She heard a note of hope there, and wondered whether she deserved it. Behind the altar, at the head of the chapel, she faced her audience of one. No. Two.

“In the beginning,” she said, “was the Mother.”

Chapter 62

62

Kai didn’t return to the Rest for weeks. At first she told herself there was too much work: board meetings, explanations. Jace’s trial, in secret session before the Council of Families. As the Grimwalds’ suit progressed, swarms of Craftsmen and Craftswomen climbed Kavekana’ai and wandered through its halls, studying and being studied in turn. Craft crackled about the mountain peak. Gavin spent three days trying to explain the basic principles of idolatry to curious Craftsmen, without much success. He emerged from the sessions white haired and shaken.

But once the furor faded, Kai still stayed away. One morning, after a long meeting with their defense team, she searched her reflection in the mirror and realized she was looking for excuses. There had been enough of those already.

So she descended Southern, walking easily now without her cane. Sea wind blew in her face and smelled, for the first time in a long while, fresh. The ocean lay like a blue razor against the throat of the sky. She tried to enjoy the walk.

The Rest was deserted as usual come morning, empty chairs on empty tables, the bar cabinet locked and warded. She climbed onto a table and pulled down the ladder that led to Mako’s loft.

Sunlight shafted through the thatch roof to dapple the bare wood floor. The low cramped space smelled of dust and paper and palm. She’d not been up here in years, since the old man invited her as a teenager to read. Shelves still lined the loft’s mountain-facing gable, packed with university press chapbooks and other, older volumes—bark-covered codices with slats of wood for pages, oracle bones from the Shining Empire, books chisel-etched on the pates of skulls, Kormish mercenaries’ battle-poems notched in the sticks they wove into their beards.

Mako slept in a nest of blankets on a straw bed by the open seaward gable.

Kai sat, and watched him.

The old man stirred. Groaned. He mumbled to himself in a language Kai barely recognized as Old Skeld, with strange overtones that raised the thin hairs on the back of her arm. He twisted on the bed. Joints cracked and popped.

Then he lay still.

“Who’s there?” he said after a while.

“That,” Kai responded, “is what I want to know.”

“Kai.”

“Yes.”

He sat up, and turned toward her voice. Her memory tried to paint his silhouette with details, the cragged scarred face and broken fingers and slumped shoulders and slight hunch. She did not let it. She saw only an outline, and a shadow, and within that shadow, maybe, deep down, a fire.

“I thought you’d come sooner,” he said, “or not at all.”

“How did you free me from that Penitent, Mako?”