Page 2 of The Isles of the Gods
He blinks and glances at me, brows raised.
“I think I’d like to hear you speak the words one more time,” I say quietly, closing my eyes to focus on his voice.
He softens, slipping effortlessly into the old tale. “The Mother made the world and watched it grow. The most annoying—but luckily for us, also the most entertaining—of her creatures began to demand more and more attention. So she did what all good leaders do.”
“She delegated the problem.”
“That she did. She created seven children: Barrica and Macean, the two eldest, born together and always jostling for leadership. Then Dylo, Kyion, Sutista, Oldite, and finally…” His voice catches, and then he pushes on. “And Valus, her youngest, always laughing.”
I can still hear Valus’s screams, some nights.
“Go on,” I say quietly.
“They each took on the tribes that would become countries, and busied themselves with answering prayers, blessing crops, healing ills. All the usual godly business. It kept them out of trouble—for a while, anyway.”
“But the gods spent too much time around us, and pickedup bad habits,” I chime in, where ordinarily the children gathered around my friend would be calling out to show off how well they remember. He has a flicker of a smile for that.
“One way or another, they learned how to covet,” he agrees, his words dying out. Now he’s telling the story of our lives, and there are no old words to recite—there’s no well-trodden path to follow to the end of the story.
It wasn’t enough for Macean’s people to come down from the mountains and carve him a new land by the sea. Barrica grew tired of her country’s rolling green hills. Oldite was bored with her deep forests, Kyion with the high cliffs and rich soil of their kingdom, and Dylo with the azure waters of hers. Each of them had their own complaints.
It began as jostling and ended in a war.
As Valus was the god of merriment and tricks, so Macean is the god of risk, the Gambler—and take his risk he did, his armies reaching out to claim the lands of his siblings.
Our goddess, Barrica, is the Warrior, and we became her soldiers.
But for all the fighting and bleeding and dying we were capable of on our own, nothing we could do compared to the destruction the gods could bring to the battlefield.
I’m a royal magician—I command not one element but all four. I was like a child with my toys alongside my goddess and her siblings.
Armadas were destroyed, ships sent skipping across the sea like stones across a pond.
Armies died in fire.
And Macean’s forces threatened to overtake Vostain, thelands of his laughing, smiling youngest brother, Valus. His sister Barrica met him head-on in Vostain’s defense, and…
And I will never forget that day.
The shock of their clash laid waste to the whole of Vostain, and every one of us heard Valus’s screams as his lands were reduced to what we’ve already begun to call the Barren Reaches.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
It’s only been a month.
Barrica held Valus in her arms, and she sent for me, the leader of her people. And we spoke. And slowly I saw what I had to do.
“I wish you’d come when we visited Vostain a few years ago,” I say, startling Galen out of his thoughts. “I wish you’d had a chance to see it. I keep thinking of the people there.”
“Who do you remember?” he asks. He likes to laugh, Galen—he would have made a beautiful priest of Valus had he been born somewhere, somewhenelse—but he never shies away from what hurts. That’s why he’s here now, at my side when I need him most.
“The queen’s cook made this fruitcake, and it hadsomethingin it—I could never figure out what, and I sent half a dozen different servants to bribe it out of her. I went down to the kitchens myself, but even my charm failed.”
“Surely you jest,” he snickers. “Who ever said no to you?”
“Well, today of all days, I confess it did happen once. Twice, if you count Lady Kerlion when we were fourteen.”
“Who else did you meet?”
