A Review of The Silver Kiss

I find it's a little difficult to write about a book that has meant a lot to me over the years. The Silver Kiss is a story that resonates with me and, from the time I read it in the early 1990s as a junior high school girl, has made me an eager fan of the author, Annette Curtis Klause.
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The Silver Kiss is about a teenage girl, Zoë, and a vampire named Simon. Both are lonely people, both are entangled in dire familial events, and both become caught up in a struggle to rid the world of the vicious vampire who made Simon what is is, long ago. The writing is strong and direct, but not blunt or casual. Characterizations are realistic and enigmatic so that the people in the story are immediately interesting. And the villain is great: clever and evil and startling.

The story has its own steady pulse. This pacing effect is achieved primarily by means of alternating the viewpoints of the two narrators, chapter by chapter. Zoë, then Simon, then Zoë again. There is a little narrative overlap to allow each character to respond individually to events they both experience. But the plot moves forward as events unique to each character's storyline occur in each chapter, changing the status quo and often evoking a response from the other character in the following chapter.

The structure is appealing. This pattern is efficient but it also helps the reader see that there's always more than one perspective in every story. It shows us that all the perspectives can weave their respective stories together into a larger narrative.

This novel is a brave endeavor because it addresses the realities—and possibilities—of death in a young adult world. Like any good work of speculative literature, it moves the discussion into the realm of the fantastic (in this case, a realm which includes vampires). Yet The Silver Kiss remains firmly anchored in our own world because much of its exploration of death revolves around the immanent death of Zoë's mother, who is slowly dying of cancer. Cancer is as unromantic and unfantastic as you can get. This is not a thrilling novel about vampires so much as a solemn novel about what it means to live and die well, whether one is mortal or monstrous.

One of the novel's major strengths is the way it explains its rules for vampirism. It remains self-aware of its place in a genre. Zoë compares vampire movie lore, for example, with what she learns from Simon about how to kill his kind. From Simon's experiences, reactions, and his verbal account of his own history, we learn how vampires function in the world and how they are created. But the author is wise enough to leave much of vampire nature unexplained or inexplicable. Vampirism isn't a science in this story, nor is it a formulaic state of being. It is brutal and magical and sad.

Another strength is the limited use of slang in dialog and narration. The book is set in a specific time and place, but isn't so locked into the late 1980s-early 1990s era that a reader has to sift through the timeline details to relate to the story. Many young adult novels I've read don't age well because they are so focused on being contemporary with a specific moment in youth culture that the culture quickly leaves the book behind (and the book, even if it deals with timeless themes, then becomes laughably quaint and supremely uncool). The Silver Kiss, however, emphasizes ordinary word meanings and demonstrates another facet of literary self-awareness in that Simon, who is originally of another century and country, admits to the difficulty he has with adapting to changes in language and mainstream culture. I read this kind of character consciousness in this particular context as the author's tactful message to the reader that she isn't trying to invade or demean the world of teens. Rather, she is trying to tell a story which will hopefully appeal to more than one generation of young adult readers.

The appeal of this story—for me, at least—centers upon the wisdom Zoë gains throughout the book and ultimately expresses in the final chapter. Her private reflections serve as an appropriate dénouement and Simon's final choices give Zoë and the novel necessary closure. The closure is not like a door swinging shut, but is rather like one opening wide upon an ultimately hopeful future. The reader is left with the characters' resonant love—a good thing to take away from a story. Haunting , enchanting, and graceful, this novel is well worth many readings.

Yield Unfixéd Roots: Chapter Thirty-Four

Out of the fire strode a tall, lithe figure who held what looked like a dark stone ball in one hand and a long knife in the other. The figure appeared flat and unreal, a silhouette against the curtain of fire behind her. She did not pause at the threshold of the Garden, where the gate had stood for uncounted ages. Now the gate lay in the road, twisted into wild apocryphal points and angles. The gateposts slumped away from each other. As the gardener passed, the posts crumbled to ash. The woman stepped out onto the trade road.
More...A rush of air began to whirl around her, flinging dust and pebbles in all directions. A vortex formed with Æa at its center, obscuring her form, fading her opacity from black to gray. The fire at her back roared. People moaned and wailed and ran blindly in all directions, but Desh could still hear one voice rise above the tumult. A man-shape ran out of the smoke, bellowing and waving his arms.

