and pulled as I had been in another life—but Nissa let her man guide her without hesitation. As they pulled the cart away, she alone looked back at me.

Her expression reminded me of the look I’d given Ingrith when I thought she was just an old, crazy lady, before I realized the truth of what she said.

“Learned from Alvilda?” The voice was filtered and hoarse.

I turned my head slowly. The man scooping water up beneath his mask was Jaron, the only other commune resident whose name I had ever had cause to know. I recognized his worn-down animal mask from the quake at Alvilda’s house, although I was certain he wouldn’t remember the incident if I asked him, either in this life or my last. He stumbled forward and perched on a rock next to me, peering at my woodworking from behind his facial coverings. I couldn’t make out what animal it was supposed to be.

I suddenly took notice of the shape of the wood in my palm. A rose. I ran the gouge brusquely over the petals, tearing them asunder.

“Yes,” I said at last, not feeling that Jaron warranted my silence.

If he noticed that I now wrecked my creation, he didn’t speak of it. Instead, he put a hand on my shoulder, his touch as light as a feather. “She will not come here.”

She? Oh, Alvilda.

It was not Alvilda who was my torment. However, I knew instinctively that to this broken man, all torment was Alvilda. My heart tightened, and I wondered if Jaron and the other men in the commune had always felt this way. Even a tenth of my feelings for even a tenth of a second would be torture.

It was a wonder they did not die.

“That’s good,” I said. And it was true. I was in no mood for visitors.

Nevertheless, Jaron sat still beside me, his mask pointed toward the jagged wooden rose in my hand. I put the broken blossom on his lap and walked back to my shack in the middle of the commune.



***



After a couple of weeks, they didn’t feed us anymore.

There were supposed to be pity scraps, weren’t there? The rotted produce that didn’t sell in the market. And the buckets were supposed to be refilled because someone remembered the men didn’t have the strength to pull their own from the nearest village well. Because someone cared enough that we didn’t die of thirst. But the buckets ran out of water a few weeks after I joined the men in the commune.

I saw a man vanish one morning, his rotted dog mask clattering to the broken stone tiles in the middle of the commune. I felt compelled to trace the fading pattern on the mask, the nose, the mouth, the long, floppy ears, one half broken. I hoped it wasn’t hunger or thirst that had killed him. How long were these men going without food or water? How could I have been so lost in myself that I hadn’t noticed? I’d hardly eaten myself.

The men were lying in front of their shacks, moaning. One man was half in a shack, half out, rolling around and pawing for an empty bucket. He scooped imaginary water with the scoop beside it, lifted the empty ladle up under his mask, and grunted when the ladle fell from his grip, clattering to the ground. “Water … ” It was the first word I’d heard him speak that wasn’t the name of his goddess.

“Water,” another man nearby joined in.

“Water,” they all repeated.

I wanted to roll on the ground beside them. I wanted to not want water, to let myself vanish with the life I knew.

But thirst won out. As did the constant chorus of “water” punctuated by the names of women from around the village.