But Siveni…”
She trailed off, having no answer for Harran that he would want to hear. Perhaps he knew it. “We’ll make it work,” he said. “Gods have survived being mortals before.”
“Yes,” Mriga said. “But that’s not the way she had it planned.”
She looked at a bar of sunlight that was inching across the bare wood floor toward the other piece of furniture, a table of blond wood with one leg shorter than the three others. “Time to be heading out, love. Do we all eat together today?”
“She said she might not be able to make it… there’s something going on at the wall that may take extra time. An arch of some kind.”
“We should take her something, then.”
“Always assuming that I get paid.”
“You should hit them with lightning if they renege on you.”
“That’s Siveni’s department.”
“I wish it were,” Mriga said. She kissed Harran goodbye and left as he was looking for a hasp to rehang the door.
Mriga walked slowly toward her own work, threading the streets with the unconscious care of a lifelong city dweller. It had been a busy year for all of them… for her in particular. One day Mriga had been just another madwoman…
Harran’s bedwarmer and house servant, good for nothing but mindless knife sharpening and mindless sex. The next, she had been awake, and aware, and divine-caught in the backwash of a spell Harran had performed to bring back
Siveni from whatever oblivious heaven she and the other Ilsig gods had been inhabiting. Harran had been one of Siveni’s priests, the healer-servants of the divine patroness of war and crafts. He had thought he would remain so. But the spell had caught him, too, binding him and Siveni and Mriga together through life, past death. That was no mere phrase, either, for the three of them had been in hell together, and had come back again to what should have been a cheerful, delighted life together… long years rich with joy.