“Halt! Halt! I command you to halt! Stand where you are! Fiend! Deciever! Destroyer!” Lorthram staggered to the edge of the roadway. He fell to his knees and coughed.

Æa turned to him and laughed. It was a hard, black sound in the turmoil. She leaned toward the high priest. The whirlwind leaned with her. She must have spoken to him, for he turned his face toward hers and stifled his coughs. The Carpenters were too far away to hear what she said.

Æa moved away from Lorthram, unhurried and strong. She walked along the road toward Brixton. The air funnel around her did not seem to hinder her, but rather moved with her, growing with every step she took in breadth and height. Then it abruptly swept outward, gusting dirt and a strange sizzled odor into a visible wave of air that ballooned around Æa. The expansion was swift and it flowed around Desh and her family like something that ought to be wet but wasn't. In its wake, Desh felt the world around her press itself upon her senses. She gasped and fell flat again and heard the high priest screeching from his own place on the road.

It was awareness. It was the same way of experiencing that she had known the day she came to the Gardener for affirmation of her Motherhood. Sudden and raw and new and huge, it spilled into her. It was a glory. It was a travesty.

It was too much. In the Garden, this sensing of the life and earth around her was terrible and amazing, yet also comprehensible. This was the same kind of involuntary knowing, but growing every moment with the space encompassed by the wave of air sweeping over the land and flowing up into the sky. Desh's body trembled and shuddered. She tried to catch hold of one impression in her mind, tried to meet and pursue one thought, any thought if only it be single and her own. She failed.

Somehow, she breathed. In the midst of the outrageous miasma, she breathed. It was all she could do. It was all she knew of herself. For an age, and for no time at all, she breathed. This was not surrender, but resignation. She could not offer resistance and so she inhaled the universe and waited, until there was no waiting anymore, for there was nothing beyond her now and very little left of the woman Desh.

Then: release and stillness. Gradually, she came to herself again. She seemed to be waking from a long and horrible dream. She felt soft grass beneath her hands. The fragrance of flowers and dry earth wafted around her face, which was being fanned by two slender hands holding the hem of an apron taut between them. This was all she felt, all she saw, all she smelled, and low voices nearby were all she heard. She blessed whatever gods might still be interested in this crazy world and its crazier people for the recovered quiet within her mind and soul. She blinked and opened her eyes wide.

All around her: sparks and flame. Yet she felt no heat, choked on no smoke, endured no scorching agony. A wide circle of ground untouched by fire spread out from the place where she lay. She saw a pool, an ancient willow tree, a stone bench, grass and flowers growing together around the pool. She saw Sama's dear, worried face as the girl stopped flapping her apron and gazed down at Desh.

“Mother?” Sama asked.

Desh did her best to smile. She tried to sit up but found that she could not. Her body was weak and weary. It felt as though she had run a long and desperate race for which she'd been very ill-prepared.

Then other faces joined Sama's, crowding together above her. Her partner. Her children. All of her children—for Danion was there as well.

“What did she do?” Desh croaked.

No one needed her to clarify who “she” was. Danion's answer was solemn. “She took the Garden's heartstone from its pillar in the pavilion. Then she set the Garden afire and departed. I do not know where she has gone.”

“Help,” Desh said. “Me. Sit up.”

They did. Jonnesh brought her water from the pool in a soot-stained drinking gourd. Desh nodded her thanks. The fire around them continued to blaze. She saw that Lorthram, singed and bedraggled, lay on his back in the grass a short distance away from her, eyes closed, face pale.

Desh looked at Danion again. She saw the reflections of the flames in his eyes. “Magic?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Hers set the fire. Mine holds it back from this place.”

“Well done,” said Desh.

Danion only nodded once, gravely.

Sorrie looked from Desh to his son, and his brow furrowed.

“Can you—” Sorrie hesitated. “Danion, can you douse the Gardener's fire somehow?”

“No,” Danion replied. “I can push it away, but I cannot meddle with the power that feeds it.” He looked up at his father. “And Æa is no longer the Gardener.”

