Nobody's Goddess (2 page)

“Your eyes better be closed, girl!” The old crone bellowed. Her own eyes were squeezed together.

I jumped and shut my eyes tightly.

“Hold that shawl tightly over your face, boy, until you can wear your mask properly!” screamed the old crone. “Off with you both, boys! Now! Off with you!”

I heard Jurij and Darwyn scrambling, the rustle of the bush and the stomps of their boots as they fled, panting. I thought I heard a scream—not from Jurij, but from Darwyn. He was the real fraidycat. An old crone was no match for the elf queen’s retainers. But the queen herself was far braver. So I told myself over and over in my head.

When the last of their footsteps faded away, and I was sure that Jurij was safe from my stare, I looked.

Eyes. Huge, bulbous, dark brown eyes. Staring directly into mine.

The crone’s face was so close I could smell the shriveled decay from her mouth. She grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me. “What were you thinking? You held that boy’s life in your hands! Yet you stood there like a fool, just starin’ as his mask came off.”

My heart beat faster, and I gasped for more air, but I wanted to avoid inhaling her stench. “I’m sorry, Ingrith,” I mumbled. I thought if I used her real name, if I let her lecture me like all the other adults, it would help me break free from her grasp. I twisted and pulled, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. I had this notion that if I touched her, my fingers would decay.

“Sorry is just a word. Sorry changes nothing.”

“Let me go.” I could still feel her dirty nails on my skin.

“You watch yourself, girl.”

“Let me go!”

The crone’s lips grew tight and puckered. Her fingers relaxed ever so slightly. “You children don’t realize. The lord is watching. Always watching—”

I knew what she was going to say, the words so familiar to me that I knew them as well as if they were my own. “And he will not abide villagers who forget the first goddess’s teachings.” The sentence seemed to loosen the crone’s fingers. She opened her mouth to speak, but I broke free and ran.

My eyes fell to the grass below my feet as I cut across the fields to get away from the monster. On the borders of the eastern woods was a lone cottage, home of Gideon the woodcarver, a warm and comfortable place so much fuller of life than the shack I left behind me. When I was near the woods, I could look up freely since the trees blocked the eastern mountains from view. But until I got closer …

“Noll! Wait up!”

My eyes snapped upward on instinct. I saw the upper boughs of the trees and almost screamed, my gaze falling back to the grass beneath my feet. I stopped running and let the gentle rustlings of footsteps behind me catch up.

“Jurij, please.” I sighed and turned around to face him, my eyes still on the grass and the pair of small dark boots that covered his feet. Somehow he managed to step delicately through the grass, not disturbing a single one of the lilies that covered the hilltops. “Don’t scare me like that. I almost looked at the castle.”

The toe of Jurij’s boot dug a little into the dirt. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Is your mask on?”

The boot stopped moving, and the tip of a black shawl dropped into my view. “Oh. Yeah.”

I shook my head and raised my eyes. There was no need to fear looking up to the west. In the distance, the mountains that encircled our village soared far beyond the western fields of crops. I liked the mountains. From the north, the south, and the west, they embraced our village with their jagged peaks. In the south, they watched over our fields of livestock. In the north, they towered above a quarry for copper and stone. And in the east, they led home and to the woods. But no girl or woman could ever look up when facing the east. Like the faces of men and boys before their Returnings, just a glance at the castle that lay beyond the woods against the eastern mountains spelled doom. The earth would shake and threaten to consume whoever broke the commandment not to look.

It made walking home a bit of a pain, to say the least.

“Tell me something important like that before you sneak up on me.”

Jurij’s kitten mask was once again tight against his face, if askew. The strap was a bit tangled in his dark curls and the pointed tip of one of his ears. “Right. Sorry.”

He held out the broken pieces of Elgar wrapped in the dirty black shawl. He seemed very retainer-like. I liked that. “I went to give this back to the—the lady. She wasn’t there, but you left Elgar.”

