GRP Chapter 30

The man was carrying something again.

Garthe crossed the room in long strides and set a bowl on the table. Clear broth, no solid contents. The smell alone was enough to imagine the taste. Pink eyes moved back and forth between the soup and the man. Garthe had taken the sofa across from her, his expression flat, watching. He showed no sign of adding anything further—as though his part were finished.

'He wants me to eat it. Presumably.'

First he'd made her expel what was in her mouth, then what had gone down her throat—and now he was giving her soup that smelled like this. She couldn't understand what sort of person he was at all. One moment throttling her as if he meant to kill her, and now—

'If I eat this, will he make me bring it back up again?'

It was a reasonable inference from experience. The faint wariness in Mariaeks's eyes produced a short, irritated sound from Garthe.

"Do you want me to feed you?"

Before the alarming statement had even finished—a statement she had no desire to picture—Mariaeks snatched up the spoon. It was pretty, gleaming, unbent. It filled with clear amber broth. She blew on it, made herself wait, then couldn't, and put the spoon straight into her mouth. It was somewhat hot. She could not have thought of spitting it out.

The taste was a shock.

Broth made from meat and various ingredients, simmered clear, with the correct amount of salt. The crucial element was the correct amount of salt. Ullri and Baen's approach to spices and seasonings had been rather unconventional. When they had none, they used none. When they had some, they used all of it. Unlike their food swinging between those two extremes, every flavor in the soup Garthe had given her blended into every other in perfect harmony, dissolving richly on her tongue, nothing standing too far out and nothing falling short. Mariaeks's eyes went bright and she was eating with frantic urgency almost before the first taste had registered.

Garthe's gaze settled on Mariaeks.

'Eating as hard as she can, in her way.'

He thought of ants or mice industriously breaking off pieces of a biscuit and carrying them away. Moving with great effort without making much visible progress—the resemblance was considerable.

He'd taken what appeared to be stock the kitchen had set aside for the next day, and she seemed to find it rather more than acceptable. Mariaeks's eyes kept catching the light like sunlight falling on a river. Now it wasn't just her eyes—the most honest part of her—but her whole face that had started to show it. The flat brows had curved. Her eyes were wider than usual. Every time she put a spoonful of soup into her mouth, her ears twitched.

This was the opposite of every reaction she'd shown him under threat. Not so much as an eyebrow had moved for any of it—accustomed to pain, then, but not to a pleasant reward.

It is the sun that strips the traveler bare. Not the harsh wind. Samthyeon's perpetual argument might, this once, be right. This once. Garthe was the kind of person who put a sword to the traveler's throat and told them to undress. He couldn't understand why anyone would take the long road when there was a short one, but this entity—the peculiar phenomenon of the imperfect god of perfect Heimdrykze—might require a different approach than usual.

He'd brought the pipe to his mouth from force of habit before realizing there was no particular reason to burn the herbs. Once when he'd gripped her throat, and once when he'd made her bring up the rotten potato. Two brief, forceful contacts had been enough to already quiet the pain that had been raging through him.

He looked at his hand, slowly closing and opening it. The plan he'd formed before entering flicked through his mind. Said aloud, it was something bleak enough to kill that fragile god's appetite immediately. Garthe ran a knuckle along his jaw, slowly.

'...Did he even need to?'

The thought had arrived without explanation. And the change was not simply that the curse had been pressed down, leaving reason to argue her usefulness over instinct. Even when reason was operating, Mariaeks had always been something to be wary of. "Wary" was a generous term for it—he had tried to kill her multiple times.

The only salvation. The paradise that leads toward peace. That was the definition he had given to what Mariaeks was. And it was what he had believed waited at the end of a road walked through cutting, burning, and killing thousands upon tens of thousands. It was also a destination he had at some point concluded didn't exist.

He had settled, without meaning to, into the calm she gave him. And then understood. How weak he had become. Three days away from Mariaeks on the subjugation—he hadn't been able to endure the curse surging back. It had been pain he'd passed through without difficulty before.

At a time when seeing golden wheat fields and verdant plains had grown far more familiar than the barren wastes left by the Void, a renowned high priest had once spoken. That one day the seal of Heimdrykze would break completely, and the Void would be unleashed, and the world would meet its end.

