“You’re…you’re…”

“Do I mumble? Very well, a demigoddess. When my father was young, he fathered a brood on my mother, who was a tree-spirit. It was all very romantic, in a brutal sort of way—but it’s not as if my father stayed around to help raise us. I didn’t call him ‘Papa,’ as you did with yours, and sit on his knee while he chucked me under the chin. The gods aren’t like that—weren’t then, and certainly aren’t now.” She chuckled at some private joke. “Like tomcats, really, and the goddesses weren’t much better.”

Briony lowered her knife to her lap but did not put it away. Even if the woman was completely mad, she had skills. Briony felt much better. She was still cold and tired, and still definitely hungry, but the weakness and misery of her illness and her many wounds seemed to have vanished. “I…I don’t know…”

“You don’t know what to say. Of course you don’t, daughter. You think I might be mad but you don’t want to offend me. In your case, you’re being careful because you’re cold and lonely and hungry, but you have the right idea. It’s never a good idea to annoy a god. If a mortal offended us in the old days, even in the smallest of ways, well, we were likely to turn him into a shrub or a sandcrab.” The old woman sighed and looked at her wrinkled hands. “I don’t know that I could manage anything that impressive anymore, but I’m fairly certain that at the very least, I could give you back your fever and add a very bad stomachache.”

“You say you’re a goddess?” It wasn’t possible. A forest-witch, perhaps, but surely goddesses never looked like this.

“Only a demigoddess, as I already admitted, and please don’t rub my face in it. There aren’t any true goddesses left. Now don’t be dull.” Lisiya frowned. “I can hear some of your thoughts and they’re not pretty. Very well. I hate doing this, especially after I already spent so much vigor healing you—ai, my head is going to hurt tomorrow!—but I suppose we won’t be able to get on with whatever the music has in mind unless I do.” The old woman stood, not without difficulty, and spread her thin arms like an underfed raptor trying to take flight. “You might want to squint your eyes a bit, daughter.”

Before Briony could do more than suck in a breath the fire billowed up in new colors and the darkening sky seemed to bend in toward them, as though it were the roof of a tent and something heavy had just landed on it. The old woman’s figure grew and stretched and her rags became diaphanous as smoke, but at the center of it all Lisiya’s staring eyes smoldered even brighter, as though fires bloomed behind volcanic glass.

Briony fell forward onto her elbows, terrified. The maid Selia had changed like this, taking on a form of terrible darkness, a thing of claws and soot-black spikes; for a moment Briony was certain she had fallen into some terrible trap. Then, drawn by a glow gilding the ground around her, she looked up into a face of such startling, serene beauty that all her fear drained away.