I momentarily consider following Emmet, but after a brief consultation with my legs, decide against it. Instead, I slump back into the lawn and settle into the grass, rolling the dice on whether it’s wet, or just cold.
As the wet patch spreads up my back, something hard digs into my shoulder. I muster up my strength, and with a herculean effort, flop around until the chunk of church window pane is in my hand. I bring it up to eye level and let the moonlight do its thing through the stained glass.
The Mother’s eye and half of her forehead glitter back at me, done up in the artist’s best try at benevolence. Clearly an apprentice’s work, no idea how it ended up on the front of the church. The cheerful crinkle to her eye pisses me off and I throw it over my shoulder. It clinks off another shard somewhere off in the darkness and I frown. We better not get in trouble for the windows.
A pair of feet crunch their way over and Evelyn squats down next to my head. She bobs forward and her face blocks the moon.
“So that was The Mother?” She says after finding nothing better to say. I hum in response but it mostly dies in my throat. She sniffs back a runny nose, but a drop ends up gathering on the end of her nose, giving it a witch’s hook.
“You good?” She wipes her nose across her sleeve and sighs.
“Yeah. It was all just a lot, you know?”
Abbey walks over, hands in pockets, looking equally morose. I give her a multipurpose nod and she returns it.
“It can never be easy, can it?” She says without any real energy.
Since we all seem to be stuck on rhetorical questions, I lever myself up and brush the glass off my shirt. The villagers mill about happily in the town square, the post-game party still going strong. By the look of the bonfires – both accidental and otherwise – the festivities are set to go on for a while longer.
“What do we do now?” Evelyn asks, her voice grating against her throat. The question unfurls uncontrollably, encompassing far too much, too quickly. Bile gurgles around my gills and I cut the legs out from under it.
“Let’s try for a room in the inn,” I say quickly. Evelyn turns vaguely towards the tavern as if not recognizing it for a moment. “I’ll go find Emmet and meet you guys there.”
Abbey nods and I walk briskly off. They hang back, still standing motionless with a slightly dazed countenance. I step up the pace and slip into the drunken crowd. Those two can probably use some time to process everything, though I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m running away from them.
I momentarily stop feeling that way when I distractedly walk into someone, then almost get knocked off my feet when someone else walks into me. One of them shouts an apology, then dances off, twirling their partner in time with one of the five different bands that had started up in the past hour.
By the time I’ve managed to negotiate my way across the town square, I’ve had a tankard of ale pressed into my hands, had the ale taken off me again, and my back smarts from a dozen hearty smacks.
I’m deposited off to the side of the main party, beside a small group of older villagers, all listening to two greying men play the fiddle. They play reasonably well as they fight valiantly against the cacophony behind us. A lute plays a more energetic jig further down the street, and a kid claps along to both at the same time.
Although my tolerance for this kind of thing is usually pretty low, I end up sitting on a log and zoning out a little. A string snaps and sends the last note warbling to an untimely end. The audience cheers and the fiddler keeps the song going. His partner joins him, playing only three strings as well, and the song quickly falls apart amidst the laughter of the audience.
“The boy who healed my Jeremy?” Someone’s grandmother answers my question during the intermission. “I think I saw him heading towards the water hole. You’re a friend of his?” I nod and thank her for being useful. “What a treasure. Give him some of these when you find him.” She pulls a handkerchief full of biscuits out of nowhere and presses them into my hands.
I manage to get out of there without too much hassle and trot down the street, stuffing biscuits into my pockets and sighing in relief as the noise falls away behind me. The light from the bonfires dims and night properly falls as I thread through the buildings. The sound of lutes and lyres are replaced by the intermitted drunken giggling of parents taking advantage of a night free from their children.
I leave them be and keep walking, until the houses grow sparse and the gravel road is replaced by loamy farmland. I get directions from a passing drunk, and cut across a cabbage patch towards a mound of dirt in the distance.
Luckily, I see Emmet’s bad haircut poking up behind the mound. Just as well, I was going to go back to the inn if this didn’t pan out. I clamber up the hill and find him sitting on the edge of a large pond – probably part of a stream during the rainy months.
