“You found me?”

“Before you found me, then. Merciful…! For a goddess, you certainly are thin-skinned.”

“Look at me, child. Thin? It barely keeps my bones from poking out—although there does seem to be more of the wrinkly old stuff than there once was. Go on, speak.”

“I was looking in a mirror and I saw him. He was in chains. Was that a true vision?”

Lisiya raised a disturbingly scraggly eyebrow. “A mirror? What sort? A scrying glass?”

“A mirror. I’m not certain—just a hand mirror. It belonged to one of the women I was staying with in Landers Port.”

“Hmmmm.” The goddess dropped her pot of salve back into her rumpled, cavernous bag. “Either someone was using a mighty artifact as a bauble or there are stranger things afoot with you and your brother than even I can guess.”

“Artifact…do you mean a magic mirror, like in a poem? It wasn’t anything like that.” She held up her fingers in a small circle. “It was only that big.”

“And you, of course, are a scholar of such things?” The goddess’ expression was enough to make Briony lower her gaze. “Still, it seems unlikely that a Tile so small, yet clearly also one of the most powerful, should be in mortal hands and no one aware of it, passed around as if it were an ordinary part of a lady’s toiletry.”

Briony dared to look up again. Lisiya was apparently thinking, her gaze focused on nothing. Briony did her best to be patient. She did not want the goddess angry with her again. She did not—O merciful Zoria!—want to be left in the forest by herself. But after the sticks in the fire had burned halfway down, she could not keep her questions to herself any longer.

“You said ‘tile’—what are those? Do you mean the sort of thing that we have on the floor of the chapel? And what is Zoria like? Is she like the pictures to look at? Is she kind?” Once, she recalled, her own lady-in-waiting, Rose Trelling, had gone back to Landsend for Orphanstide and had been asked an extraordinary number of questions by her other relatives—about Briony and her family, about life in Southmarch Castle, a thousand things. So we wonder about those who are above us—those who are well-known, or rich, or powerful. Are they like us? It was funny to think that ordinary folk thought of her as she thought of the gods. Who did the gods envy? Whose doings made them sit up and take notice? There were so many things Briony wanted to know, and here she sat with a living, breathing demigoddess!

Lisiya let out a hissing sigh. “So you have determined on saving me from this painful immortality, have you? And your killing weapon is to be an unending stream of questions?”

“Sorry. I’m sorry, but…how can I not ask?”

“It’s not that you ask, it’s what you ask, kit. But it is always that way with mortals, it seems. When they have their chances, they seldom seek important answers.”