Briony scowled right back. “I don’t want any prince. I want my brother back. I want my father back, and our home back. I want everything like it was before!”

“I’m glad to hear you’re keeping your demands to a minimum.” Lisiya shook her head. “In any case, stop thinking about wolves—they’re not relevant. There’s a stream over that rise and down the hill. Go wash yourself off, then drink water, or make water, or whatever it is you mortals do in the morning. I’ll pack up, then if you need more explanations, I’ll provide them while we walk. And don’t dawdle.”

Briony followed the goddess’ instructions, walking so close past the grazing deer on her way to the stream that one of them turned and touched her with its nose as she went past. It was an unexpected thing, small but strangely reassuring, and by the time she’d washed her face and run her fingers through her hair a few times she felt almost like a person again.

With her worse fears placated, a little food in her belly, and the company of a real person—if a goddess as old as time could be said to be real—Briony found that there was much to admire about the Whitewood. Many of its trees were so old and so vast that younger trees, giants themselves, grew between their roots. The hush of the place, a larger, more important quiet than in any human building no matter how vast, coupled with the soft light filtering down through the leaves and tangled branches, made her feel as though she swam through Erivor’s underwater realm, as in one of the beautiful blue-green frescoes that lined the chapel back home at Southmarch. If she narrowed her eyes in just the right way Briony could almost see the dangling vines as floating seaweed, imagine the flicker of birds in the upper branches to be the darting of fish.

“Ah, there’s another one,” said Lisiya when Briony shyly mentioned the chapel paintings. “Don’t your folk hold him as an ancestor, old Fish-Spear?”

“Erivor? Why, is that a lie, too?”

“Don’t be so touchy, child. Who knows if it’s true or not? Perin and his brothers certainly put themselves about over the years, and there were more than a few mortal women willing to find out what it felt like to bed a god. And those were only the ones who participated by choice!”

“This is all…so hard to believe.” Briony flinched at Lisiya’s expression. “No, not hard to believe that you’re a goddess, but hard to…understand. That you know the rest of the gods, know them the way I know my own family!”

“It isn’t quite the same,” said Lisiya, softening a bit. “There were hundreds of us, and we seldom were together. Most of us kept to ourselves, especially my folk. The forests were our homes, not lofty Xandos. But I did know them, yes, and while we met each other infrequently, we did gather on certain occasions. And many of the gods were travelers—Zosim, and Kupilas in his later years, and Devona of the Shining Legs, so the news of what the others did came to us in time. Not that you could trust a word that Zosim said, that little turd.”