“The promise of a god must be kept. I promised my followers riches and delights. God-blood is delightful for them to drink. They revile your kith, of course, but oh how they love all the many parts of you. As for the wall, the half-ones deserved it, just as I deserved my punishment.”

“Why?”

“Murder.”

I remembered my dream of people in the agora killing the god. “The god of discovery.”

“Yes,” he said. “My brother.”

I heard the rustle of feathers.

“He lives on in Elysium birds,” said the god. “This one can sense the god-blood in you. It is drawn to you. I knew, when it called to you during the parade, what you were. You should see how it leans toward you. I must hold it back.” The god sighed. “The murder is my fault.”

“You killed your brother?”

“I may as well have. I, the pitying fool that I am, sought to help the half-ones. I admit Discovery irritated me. The tattletale. Always meddling in my affairs and exposing my schemes. Yet he was my brother, and though I sometimes loathed him, I loved him, too. And I was too clever. I had once stolen tears from the god of death. Take this, I told the half-gods, who had been marked by Discovery and thus had no freedom to scheme, to live, to hide, to be anything other than obviously what they were, and thus became the favorite playthings of the gods and hated and feared by humans. Anoint yourselves with it, and the tears of death will blind Discovery to you.”

His voice grew quiet with intensity. “But one half-god, child of wisdom, took my gift and divined another use for it. He dipped a blade in the tears and thus made a weapon fit to kill a god. The half-gods spilled immortal blood in their agora, and the pantheon will never forgive them—or me—for it. Eradicate them, said Wisdom, or they will multiply through the ages, and one day bear someone fit to overthrow us all. Death lifted his hand. Then the weakest god, the least among us all in power, spoke. Still, the god of sewing said, they are our children. Death studied the Seamstress, whom he loved. The pantheon argued. It was decided that the gods would forsake this island … and that I, as punishment, would protect the rest of the world from it and its unruly god-children.”

“I thought the Lord Protector was called that because he protected us.”