I snatched the pieces from Jurij’s hands. “You went back to the shack? What were you going to say? ‘Sorry we were spying on you pretending you were a monster, thanks for the dirty old rag?’”

“No.” Jurij crumpled up the shawl and tucked it under his belt. A long trail of black cloth tumbled out immediately, making Jurij look like he had on half a skirt.

I laughed. “Where’s Darwyn?”

“Home.”

Of course. I found out later that Darwyn had whined straight to his mother that “nasty old Noll” almost knocked
his
mask off. It was a great way to get noticed when you had countless brothers and a smitten mother and father standing between you and any form of attention. But it didn’t have the intended effect on me. I was used to lectures, and besides, there was something more important bothering me by then.

I picked up my feet to carry me back home.

Jurij skipped forward to join me. One of his boots stumbled as we left the grasses behind and hit the dirt path. “What happened with you and the crone?”

I gripped the pieces of Elgar tighter in my fist. “Nothing.” I stopped, relieved that we’d finally gotten close enough to the woods that I could face forward. I put an arm on Jurij’s shoulder to stop him. “But I touched her.” Or she touched me. “That means I win forever.”

The kitten face cocked a little sideways. “You always win.”

“Of course. I’m the queen.” I tucked the broken pieces of Elgar into my apron sash. Elgar was more of a title, bestowed on an endless number of worthy sticks, but in those days I wouldn’t have admitted that to Jurij. “Come on. I’ll give you a head start. Race you to the cavern!”

“The cavern? But it’s—”

“Too late! Your head start’s over!” I kicked my feet up and ran as if that was all my legs knew how to do. The cool breeze slapping across my face felt lovely as it flew inside my nostrils and mouth. I rushed past my home, not bothering to look inside the open door.

“Stop! Stop! Noll, you stop this instant!”

The words were something that could easily come out of a mother’s mouth, but Mother had a little more patience than that. And her voice didn’t sound like a fragile little bird chirping at the sun’s rising. “Noll!”

I was just an arm’s length from the start of the trees, but I stopped, clutching the sharp pain that kicked me in the side.

“Oh dear!” Elfriede walked out of our house, the needle and thread she was no doubt using to embroider some useless pattern on one of the aprons still pinched between two fingers. My sister was a little less than a year older than me, but to my parents’ delight (and disappointment with me), she was a hundred times more responsible.

“Boy, your mask!” Elfriede never did learn any of my friends’ names. Not that I could tell her Roslyn from her Marden, either. One giggling, delicate bird was much like another.

She walked up to Jurij, who had just caught up behind me. She covered her eyes with her needle-less hand, but I could see her peeking between her fingers. I didn’t think that would actually protect him if the situation were as dire as she seemed to think.

“It’s crooked.” Elfriede’s voice was hoarse, almost trembling. I rolled my eyes.

Jurij patted his head with both hands until he found the bit of the strap stuck on one of his ears. He pulled it down and twisted the mask until it lined up evenly.

I could hear Elfriede’s sigh of relief from where I was standing. She let her fingers fall from her face. “Thank the goddess.” She considered Jurij for a moment. “There’s a little tear in your strap.”

Without asking, she closed the distance between them and began sewing the small tear even as the mask sat on his head. From how tall she stood above him, she might have been ten years older instead of only two.

I walked back toward them, letting my hands fall. “Don’t you think that’s a little stupid? What if the mask slips while you’re doing that?”

Elfriede’s cheeks darkened and she yanked the needle up, pulling her instrument free of the thread and tucking the extra bit into the mask strap. She stood back and glared at me. “Don’t you talk to me about being stupid, Noll. All that running isn’t safe when you’re with boys. Look how his mask was moving.”

His mask had moved for even more dangerous reasons than a little run, but I knew better than to tell tattletale Elfriede that. “How would
you
know what’s safe when you’re with boys? You’re already thirteen, and no one has found the goddess in you!” Darwyn’s taunt was worth reusing, especially since I knew my sister would be more upset about it than I ever was.

