“You don’t know what it’s like to be down here when he’s up there. With so few faithful left, I live at your speed. I think the way you think. Even”—she gestured at her body, Tara’s body—“reduced like this, my mind’s wider than those meat brains of yours, but I should be deeper, bigger, the way he is. Thinking in this register feels like talking after a helium hit. I sound ridiculous to myself. Imagine being so close to your other half, and still so far below. Can you blame me for wanting more?”

“If it hurts the city? Yes.”

The moon-Tara crossed her arms and waited.

“Fine,” Tara said. “You want to be public, we can do that. You have an interview with a Crier tomorrow night.”

“What?”

“A woman named Gavriel Jones.” She felt very tired. She took that feeling, crushed it in a vise made of will, and tossed it into the corner of her mental attic with all her other weaknesses. “We jump the news cycle, come clean. Tell the people of Dresediel Lex you’re here for them. You’re back, to heal forty years of wounds.”

“You want me to preach through the news.”

“Maybe that’s not how things worked back when you were starting out.”

“When I was starting out,” she said, “there were still—what’s the Kathic name for those big furry things with the tusks?”

“Mammoths,” Tara said. “The Crier wants a story. Give her yours. After what you did tonight, our only option is to go public as fast as possible.”

“Thank you,” the goddess said.

“It’s nothing.”

“It isn’t, though. Craftswomen don’t believe in gifts.”

“Some of us do.”

Seril could look awfully patient when she wanted. In the pits of those shining eyes, Tara saw herself as her mother might have seen her, complete in all her flaws.

“I do need help,” Tara admitted at last.

The goddess, to her credit, did not laugh.

“I need your archive. Your old records.”

“I don’t have anything like that.”

“Impossible.”

Seril shrugged. “I was never the bookish type. I lived in shadow and claw and moonlight. My children were poets and mystics and warriors, not accountants.”

“You must have left some scripture, some trail.”

“Why would I need scripture? My children are living sermons.”

“In case you ever wanted to prove your claim to what you own.”

“If I have a thing, it is mine. What does a claim matter?”

“Gods,” Tara said.

“Clearly.”

“You can’t possibly be this dense.”

“Excuse me?”

Tara’s apartment wasn’t large. She squeezed between her stained red couch and the bookcase. From the top shelf she took a slender black notebook and tossed it onto a skull-embroidered end pillow. “That’s the notebook I used to jot down my first experiments with Craft. Take it, if you can.”

The goddess raised one eyebrow.