Yeine rolled her eyes. “A tantrum. I suppose that’s to be expected, given your influence, but really…” She shook her head and sat back on her knees, looking around thoughtfully. For an instant her eyes darkened, from their usual faded green to something deep and shadowed, like a thick, wet forest, and then suddenly the orrery chamber was empty. All my dead toys vanished. En, too, for which I felt sudden regret.
“I’ll keep the rest safe for you,” she said, reaching up to smooth a hand over my hair as she had always done. I closed my eyes and relaxed into the comfort of familiarity, pretending for a moment that I was still small and all was well. “Until the day you can reclaim them and send them home yourself.”
I exhaled, grateful despite the bitterness her words triggered in me. It hurt her to make dead things live again; it went against her nature, a perversion of the cycle Enefa had designed at the beginning of life. She did not do it often, and we never asked it of her. But… I licked my lips. “Yeine… this thing that’s happening to me…”
She sighed, looking troubled, and belatedly I realized there was no need to ask. If she’d had the power to reverse my transformation into a mortal, she would have used it, no matter what harm it did her. But what did it mean, then, that the goddess who had supreme power over mortality could not erase mine?
“If I were older,” she said, and I felt guilty for making her doubt herself. She lowered her eyes, looking small and vulnerable, like the mortal girl she resembled. “If I knew myself better, perhaps I would be able to find some solution.”
I sighed and shifted to lie on my side, putting my head in her lap after awkwardly pushing my hair out of the way. “This may be beyond all of us. Nothing like it has ever happened before. It’s pointless to rail against what you can’t stop.” I scowled. “That would make you Itempas.”
“Nahadoth is unhappy,” she said.
I suspected she wanted to change the subject. I sighed. “Nahadoth is overprotective.”
She stroked my hair again, then lifted the tangled mass and began to finger comb it. I closed my eyes, soothed by the rhythmic movements.
“Nahadoth loves you,” she said. “When we first found you in this… condition… he tried so hard to restore you that it damaged him. And yet…” She paused, her tension suddenly prickling the air between us.
I frowned, both at her description of Nahadoth’s behavior and at her hesitation. “What?”
She sighed. “I’m not certain you can be any more reasonable about this than Naha.”
“What, Yeine?” But then I understood, and as she had predicted, I grew unreasonably angry. “Oh gods and demons, no, no you don’t. You want to talk to Itempas.”
“Resisting change is his nature, Sieh. He may be able to do what Nahadoth could not: stabilize you until I find a cure. Or if we joined again, as Three—”
“No! You’d have to set him free for that!”
“Yes. For your sake.”
I sat up, scowling. “I. Don’t. Care.”
“I know. Neither does Nahadoth, to my surprise.”
“Naha—” I blinked. “What?”
“He is willing to do anything to save you. Anything, that is, except the one thing that might actually work.” Abruptly she was angry, too. “When I asked, he said he would rather let you die.”
“Good! He knows I would rather die than ask for that bastard’s help! Yeine”—I shook my head but forced the words out—“I understand why you’re drawn to him, even though I hate it. Love him if you must, but don’t ask the same of me!”
She glared back, but I did not back down, and after a moment, she sighed and looked away. Because I was right, and she knew it. She was still so young, so mortal. She knew the story, but she had not been there to see what Itempas had done to Nahadoth, or to the rest of us Enefadeh. She lived with the aftermath—as did we all, as would every living thing in the universe, forever and ever—but that was entirely different from knowing firsthand.
“You’re as bad as Nahadoth,” she said at last, more troubled than angry. “I’m not asking you to forgive. We all know there’s no forgiving what he did, the past can’t be rewritten, but someday you’re going to have to move on. Do what’s necessary for the world, and for yourselves.”
“Staying angry is necessary for me,” I said petulantly, though I forced myself to take a deep breath. I did not want to be angry with her. “One day, maybe, I’ll move on. Not now.”
She shook her head, but then took me by the shoulders and guided me down so that my head lay in her lap again. I had no choice but to relax, which I wanted to do, anyway, so I sighed and closed my eyes.