Elfriede bit her lip. “Go ahead and kill your friends, then, for all I care!” The bird wasn’t so beautiful and fragile where I was concerned.

She retreated into the house and slammed the door behind her. I wrapped my hand around Jurij’s arm, pulling him eastward. “Come on. Let’s go. There’re bound to be more monsters in the cavern.”

Jurij didn’t give beneath my pull. He wouldn’t move.

“Jurij?”

I knew right then, somewhere in my mind, what had happened. But I was twelve. And Jurij was my last real friend. I knew he’d leave me one day like the others, but on some level, I didn’t really believe it yet.

Jurij stood stock still, even as I wrenched my arm harder and harder to get him to move.

“Oh for—
Jurij
!” I yelled, dropping my hands from his arm in frustration. “Ugh. I wish I was your goddess just so I could get you to obey me. Even if that means I’d have to put up with all that—
yuck
—smooching.” I shivered at the thought.

At last Jurij moved, if only to lift his other arm, to run his fingers across the strap that Elfriede had mended. She was gone from my sight, but Jurij would never see another.

It struck them all. Sometime around Jurij’s age, the boys’ voices cracked, shifting from high to deep and back again in a matter of a few words. They went from little wooden-faced animals always shorter than you to young men on their way to towering over you. And one day, at one moment, at some age, earlier for some and later for others, they looked at a girl they’d probably seen thousands of times before and simply ceased to be. At least, they weren’t who I knew them to be ever again.

And as with so many of my friends before Jurij, in that moment all other girls ceased to matter. I was nothing to him now, an afterthought, a shadow, a memory.

No.

Not him.

My dearest, my most special friend of all, now doomed to live or die by the choice of the fragile little bird who’d stopped to mend his strap.

Like most of the village, we couldn’t afford a mirror, but if you asked me, that was a good thing. By the time Mother was done trying to make me appear half a lady, I was ready to smash anything easily breakable within five yards of where I sat. “I don’t care how long you spend running the comb through my hair, it’s never going to be soft and supple.”

It’ll never be as beautiful as Elfriede’s
.

Mother dipped the wooden comb in the bowl of water she’d brought to the kitchen-table-turned-rack-of-torture. It wasn’t working too well. I could tell from the constant battle between my scalp and the roots of my hair that so badly wished to tear free of the skin. But it was either that or bacon grease, and I wasn’t having any pig fat slathered over my hair in attempt to tame it, not today.

She gripped a chunk of hair like the tail on a dead squirrel and ran the wooden comb upward. “Oh!” came the shout, followed quickly by the snap of the wooden comb Father had carved for her upon their Returning years ago. The comb that was only really a last resort, a gift meant for Mother to treasure and run through her own silky, wavy golden hair. “We’ve broken the last of them,” she sighed. “We can still use the grease.”

“
No
.” I could just imagine myself smelling of dead pig on the first day I’d look upon the face of the man I loved. Not that he’d care even if I showed up smeared in mud with a live pig under each arm and missing a few teeth. He only had eyes for his goddess.

“Mother,” interrupted Elfriede, the goddess who’d have his love with or without the mud and the pigs. She stood by the sink, perhaps hoping to see her reflection in the musty water collected there. One hand held a wavy lock of golden hair that had escaped from the bun at the back of her neck. “This keeps falling out.”

Mother crossed the room and ran the broken half of the comb through Elfriede’s loose tendril. I yanked and jostled the tangle at the top of my head until the other half of the comb came loose. “Can’t I just cut it short?”

“
No
,” said Mother and Elfriede at once, in the same tone I’d used moments before.

Elfriede patted the sides of her head as Mother crossed back over toward the bed my sister and I shared. “
Really
, Noll,” said Elfriede, without turning her head. “You act like a young boy enough already. What if someone glanced over and thought you
were
a boy—
unmasked
—running around? You’d scare the women in the village to death!”