told her, had the underworld’s Queen come out of her dark halls. The only sound
was Tyr’s merry barking ahead of them as she led the way.
Mriga found it difficult to look at Siveni as they drove westward down
Governor’s Walk, and Siveni would not look at her at all. It needed no
omniscience to hear the anger rumbling like suppressed thunder in her. “Look,”
she whispered to Siveni, “you know I’m right.”
“No, I don’t.” Siveni paused a moment, watching the dark, familiar streets go
by, and then said, “You wrecked it, you know that? You and he would have been
out of here by now. And I would have managed: I always manage.” She paused
again. “Dammit, Mriga, I’m a maiden goddess! He’s in love with me, and I can’t
give him what he wants of me! But you can. And if I stay down here, you get my
attributes-all but that one. My priest gets what he wants-me. And you get him-“
Mriga looked long at Siveni, who would not look back, and began to love her
crazily, in somewhat the same manner as she had crazily admired Ischade. “I
thought you were the one claiming that the attributes would stay down here-“
Siveni ignored this. “I wasn’t entirely myself when he called me back,” she
said. “I made him lose a hand for my sake. The least I could do is make sure he
lives long enough to get some use out of his new one.”
The chariot turned south, past the tanners’ quarter. “You’re a full immortal,”
said Mriga. “You can’t die.”
“If I really want to … yes, I can,” Siveni said, very quietly. “She did it,
didn’t she?”
There was no arguing with that, whatever Ischade’s opinions on the subject might