His feet sway idly, barefoot, in the water, and a line of string trails from his finger into the waterhole. An old man does the same a little way off, every now and then reeling in his line and dropping whatever he caught into a bucket.
Padding down the slope, I hang back as Emmet stares thoughtfully into the middle distance.
“I think that’s their drinking water, you know.”
My voice cracks, but does its job and breaks the silence. Emmet starts, glances back at me, then to his feet, floating in the water. He yelps and scrambles back, his fishing line trailing after him.
“By The Mother, I didn’t know,” he says, reaching for his shoes. I wave a hand and draw a little closer.
“I’m fucking with you,” I say. “It’s literally sitting in a dirt hole, anyway – hardly sanitary.” I make a mental note to stick to the ale while I’m here.
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Emmet sighs and settles back down, a ghost of a smile settling on his face. He dithers a little, but slips his feet back in the water eventually. The same contemplative silence returns and it looks like we might be here for a while. I sigh, pull my still-kind-of-damp socks off, and join Emmet by the waterside.
“So, ah, you good?” I ask, clinging firmly to my old reliable. Emmet shrugs and wiggles his fishing line a little.
“Not really,” he finally says, his voice soft and sad. It immediately puts this conversation outside of my realm of expertise and I click my jaw shut. I cycle through things to say, and manage a sympathetic hum a second too late for it to be natural.
“Was She like that when She spoke to you back in Kismet?” He asks, my meagre offering having apparently been enough. I nod in answer and his expression darkens a shade. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I keep my eyes focused on the fishing line, but I feel his gaze digging in to me. I scowl at the bobbing twine – it’s hardly my fault that his god’s a psychopath.
“For all I know, she’s meant to look that way.”
“The cruelty, Lucien – who cares what She looks like?” Emmet exclaims and I feel forced to meet his eye. “The Mother tried to kill us – tried to kill Evelyn and Abbey. She lied to us, threatened us, all in the name of self-preservation.” His hands creak, they’re clenched so tightly.
“Yeah, that’s bad, she sucks. But we would all do some pretty grim stuff in the name of protecting yourself,” I say, for some reason feeling the need to play defence for a god. Emmet bristles with real anger, and I draw back. “What’s wrong with self-preservation though?” I continue, more confused than anything.
“She could have just asked!” Emmet shouts. “She should have helped us get Evelyn back home. She should have been truthful and compassionate and kind.” He jumps to his feet, spurred by directionless energy. “Instead, She lied and schemed. For what? Power?” He kicks out and sinks his foot into the mud. “What ever happened to not coveting power? Why be so mercenary?”
“She’s a god, Emmet. Power’s her whole deal.”
“Power is for the Empress!” Emmet spits, the words bubbling up from deep within. “It’s for Fourey, Havale’s baron, and all the nobles. It’s for Sable, and the Empire, and you!” He throws an accusatory finger out, but I’m feeling too off balance to take offence. “The Mother is meant to be better than that, She’s not meant to be like them.”
He runs out of breath and angrily wipes his eyes with a sleeve. I stay sitting in the mud, feeling like a rabbit in an open field, not wanting to make a move lest an eagle make me its lunch.
“What’s she meant to be?” I ask into the silence.
Emmet snorts and the manic energy lifts away, his tired limbs lowering him back down beside me. “Suddenly interested in scripture?” He asks snidely.
“Enjoy it while it lasts, asshole,” I mutter back. His eyes flicker with guilt for a moment, before his inertia pushes it aside. He huffs and locks his jaw. After a few seconds, I almost think that he’s not going to say anything.
“The Mother is meant to be good,” he starts. “She’s kind, compassionate, everything that we should be. Everything that gets in the way of goodness, She doesn’t care about. She doesn’t have to think about it, She just does what’s right.” He brings his knees to his chin and buries his head in his arms. “Life’s full of things that make it hard to do what’s right. You want money, or food, or power. You need to protect yourself, protect someone else, a hundred excuses, a thousand rationalisations. It’s always so hard to find what you’re meant to do, what’s the good thing.”
He peeks out from his elbows and looks over the waterhole with glistening eyes.