Everyone had denied it. But from roughly a hundred years ago, the damage caused by divine beings and inexplicable strange events had been steadily accumulating. The incidents piling up without end, day after day, had led people to understand. Perhaps the seal that had held firm for thousands of years had begun to crack. A dense shadow lay over the world, and countless living things trembled beneath it.

But Garthe had thought it wasn't death, or threat, or the world's end that everyone else feared—only that great goddess could undo him. She would shake everything he had endured through, and collapse it. She was not salvation.

Feeling threatened by something that looked as if it would take everything was natural. So Garthe had tried to kill the only salvation, his paradise, the great goddess.

'The great... goddess....'

Garthe's gaze moved over the target before him.

Hair half-fallen from its binding, disheveled. Eyes and nose red from having been made to vomit. The clear mark of a large hand still on her throat. The hems of her clothing and her sleeves soaked through from washing her face. The image of her cramming rotten potato into her mouth in desperation, then the unbecoming sight of her bringing it back up, passed through his mind in sequence.

A moment later, Garthe's gaze moved to the empty vase on the table.

'...One sip. Each day.'

'I hadn't drunk much. I only drank a very little bit at a time.'

The sound of Mariaeks making that grave, earnest confession surfaced in his mind. With that, the presence of the "great goddess" thinned and shrank.

About the size of a thumb.

No. A pinky joint.

Far too small to constitute a threat. Too close to ruins to be called paradise. Too weak to save anyone.

Not the great goddess. This was—

'Mariaeks.'

Mariaeks, staring straight at him with trembling eyes, had said it. In answer to what are you—she had not replied at length that she was the great goddess of Heimdrykze, possessing remarkable power, capable of saving or destroying him, a shaft of light and a calamity both. Just a name.

Mariaeks. That was all.

The busy sound of the spoon had stopped. The bowl was empty before he'd noticed. He had doubted she'd finish before sunrise, but somehow she had managed it with that inadequate spooning. Not a drop of broth remained. He entertained the thought that she might have licked it clean when he wasn't looking.

But Mariaeks couldn't set down the spoon, as if reluctant to let go. The amount hadn't been large, and it was nothing that would fill her up. A stomach starved for a long time was more delicate than expected. Meat was out of the question, but even soft bread was likely beyond what she could digest.

Eating anything else prematurely and being unable to keep it down—bringing it back up repeatedly—was a way to starve to death despite food being present. Given the unusually fragile body, it was better not to eat more. Unless it were something medicinal, or light enough to cleanse the palate—

Ah. Right. He had that.

Garthe remembered that he happened to have something falling into both categories. He rummaged in the side drawer by the table and produced a small box woven from thin branches.

Mariaeks, now that the meal was finished, seemed to have come back to herself—her face had gone stiff and tense again. Garthe had come, over time, to distinguish between the blank affect particular to gods who had lost their emotions and her expression.

He held out the small box. She was rigid and not moving. From her face, he had apparently held out a weapon rather than a box. At this rate it would take ages for her to open it.

Garthe opened the box himself and picked out a brown candy the size of a finger joint rolling around inside. An expensive candy made from sugarcane—used medicinally as well, so this much should be fine. He brought the candy to her lips and tapped them lightly.

"Mariaeks."

Mariaeks, her face rigid with tension, opened her mouth slightly. The candy slipped through the gap of that hesitation. As sweetness spread through a mouth still warm from the soup, her eyes went wide, then wider. The hesitation and tension dissolved along with the candy, without resistance. Her ears twitched—the same as when she'd been eating the soup.

After rolling the candy around in her mouth for some time, she lifted her head and met Garthe's eyes. Pink eyes, wet with something he didn't have a word for. An expression entirely unlike her usual—the one where she kept her eyes coolly, primly downcast.

"This..."

Garthe folded his arms and tilted his head slightly, looking down at Mariaeks. Had she ever voluntarily started a sentence before? It didn't take long to consider. She was someone for whom opening her mouth at all was uncommon.

"It's good."

He'd wondered what weighty thing she was building up to say. Garthe was well aware that Mariaeks was afraid of him. And to that person she had gone ahead and declared the unnecessary observation that the candy was good. The candy must genuinely be good.

"Thank you."

His eyebrow moved slightly at what followed. He found himself having the rare experience of being thanked by a god. The person saying it was Mariaeks—forcibly confined to the fortress and still wearing his handprint on her throat—and he was, quite simply, struck speechless by the absurdity.