In a Garden Burning Gold by Rory Power

Author:Rory Power [Power, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

It had all seemed so easy that day in the church. Standing in front of her mother’s portrait, the room around her dark and cloistered, one shaft of light cutting through the window above, Rhea had felt different. Separate from herself, ancient and young in the same breath. It had taken nothing at all to look into her mother’s veiled eyes and say, “I will do what you have done.” And then she’d left the church, got back on her horse, and ridden here to Michali’s house, all the while realizing that doing as her mother had done was, in fact, going to be rather difficult.

Survive, really: That was the point of it. Mama had lived as a saint and only died some thousand years later, long after her very existence had been outlawed. She had seen a shift in the world coming, a new order beginning to take hold, and she had changed, let go of herself so completely that even these worshippers in the mountains who loved her so dearly had no idea she had not died like the others of her kind.

Mama had married Baba for protection—that Rhea understood. He’d been a general in a steward’s army back then, a position above scrutiny but not high enough to draw too much attention. As his consort, Mama would have been removed enough from sainthood by time and status that she could live safely. But there were still so many years before their marriage that Rhea had to account for.

It had taken her a number of days to understand the breadth of it, something she was a bit embarrassed of now as she sat, wrapped in layers of blankets, on the bed in her room at Michali’s house. Of course Baba had not been the first. Of course there must have been consorts before him, families found and then forgotten. Still, even knowing that, even understanding that Mama would have had to make her way somehow, it seemed impossible to Rhea that there might be other children she had left behind, strewn across the continent like bits of broken pottery. It was true that Rhea remembered very little of Mama, but she couldn’t imagine her as a mother to anyone else. Surely, when Rhea and Lexos had arrived, and been cradled against Mama’s chest, their little fingers linked together, they had been the very first.

And if they hadn’t been, well, those other children were long dead by now. That, at least, was some comfort.

The question now, though, was how far to follow Mama’s example. The more Rhea thought about it, the more nervous she became. If she did exactly as Mama had done, and allied her family with the side of those most dangerous to them in the service of self-preservation, that would mean taking the side of the people in the Ksigora, joining Michali and even the Sxoriza itself if she had to, so that she might protect Baba and her siblings if and when Thyzakos and later the federation came crashing down.

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