On her third birthday, her mother had let her dip a small wooden spoon into a clay jar of honey, and though Lyssena could not recall the moment itself, she remembered the story repeated at family dinners, her father laughing as he told how little Lyssena had asked if they could set aside a bit of honey for the god with no name.
She had felt sorry for him.
While the other gods received prayers and offerings and praise, he received nothing at all, and in her small, earnest mind, that had seemed unbearably unfair. She had wanted to share something she loved, to make him less alone.
She remembered, too, the way the laughter had stopped. The way her mother’s hand had tightened around hers. That was the day she learned it was forbidden to speak of the god with no name.
Forbidden even to wonder.
And so she had stopped.
She had stopped asking. Stopped thinking. Stopped whispering little offerings into the dark.
Not until the day her family betrayed her, until the day she stood abandoned and humiliated and alone, and there had been no one left to pray to.
No one but him.
Lyssena did not sit back down. Her fingers slowly uncurled from the edge of the table, though they still trembled, and she swallowed past the tightness in her throat before forcing the question out.
“How,” she asked, her voice no longer sharp but fragile now, stretched thin with too many realizations hitting her all at once, “did you intervene?”
“In small ways,” Erevos replied. “Ways that would not frighten you. Ways that allowed you to believe the world was merely . . . kind.”
A chill moved across her skin at that.
“When your father opened his drawer during the winter you turned seven,” he continued, “and found silver coins he did not remember earning.”
Lyssena’s breath caught.
That winter had been bitterly cold, the kind that crept beneath doors and through cracks in the walls, settling intobones and refusing to leave. She remembered the way her father’s voice had filled the house one evening, calling her mother to the bedroom.
Coins. Several of them.
Small, dull silver pieces resting at the back of his wooden drawer, beneath folded cloth, where no one had placed them.
She remembered standing in the doorway, small and barefoot, watching her father turn the coins over and over in his rough hands, frowning as though trying to recall a memory that would not come. He had insisted he would never forget earning silver, not when money was so scarce.
But that week, they had eaten warm bread every night.
Her mother had bought thicker wool for lining their cloaks. Lyssena had been given a pale blue ribbon, which she had worn in her hair until it frayed.
She had thought it a miracle. She had thought perhaps the gods had finally answered.
“I placed them there,” Erevos said simply.
Her stomach twisted.
“There were other times,” he continued, “When your grains were eaten before harvest. When your flowers were trampled.”
Lyssena’s lips parted slightly. She remembered that, too.
The small patch of land behind their house had been her mother’s pride—rows of modest vegetables, delicate flowers lining the fence—and there had been seasons when animals broke through. Chickens from neighboring yards scratching through their grains. Pigs nosing beneath the fence and crushing blossoms beneath blunt hooves.
And yet . . .
There had been evenings when her father would return home carrying meat.
Not the thin broth they were used to, but proper meat. Roasted chicken, crisped at the edges, the skin blistered andfragrant. Pork slow-cooked with herbs, the scent filled the entire house and made Lyssena dizzy with hunger before she even sat down.