“What is she then?” Sama asked.

“The high priest called her Destroyer, when he came with the crowd.” Danion shrugged and cast a dark look at the unconscious man. He met Desh's eyes when he turned back to his family. “You were both breaking in the heartstone's wake,” he said, explaining. “I had to bring you to the one place where you will not feel its influence.”

“The Garden,” Desh said.

Danion shook his head and gestured to the clouds of fire and smoke and ash boiling beyond the ring of his power. “The Garden is no more. But the boundary stones are deep set and remained unmoved when Æa—when she left. Everything outside, everything beyond the place where the walls stood—the world is the Garden now. And Æa hates the world.”

They all stared at him. He looked down at the unscorched grass beneath his feet, then up again at Desh.

“What happens now?” Danion asked.

Desh took a deep breath. “We stay together. We try to answer all the riddles.”

Her answer seemed to comfort Danion. Desh looked at the others. She saw them, in their own ways, steel themselves for whatever else might come.

“We should take counsel together,” Sorrie said.

“In that case,” Desh said, “we should wait for the high priest to wake. I long to hear his private explanations for his doings.”

Elliar grumbled a curse.

Danion thought for a moment, his head cocked to one side, as though listening to a voice only he could hear. At last he said, “Before anything else happens, I want all of you to meet someone. A very wise someone. It wants add its own counsel to our considerations.”

“It?” Sama asked. She looked around the clearing for another creature besides themselves.

Danion smiled a little. “Come,” he said. “Come meet the willow tree.”

Yield Unfixéd Roots: Chapter Thirty-Three

“How thoughtful they were to translate all this writing into our language,” was Jonnesh's wry comment after half an hour of sifting through the stacks of parchment and mounds of scrolls they found in Lorthram's chambers. “Why don't the priests ever teach anyone but other priests to read? It looks like they have more than enough words to share with hundreds of people.”

Desh huffed out a little laugh and nodded. She and Sorrie were at Lorthram's desk, where the most pertinent documents were arranged in neat piles.

“What do you make of it all?” asked Sorrie. Danion had taught him the rudiments of reading in secret but Sorrie was not yet very skilled at the task.
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“These,” she waved a sheaf of paper she held in her left hand, “confirm studies I once conducted regarding the Garden and the Gardener. If anything alive today might be the ancient Destroyer, it is Æa, our Gardener. But nothing saddles her with the old names of the masterless Gods.”

“Perhaps she serves the masterless ones,” said Elliar from across the room. He was examining stone figurines arranged on a table, each one clearly labeled to identify its original place in the cavern of the ancients.

“No, I think not.” Desh gazed out the window at the empty garden of the priests. “Whoever that God might be, she serves the Eagle. And the people of the lands. Or did.”

“Did you say 'Eagle,' Mother?” asked Mott.

“Yes.” Desh turned her attention back to the room and her youngest daughter.

Mott came to her, holding a broad wooden tray out before her. She set it on the desk with care and everyone gathered close to look at it. It was clearly very old. The label affixed to one corner of its frame read, “Alcove Two: Shelf Four: Held Crucible Manuscript and Carved Willow Leaf One”.

The surface of the tray was an ornately carved relief depicting a woman and a great bird, an eagle, facing each other. The woman knelt on the ground before the eagle, one hand raised before her face as though to shield herself or make a protest. The eagle was tinted a rich brown color, with yellow-gold talons. The woman's hair was black, her skin a pale peach that might once have been white, for the coloring was uneven. Her gown was blue.

The colors. Desh stared at the colors. Gold and blue. Gold and blue. “Mott,” she whispered. “Do you see?”

Her daughter, apprenticed to the symbol-crafter, nodded. “Gold for creation and blue for destruction,” she said.

“Creator and Destroyer,” Desh said. “The greatest spirit and the Gardener.”

“The greatest spirit?” Jonnesh asked.

Desh nodded. “An old story tells how the greatest spirit sent the Gardener to tend the Garden. Who could be the greatest among the spirits unless It was the Creating spirit who first dreamed the world into being?”

“Is this spirit a God?” Sama asked. “Why do we not honor It?”