“But The Mother is perfect, so there’s always a way to do the right thing. It’s never an untrodden path. It’s such a beautiful idea.” He pauses, and sniffs. “It was. What am I meant to do now? Why is doing good so hard?” His eyes turn back to me and I see that question haunting him, pushed down and rotted away.
“We’ve done some good stuff,” I try to placate him once my mouth starts working again. “You’ve healed people, gotten us out of some scrapes, annoyed a cult.” He doesn’t smile, if anything his frown grows deeper.
“And we’ve hurt people too. The Empire hurts people and I worked with them. And now the church hurts people. How do you do the right thing when whatever you do, somebody gets hurt?”
“Fuck Emmet. Isn’t that the big question?” I say, a little exasperated.
“What do you do, then?” Emmet asks, hiccoughing and not bothering to wipe his face. I roll my eyes and shift along with the energy in the air.
“I don’t do good – I’m an evil sorcerer.”
Emmet scoffs at that.
“No, you’re not, be serious for a second.” He brushes my identity aside and I grumble as I stew over a proper response.
“I don’t know,” I shift uncomfortably. “I don’t think about it all that much. It’s all about intentions, right? Just feel it out like everyone else.”
“And if there’s no perfect path? If not even The Mother can make the best choice?”
“Do the least bad thing? I don’t know Emmet,” I say, frankly getting fed up with the conversation. I try to dredge up something more substantial to say, but everything feels so painfully insincere. Empty platitudes spring easily to mind, but nothing that seems worth saying.
The old man across the pond tugs at his line and pulls something in with a bevy of splashes. He throws whatever it is into his bucket and casts his line again.
“Can you still use your healing?” I ask, picking at the grass beneath us. Emmet, looks up at the change in subject. Equal parts annoyed and grateful for it. “Us being on her shit list and everything.”
He lifts his hand with a humourless smile and a soft glow plays across his fingers. “I’ve been checking every few minutes.” He smothers the glow and hunches forward again. “I don’t think She can take it away.”
“So, you’re all just tapping into her or something?” I ask, this being much more interesting than metaphysics.
“Like worms,” he mutters. I sigh, feeling my emotional energy depleting. “Maybe I should stop using it.”
“No, continue healing us, thanks,” I say, coaxing a small smile from him. “Well, that’s perfect though, isn’t it?” He looks up, curiously. “Go around healing and stuff. Then at least some of her power’s going to something worthwhile, right?”
He shrugs, fiddling with the fishing line and turning things over in his head.
“Anyway, feeling any better?” I ask.
“Not really,” he says. His voice is lighter, like he’s managed to at least bring something out into the open.
“Well sometimes that’s the best we can hope for,” I say wisely and get to my feet. “We’re meant to be staying at the inn tonight. You want to come now?” He mulls it over for a second before nodding and climbing to his feet.
“Wait a minute, I need to give this back,” he says, gesturing to his fishing line.
We walk off towards the old fisherman and I trail behind. The old guy sees us coming and waves.
“Feeling better lad?” He asks and Emmet smiles and nods politely – which is slightly galling. “Catch anything?”
Emmet checks the end of the line, as if something would materialise without him knowing, then apologises when he’s met with bare string. The fishman waves it off and laughs. He leans down and grabs a pair of miniature lobsters, then hands them to me.
“What are these? Lobster?” I ask. It’s bright orange, so he’s cooked it already. The fishman seems to find that infinitely funny and begins choking.
“They’re yabbies son. Lobsters – imagine that.” He turns to Emmet and lays a gnarly hand on his shoulder. “Now remember, when the water’s muddy and you can’t see the yabbies, you can only ever do your best and throw a line.”
“Gods, spare us the fishing metaphors old man,” I groan and walk off, yabbies in hand. Emmet nods thoughtfully and follows me up the hill, waving back to the old man.
We wander in blessed silence back towards the village, our energy spent. I feel something bulging out of my pocket and I remember the biscuits that those old women gave me. I fish it out, juggling the yabbies and offer one to Emmet.
He peers into the handkerchief and takes one, nodding in thanks. I take a bite and he nibbles the corner. The taste of butter spreads through our mouths and he manages a small smile.
I should have just opened with this.