The Sword at My Throat
The sword at my throat was, I had to admit, unexpected.
Not because I hadn’t seen it coming. I had watched the man holding it move through the chaos of the battle with twelve men behind him — a man whose steps I had steadied, whose arm I had made certain, whose courage I had personally poured into him like wine into a cup he didn’t know he was holding. I knew exactly what he was capable of. I had made him capable of it.
I simply hadn’t moved.
“Your husband?” said the man holding the sword. He glanced down at Garrick, who had fallen between us.
“No. Not my husband. But we are lovers.”
It was not true. It was, however, the first explanation that arrived, and I had learned in the last hour that explanations are far more readily accepted than silence. Silence made everyone suspicious. A lie, delivered with enough conviction, is simply filed away as fact.
Garrick looked up at me with the expression of a man who had just heard something he could not account for. He opened his mouth.
The boot caught him in the ribs before he could use it. He made a short, sharp sound and said nothing.
I gave him the look that suggested that if he did decide to speak, he would find himself doing it without a voice. He closed his mouth.
The man with the sword studied me for a long moment. Then, to the men behind him:
“Put them both in the prisoner’s shed.”
Two men separated from the group. One took Garrick by the arm, not gently. The other pressed the flat of a blade between my shoulders to indicate direction, which I allowed because I had chosen to allow it, and for no other reason at all.
A door opened in front of us. Inside: dirt floor, a fire pit gone cold, no windows, the smell of old hay. A dog slipped past my legs and entered ahead of us like it had been waiting for exactly this.
And that was how I, Selune, Lady of the Moon, ended up locked in a storage shed with the warrior who had prayed to me every night of his adult life, and a dog that would not stop investigating my sandals as though it suspected I might be edible.
I should explain how I got there.
I had been watching them for centuries.
Not constantly. That would have been tedious, even for a goddess with nowhere else to be. But often enough to know the patterns. Mortals fought. Mortals prayed. Mortals died. And then they started the whole thing over again, as if the last time had taught them nothing.
That night the valley below had been loud with the sound of a war about to begin.
Two clans. Same mountains. Same old argument about the river that ran through the narrow pass. They had been killing each other over it since their grandfathers’ grandfathers were children, and I doubted any of them living now could explain how the quarrel had started in the first place. The river fed the lower fields on both sides, which meant neither clan could simply leave and farm elsewhere. They were tied to it the way two people were tied to a single bed too narrow for both of them — unable to share it, unwilling to leave it. Over time, the motive behind the quarrel became unimportant, and the fighting had simply become its own reason.
From my place among the stars I could see both camps clearly.
The tribe on the eastern ridge had built their fires high. Their altars were fresh — rabbit blood still glistening on the stones, silver trinkets laid out in careful spirals. They prayed loudly. One man stood before the largest altar, head bowed, voice carrying on the wind in a way the others’ did not. Dark hair falling across his forehead. Tall, strong build, and the fire in his eyes outmatched only by the one burning in front of him.
“Selune, Lady of Moon and Silver, give us strength tomorrow. Let our blades be lucky and find the enemies on their knees. Let their blood water your earth upon which you shine.”
I liked him. I had watched him before, the way you watch something you find amusing and worth the attention. When he fought, he moved like he believed the gods were watching, which was a belief I happened to know was occasionally true. That kind of belief had power. It made him sharp. Dangerous.
His name was Garrick. Leader of the eastern clan, and among those who prayed to me with the most fervor, his voice was always the loudest, his offerings always the most carefully arranged. You could not remain indifferent to that. Not even as a goddess — especially not as a goddess, when your power came precisely from those who knelt and called your name.
On the western slope, the other camp was quieter. Fewer fires. No altars. No prayers drifting upward. Just men sharpening steel and speaking in low voices. Their leader sat apart from the rest, back against a pine tree, cleaning his blade with slow, deliberate strokes.
I knew this one as well — not because he had ever prayed to me, but because his name appeared constantly in the prayers coming from the eastern camp. Protect me from him. Weaken him. Let him fall before he reaches me. Kael. The name his enemies gave me like a gift, wrapped in fear, every single night.
He was larger than most, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of stillness that made other men nervous. Dark hair, sharp green eyes that never seemed to rest on any one thing for long. The men I overheard said he had killed twelve men in single combat before he turned twenty-five. They also said he laughed when people spoke of the gods in his presence.
I found that interesting. I am not certain why. I had been worshipped, feared, and occasionally blamed by mortals for centuries, and not one of them had ever simply found me funny.
I let my awareness drift lower, closer, until I could almost taste the woodsmoke and the sharp, particular smell of men who were afraid and working very hard to pretend otherwise. I had smelled fear from above before. I had never been close enough to taste it.
I was not a cruel goddess. Fair, perhaps, though that was debatable, depending on which mortal you asked and how recently I had disappointed them. I did not usually intervene directly — at most I breathed something into the hearts of those who prayed, courage or clarity or the particular sharpness that came just before a fight. I did not move against their enemies, even when the prayers begged for it. If they wanted their enemy weakened, or cursed into the ground, I was not the goddess for that. I had never been the goddess for that.
There were rules to this, even if mortals never learned them. I could give. I could not take. A blessing was mine to grant freely, on a whim if I wished it; a curse belonged to someone else entirely, and reaching into another god’s domain without invitation tended to produce conversations I preferred to avoid. Especially if the god in question was my brother. It was a tidy enough arrangement, most centuries. It kept the sky orderly and the gods mostly out of each other’s business.
Looking at the valley now, at the terrain and the numbers, I could see what Garrick could not. He was at a disadvantage. A serious one, and growing worse by the hour.
The night before the battle, I saw the rest of it — the western force moving quietly through the northern pass under cover of dark, splitting in two, the larger half cutting wide through the pine forest to come at Garrick’s flank while every eastern eye stayed fixed on the valley below, waiting for an attack that wasn’t going to arrive from that direction at all.
I could have sent a dream. A sign. Something subtle and appropriate for a deity of my standing.
Instead I decided to go down myself.
I had never done it before. I couldn’t bring all of myself — Nyxar watched the sky the same way I watched the valley, not constantly but often enough. If the moon disappeared he would notice. He would come looking, and the conversation that followed would be long, and he would be right about something, which I preferred to avoid.
There was also the question of what happened to a body if something went wrong with it. I did not have a clear answer. I assumed I would simply return above, the way water returned to a cloud, but I had never tested the assumption and saw no particular reason to test it on the first attempt.
So I left most of myself above. The moon stayed. A little dimmer than usual — a clouded night to anyone looking up. Nothing unusual.
I brought the rest down and built a body around it.
A body required a face.
I could have chosen something plain. Forgettable. The kind of woman who moved through a camp and left no trace of herself behind, who could ask questions and vanish before anyone thought to remember her features. It would have been practical. It would also, I decided, have been a waste of an opportunity I did not expect to have again.
I was a goddess.
I chose to be tall, dark-haired, with hazel eyes that shifted gold in firelight and held something in moonlight that had no name in any mortal language.
A small vanity. I allowed myself that much.
I gave the body no weapon. A weapon implied a particular kind of threat, and I wanted to arrive as something else — unarmed, unaffiliated, difficult to categorize on sight. I chose clothing that would not immediately mark me as belonging to either camp. I had not yet decided what my voice would sound like, or how to keep my footing steady enough not to trip over everything on the ground. That, it turned out, was not something I could plan in advance. That I would simply have to discover the way mortals did — one clumsy, undignified moment at a time.