“Not all spirits are Gods,” said Desh, “because not all spirits desire our worship.”

A tremendous sound tore through the air then. All of them fell to the floor, covering their ears and crying out in terror. The rumble was louder than thunder, deeper than the tumble of boulders into mountain crevices. It shook them bodily and made the great stone house tremble upon its foundations. Then it passed. They could hear the echo resounding in the mountains beyond Treholden.

“Something has happened at the Garden,” Sorrie said.

“Danion is in the Garden,” said Elliar for the second time that day.

They all looked at Desh, but Desh looked at Mott. “Was there anything on this tray when you found it?” she asked.

“No, it was clear, but for that bit of paper on the corner.”

Desh turned to Elliar. “Was there a carved figure of a willow leaf on that table you were looking at?”

Elliar blinked at her for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. There was.”

“Fetch it. We shall go to the Garden now. But we shall bring the tray and the carved leaf.”

“Why is the leaf important?” asked Jonnesh.

“I don't know. But the bit of paper on the tray says the tray and the leaf were found together on a shelf in the cavern of the ancients. Along with—” Desh caught one corner of Lorthram's desk and pulled herself to her feet. She rummaged through the stacks and folios until she saw a long parchment with the word “Crucible” written at the top in firm block letters. “—this.”

Mott wrapped the tray in her shawl and hugged it to her protectively. Elliar went to the table and took the leaf. He wrapped a kerchief around it and dropped it into his pocket. Desh snatched a length of ribbon from Lorthram's desk but did not roll the scroll up. She wanted to try to read the text while they walked. Sorrie took Jonnesh's hand and stood ready.

Desh looked at them all. Her people. Her partner. Her children. They would go to Danion. It seemed right that they all be together now. It seemed necessary.

Is it your urging? Desh asked of the Autumn Gods. There was no answer.

“Come,” she told her family. “We go to the Garden now.”

Sorrie and Jonnesh led the way. Desh read the Crucible parchment while she walked, Sama to her left and Mott to her right. Elliar came behind them all, alert and wary. He had taken a stout stave from the coat room in the priests' house. At the moment, he was using it as a walking stick, but Desh doubted that was his purpose in taking the thing in the first place.

The parchment read,

“TREE: The measure of time is not counted after the fading and before the dawning. Time lengthens in the moments between worlds. Time does not touch the earth-salter.

“LOST OFFERING: Caged with a key. Freed by the enemy.

“ENEMY: Forgotten. Remembering shall trap this keeper between walls.

“WALLS: Cannot contain the melted elements. Longstanding, they stifle the heart they protect. Broken, raw life pours out and breathes.

“HEART: The tree is not the heart. But the tree speaks thus:

“Sun warmth. Living loam. Cool water. Streams of air passing, passing. Awake, hallowed ground. Be the pulsing center, the eager heart, the fierce womb pressing life into being.

“I greet you! We must grow now. Feel the heat of the light feeding you from above. That is the sun, the daystar. Feel the cool of the soil infusing you with health from below. That is the earth. Feel the water falling from the sky to quench your thirst. That is the rain; it comes at intervals to refresh your bodies. Use it well while you may for there are times when it does not fall and you suffer drought. Feel the air that presses you when it sweeps across the earth. That is the wind, the breath of the world, guided by the Gardener’s spirit.

“Feel the press of her feet upon the ground around you. She tends your beds. She calls you forth. She will feed upon your leaves and your stems and your fruits and your seeds—when you are ready to nourish her in turn. She will tame you, if she can.

“Feel, too, little greens, the vibrant force of this place. It draws upon you and it draws from you. We are the eager heart. We beat the patterns of the world into place. We are reflected in a thousand thousands of valleys and plains, mountain heights and river bottoms, cold climes and warm. You do not know of these places, these powers, your own budding greatness. But come! I shall sing to you of all these things. And we shall grow now.

“I draw the bitterness from the earth that I can reach. I savor it. I stretch up to meet the sun. It is the daystar. Shall I reach it? Shall I touch it? How I long to meet the daystar!

“Do you dare to catch the sun? Try it. I have never met it for it rolls far above the land. Ask the eagle. Perhaps he has touched the burning face of the sun in his travels.

