Tara saw traces of her own features in the face Seril assumed: her cheekbones, and a line of jaw more her mother’s than her own. Perhaps she saw only what she knew to see. That was often the way with gods.

Part of why she didn’t like them. Craft was clear: no wiggle room with ink and blood and starlight. A deal worked, or did not. Rights relinquished could not be willed back. Absolute truth issued from signatures on paper. Subjectivity was for people who couldn’t hack it objectively.

She had thought like that when she first came to Alt Coulumb. Still did, most days. But then why had she removed her glyph from Shale?

Jones slowed as she neared the throne, like the Ebon Sea philosopher’s arrow that crossed first half the intervening distance, then half that, then half again. She stared into Seril’s face.

At the foot of the throne she hesitated, and looked away. Tara saw a bright wet line on Jones’s cheek.

Tara knew the feeling. She’d felt that way herself last year when the gargoyles introduced her to their Lady. Cynical analysis: gods prompted this neurochemical reaction as a form of self-defense. Awe each human you encounter. Seduce them with ultimacy. If she examined herself the way the schools taught her, she could see classic signs of subversion—a drastic change of behavior upon exposure to a divine being. Broken by blessing. The libraries of the Hidden Schools held volumes about conversion, indoctrination, torture. She remembered the woodcuts of rats in mazes and babies raised in boxes.

Priestess.

But the scholastic method was a conditioning all its own. Any break in the pattern of thought she’d learned was a moral failing, an intrusion of dark powers to be met with suspicion and fear.

Daphne held the flightless bird in the temple gardens.

We’re so alone, she thought. We touch one another too firmly and wound or break, or else we pull away. We tell stories in which we are lone noble heroes, until we stand face-to-face with a goddess and see something older and bigger than each of us because it is each of us, our souls touching, the subtle interaction at a distance of minds with minds, when we reach the edge of loneliness and teeter uncertain at the brink.

Or else, old teachers’ voices whispered, you kneel because you lack the strength to stand.

Jones asked the Goddess a question Tara could not hear.

But she heard the answer: “Yes.”

*   *   *

The night before, when had Cat crouched on the roof’s edge, Aev told her: first we invite the wind into our wings. Without the wind, we cannot fly.

It sounded stupid. Mystical mumbo-jumbo, self-evident, of course you needed the wind to fly, that was how wings worked.

Raz took her hand. She invited the wind.