She shook off the thought.
I have to try....
“Eris,” said Asha, taking another step.
“That raven,” she interrupted. “It’s not a raven. I don’t know how long you’ll have before it wakes, but once it does, if Safire’s nearby...” She shook her head, her heart aching at the thought. “Please, get her away from here. As quickly as you can.”
The mist was rising. Eris glanced up once more, to Dagan this time.
“I’m not the girl you knew,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Just before she stepped across, the knife at Asha’s hip gleamed in the setting sun, catching her eye. Those designs etched into the hilt... she’d seen them before.
Eris didn’t have time to figure it out, because once the scarp poison wore off, Kadenze would wake. She needed to go—now.
So Eris stepped into the mist, leaving them all behind. Praying that Asha would do as she said and get Safire somewhere safe. Praying that Dagan would remember the girl she’d once been instead of seeing the one she was.
It was only after she walked the path through the mist and stars, only after the walls of the labyrinth solidified around her, that she remembered.
The knife Asha carried at her hip... it was Day’s knife. The one she’d sold on the night the scrin burned, buying her and Jemsin passage aboard a ship. A knife Day had given her for cutting scarp thistles.
What was the Namsara doing with it?
A Dangerous Liaison
After the defeat of the Shadow God, the people of the Star Isles took Leandra as their sovereign. Under her reign, the Star Isles prospered and, with peace returned, Skyweaver turned back to her weaving.
Centuries passed. The Star Isles forgot the Shadow God and the misery he’d caused.
But Skyweaver didn’t.
Sometimes, on the darkest nights, she heard him calling. In the beginning, she ignored it. But he was insistent, summoning her until his voice became a haunting.
Unable to bear it, Skyweaver rose from her loom one night, banished her servants, and went to him.
“What do you want?” she asked, careful to keep her distance from the web she’d ensnared him in.
“Someone to talk to,” he said, never taking those burning eyes off her.
“You’re a horror,” she told him. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“I wasn’t always a horror.”
Skyweaver doubted that. But she listened.
He spoke of a little cove beneath the cliffs, where he used to walk, long ago. He told her about the dirt paths through the junipers, the howl of the north wind, the taste of the salt of the sea.
Skyweaver might be merciful, but she wasn’t a fool. The Shadow God could tell her all the tender tales he wanted. She knew what hewas. She’d seen the terrible things he was capable of. If he hoped to gain her sympathy and trick her into freeing him, he was deluding himself.
When he finished his stories, she excused herself and left.
He didn’t call again until several years later. Skyweaver ignored him this time, too. But he was her responsibility. She had lied to Leandra. She had kept him alive instead of killing him.
So Skyweaver rose from her loom, once again banished her servants, and went to him.
This time, he didn’t tell her of his beloved cove but of the girl who lived there. A fisherman’s daughter. A girl who’d been born too early, and as a result, was too small. So small and so mortal and yet she had tamed the god of shadows. Had taught him to be human.
“I didn’t know how lonely I was until I met her,” he said.