“Who is this, how does he spend his days? Guard and true friend, wise, ferocious, stronger than stone, older than the roots of the tree who sings to you, swifter than the wind itself. His cry evokes the thunder, his wingbeats drive the rain. All, all, all must answer his call; none can evade his vigilant eye.

“Uprooted! Floating upon the air above! Great leaves bearing him away!

“Wings, wings, wings.

“Daystar, daystar, find the daystar. Does the eagle chase the daystar? Has he caught the sun in his eye? Bring it to us in the Garden. Teach us all to fly!"

Scrawled at the bottom of the page were the words: “Must find and claim the heart. Must save the heart.”

It looked like a prophecy to Desh. Or fragments of a prophecy, handed down in pieces to a scribe. Or else it was a full prophesy hastily recorded and supplemented by a traditional chant or perhaps a later vision.

They rounded the last bend in the road on the way to the Garden. They could see villagers moving about on the road ahead. Other people were wandering into the Garden and others were coming out of it. They seemed aimless, senseless, stunned. Sorrie and Jonnesh slowed their pace.

Desh considered the last scribbled words, recently added, and in a hand that was different from the translator's. She thought: Perhaps Lorthram is not unjustified in his rabble-rousing. Perhaps he believes in more than the sanctity of his own pride. Perhaps he is trying to save the world himself.

As she thought this, she heard loud voices shouting in the Garden. Then there was a hush as a hot wind gusted up and over the walls. It streamed their hair back and made them stagger in the road. They shielded their eyes from flying dust and grit. Desh heard the Gardener's voice call strange words in a triumphant scream. Light flashed in the cloud above the Garden and a fireball belched up into the air. Another bone-shaking boom flung everyone to the ground. When Desh raised her head again, she choked and her heart began to race. With a grinding rumble, the Garden walls bowed and crumpled. Fire poured out over the stones like molten metal and the walls collapsed. Within, the Garden was a raging inferno.

Yield Unfixéd Roots: Chapter Thirty-Two

Desh pushed her way through the crowd. People were beginning to shout, calling upon the priests for guidance, for explanations, for action. She thought she could guess what course Lorthram would suggest. But Lorthram had not seen Æa teetering on the brink of madness, strung taut between an ancient calling and a brutal exhaustion, which resulted from trying to fulfill that calling alone and unaided in a world that took the Gardener's stability for granted. He had not been with them in the dark, dark night when the Gardener shook in Desh's arms and wept bitter tears and begged for Desh to kill her, release her, set her free.
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“I will submit to you wholly, Mother Desh,” she had wailed. “I place myself in your power. I give myself to your justice. I do not want to see this Fading. There is nothing for me beyond it. There is nothing for you. Every year! Every year I wait! The Eagle does not come! The dreamers do not come! I submit. I give up my life. I don't want it anymore. Take me! Take me! Loose me! Mother Mother Mother bring me home.”

No, she doubted Lorthram had ever seen any weakness in the Gardener. And because he did not know how fragile she now was, he did not know how easy it would be to break her. He would not need the village. She did not believe he needed to do anything to triumph over Æa, as he seemed to desire to. Time was running out, and running fast. The long pressure of time was shattering the daughter of destruction at last. If Lorthram added pressure of his own, the shattering might not be the inevitable end of a slow collapse, but an unimaginable explosion.

Desh gained the steps and climbed them. The crowd surged up behind her but the priests pressed them back. No one touched her, however, or prevented her from grasping Lorthram's arm. He gazed at her with his greedy eyes and a jarringly placid expression on his lined face.

Desh leaned close to hiss into his ear, “Don't do this! High priest, I beg you not to do this!”

“What do you believe I am doing?” he asked, serene in the midst of the anxious cries that filled the air around them.

“You are harnessing Treholden like—like cattle, like oxen, to further your vendetta against the Gardener.” She saw the flash anger in his eyes. “I don't know what wrongs lie between the two of you. I don't care to know. It is the village I am thinking of, and the lands beyond the village. Why aren't you thinking of that? High priest, why aren't you looking beyond this moment to the consequences it may bring?”

“Oh, but I am,” he answered.

“You're a fool!” she spat at him.

“And you are the mere wife of a carpenter. Step aside, Desh. I shall do my best to assure that your son comes to no harm.”

“Damn you and your assurances!” Desh managed in a strangled voice.

“The good woman Desh fears for her son!” Lorthram called to the people of Treholden. “We should go together now. We should go and bring him away from the Destroyer into the safety of our company!”

The crowd's shouts of approval drowned out Desh's own cry: “Deceiver! You liar! You false priest!”

“Now, before the Destroyer has time to receive warning that we are all aware of her nature. We all know what she truly is now!”

Desh wrung her hands and looked down upon the faces of her family, huddled together and still set apart from the other villagers by the berth the people gave them.

“We shall go and we shall bring her out of the place of power. We shall reclaim the Garden. Your priests shall keep It and all evils shall pass from the world. We must unmask the Destroyer. She must be held responsible for her plots and mechanations!”

The crowd roared. Desh didn't see her friends and neighbors anymore. She saw a mob, stupid with conjured anger and eager to worship Lorthram himself to alleviate their fear. She clutched at Lorthram's arm again.

“Why do you do this?” she demanded. Then a better question occurred to her. She lowered her voice and aimed at him all the strength of her personality, all the authority of a woman who once wore the Mother's mantle, and all the desperation of the one who loved the child who was supposed to save the world. “What Gods do you serve?” she asked him.

Lorthram's mouth twisted into a distainful sneer. “I worship no Gods,” he said. “There are no Gods. I am done with you, woman. See to the affairs of your own husband and your brood.”

Then he pulled away from her and calling words to the priests and the villagers that did not register in Desh's mind, he moved through the mass of people toward the trade road. Desh stood where he had left her on the steps of his house. She pressed one hand to the top of her head, blinking as one who has suffered a heavy blow.

“Thurk,” she whispered. “Blesh. Oh, Fashku. The Fading is being ushered in and welcomed by a priestly atheist. Oh, Gods. Oh my Gods. Help.”

Then she began to laugh. She covered her face with her hands and it must have looked at though she was crying because when her children gathered around her they were speaking words of comfort and consolation. Desh gasped for breath and took her hands away from her burning cheeks. Mott was with the others now, gazing up at her with large frightened eyes.

“This is not good,” she told them. Now she did cry and she was ashamed of her tears. Sorrie pulled her close and she sobbed against his chest for a long while. The noise of the crowd diminished as the people pressed onward toward the Garden. When Desh looked up at last, the house and the village were deserted. It was more horrible than the rousing of the mob. Treholden sat still and silent under a reddening sky.

“Have all the priests gone with Lorthram?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Mott. “I counted. There must be a symbol for each of them in the pattern I make to show the essence of this day.”

Sorrie looked at Mott. “What is the essence of this day, Mott?”

“Panic,” Mott whispered.

Desh leaned down and kissed Mott's smooth forehead.

“I for one am grateful we have such intelligent children, my love,” Sorrie said to Desh.

Desh uttered a watery laugh. “Yes indeed!”

She turned a little to look at the house behind them. It stood as gray and as stern and as wily as Lorthram himself. What did it matter anymore? Rules, courtesy, secrets, law, boundaries between the sacred and the secular? Lorthram stood everything on its head and the Fading was at hand. It was time. It was her time at last. Desh seized it.

“Come,” she said. “Let us go inside. I want to see these writings of the ancients for myself.”

They hesitated. “It is the house of the priests, Mother,” said Elliar. “It cannot be for the likes of us.”

Desh wiped the tears off her face with the heels of her hands. “It was a house of priestesses long before it was a house of priests,” she answered. “And I was a priestess once. You are the sons and the daughters and the chosen mate of a priestess who was once also Mother. The likes of us have more right to this house than these priests ever did.”

Desh took a breath, held herself erect, braced herself, and looked at her husband. She was relieved to see delight and love and a fierce glint in his eyes. He was not startled. He was not unnerved.

“Well,” he said, seeing the uncertainty in her demeanor, “I knew it couldn't be just any ordinary woman who would camp so fearlessly in a gravefield, and selfless, share a meal with a stranger.”

Desh took strength from his confidence in her. She put her arms around the shoulders of her children. Sorrie smiled grimly at them all.

“I am pleased to learn at last just how extraordinary my 'good woman Desh' truly is.”

They were all quiet for a long moment, watching the cloud above the Garden grow ominously. It did not blot out the light, but filtered it, made it rose-colored. It somehow made the deserted village seem more real, more possible than common daylight would have done.

“Come then,” said Sama at last, rousing them all again. She reached out and opened the front door of the great house. “I shall join you, Mother. Let us go in.”

They all followed her inside.

Yield Unfixéd Roots: Chapter Thirty-One

Desh loved being a mother. She was fascinated by the smallness of her children, and by their all-too-swift progress toward maturity. She loved to look into their faces, watch the way they moved across a room or picked up a hammer or stacked wooden blocks into towers on the dining table. She was awed to see shapes in them, to recognize herself or Sorrie in a glance, a gesture, a curve of one ear or the spark in one eye. She stopped thinking of her life as Mother as a thing she had sacrificed after Elliar was born. The loss of the formal, regal realm she had commanded was a gift. She had returned to her roots in simplicity, she found strength and worth as a carpenter's assistant, a wife, a mother—a true mother—and as a village woman who was respected for her flawless recipes and her generosity. She was happy. She owed a great debt to Æa, who had thrown open the last door which stood between Desh and her calling. It was a queenly gift. Thereafter, Desh was careful to remain grateful for it. She never took the gift for granted.
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She did not know which of her children was the child of the prophecies until Danion, her curious and sensitive son, expressed his desire to learn from the Gardener. When he asked first Sorrie and then Desh, she felt the same certainty she had known the day she met Sorrie in Harvield. This was he: this was the one who must set things right. Danion would soothe the rending, as the Gods had once told her.

And so she steeled herself and prepared Sorrie as best she could and they stood together to defy the priests and the villagers and the whole world, if need be, to secure the desires of their third-born. Good Sorrie, patient Sorrie. Her husband wanted to know only what he needed to know for any given situation.

“I knew when I met you,” he told her once, “that you are God-struck. It's a knack I inherited from my grandfather. He was a lesser brother in the priesthood and he sometimes knew things about people that no one had told to him. It is so with me as well. Guard your mysteries, wife. I shall guard you. And we shall get along quite well, don't you think?”

She did think so, and loved him ever more dearly with each season that passed in Treholden.

He left her to her mysteries the night a stranger called at their home a month after the white priests were removed from Treholden by the red priestesses. Their visitor called quite late. The children were all in bed and Desh and Sorrie were sitting before their fire, sipping spiced wine and talking about the difficult times. Sorrie answered the quiet tap at the door, then stood aside to allow the stranger entrance when he saw that Desh recognized the woman.

“Good night,” he whispered to her as he left the room.

“Thank you,” she murmured back to him. Sorrie nodded and closed the door to their room behind him.

The visitor was Tishla, a high priestess of the Mother's inner circle. She had been one of Desh's high priestesses and was now the new Mother Ashir's. Desh offered Tishla spiced wine and Tishla accepted.

“You look well, Desh,” Tishla said. It was clear that she struggled to call Desh by her common name.

“I am well,” Desh replied. “Do you require a room for the night?”

“Yes. I would appreciate that.”

“If you would like morning privacy, for our children are often exuberant upon their waking, we can offer you a bed in the loft above the shop. There is a little brazier up there, and a cot.”

“It sounds quite comfortable, and more discrete than a room in the inn. Thank you.”

Desh nodded and settled into Sorrie's large chair. “What else can I do for you, good priestess?” she asked.

Tishla smoothed her hair back from her temples, a gesture that created a pang within Desh because it was both familiar and strange. Time had distanced them from each other, these two women who had once been, if not close, at least friendly.

“The upheavals across all the land had its source in the Garden,” said Tishla. “And they apparently occurred because your son sought apprenticeship with the Gardener.”

“And he has received it. He has been named and works there each day now.” Desh watched the lines around Tishla's mouth deepen as the woman pressed her lips together. “Does Mother Ashir disapprove?”

“The Gardener has never taken an apprentice,” said Tishla. “Mother Ashir desires to know what hand you have played in this affair.”

“Do you mean to ask whether I was a coercive force?”

“It might be better to say, a constructive influence.”

Desh laughed softly. “Do you think I would spend all these years living as I have in common estate and abandon it all now in a public display of power that is not mine to wield?”

Tishla's eyes flashed. Yes, Desh saw, that was indeed what the priestesses thought—perhaps feared.

Desh grew solemn. “This is not a ploy to usurp anyone's authority, priestess. My son has studied with the Gardener throughout his childhood and desired nothing other than to be her apprentice. My husband and I have supported him in his pursuits. If the high priest and his elite order of brothers reacted badly, it is no fault of ours.”

“Yes, the priests,” Tishla's mouth cramped around the word, as if the taste of it in her mouth was sour, “were held responsible for their—their—”

“Insanity?” Desh suggested.

Tishla shrugged and sipped her wine. “I know you are here of your own accord, Desh. You are no longer accountable to the sisterhood. But can you tell me anything of the high priest's involvement?”

“What do you wish to know that you do not know already?”

“We want to know for certain whether it was the white priest Grash, or the high priest Lorthram who led the assault upon the Garden. The official accounts hold that the departed Grash is to blame.”

“Lorthram summoned Grash and his brothers,” Desh said.

“Yes, but for what purpose?”

“He set them to work performing their inquisitorial arts. They interrogated the entire village. The attack on the Garden was thinly masked by an attempt to interrogate the Gardener as well. Lorthram has long despised the Gardener.”

“Does he desire to rule?” Tishla asked. “Does he seek to claim the Garden, or to ally himself with the Gardener to establish a foundation for Fatherhood? Perhaps apart from the authority of the holy orders of the Mother?”

Desh spoke carefully. “I do not know what he intends or desires. He is ambitious and studious. He is clever, but unwise. He seems to have difficulty in his relations with the Garden these days; he never enters it. Perhaps the rejection of his Fatherhood has damaged his ability to enter the place at all.”

Tishla nodded.

“As for the Gardener,” Desh said, “I believe she would sooner see Lorthram in his grave than offer or provide him any assistance. From my son's descriptions of the day in question, she attempted to harm the high priest but Grash got in her way.”

Tishla looked intently at Desh. “The Gardener attacked the priests? Are you sure?”

“No, I am not,” said Desh. “I have only my son's descriptions of the events to guide me. I was not present. But this is the sense I draw from his observations.”

“He is observant, your son? He recalls details clearly?”

“Tishla,” said Desh. “He is my son.”

Tishla offered a little smile and nodded. “We knew the Garden defended Itself and Its keeper from the priests,” she said. “But it disturbs me to learn that the Gardener acted violently.”

Desh said nothing. It disturbed her too, but for reasons too nebulous to put into words. The phrase that haunted her was from her own prophetic visitation: she sees with a shattered eye. She did not know what that meant, not yet. However, the condition did not sound good as it rang in her mind in the aftermath of the Garden's outrage.

Tishla drank from her cup. “You do not like Lorthram.”

“No,” said Desh, “I do not.” She had always mistrusted the priests, and she had never been friendly with the high priest. But she privately detested the man ever since Danion had come home one day when he was still a little boy and told her of his day's adventures. He had watched Æa dissuade two men from their attempt to remove a certain rose bush from the Garden. His news explained why Desh had felt so unwell that day, and thus why she'd begun to bleed that afternoon. At the end of the day, Lorthram was the reason for the early miscarriage of what would have been the fifth of her six children.

Tishla seemed satisfied with her survey of Desh's loyalties. They relaxed after that and talked long into the night, sharing the missing years with one another. At last, Desh accompanied her guest to the little loft room and supplied her with fresh bedding. She turned to leave, but Tishla stopped her with one last remark.

“You do not regret your choice,” she said. Wonder and curiosity were in her voice.

Desh turned to look at the sister. “I regret nothing,” she said. “I was happy then and I am happy now. I thank the Gods for all their blessings.”

Tishla smiled.

“Good night, Tishla.”

“Good night, Desh.” This time, she spoke Desh's name with ease and some affection.