Page 3 of Goddess of Light

I gulp. No pressure or anything.

“Can’t I just somehow get my powers down here?” I ask. They showed up before when Tuoni died. Isn’t there some way my mother can teach me, much like Vipunen did?

“I can’t stay here for long,” my mother says in a low voice. “The longer I’m here, the more I lose my strength, and the more mortal I become. You gather your strength from the sun, just as I do.”

“Yeah, but the sun…” I say warily. “Like the actual sun? Isn’t it a ball of gas? Won’t I just, you know, die?”

“It’s not what you think,” she says.

Uh huh. Very helpful.

“I will come back, won’t I?” I ask her.

“You will,” she assures me.

“You must,” Vellamo chimes in. “Otherwise, you might as well stay here.”

“She will be back,” my mother says sharply, her hair briefly turning into curling flames that rise like solar flares. “I will make sure she doesn’t forget.”

I frown. “Why would I forget?”

My mother’s gaze slides to mine, and she stares at me in such a way that I have a little Galadrial and Frodo moment. I would hate to see her angry.

Suddenly, I’m flooded with fear. I know she’s my mother and all, I know there’s so much I don’t understand and that there’s a fuckload of questions that need answering, but I really don’t know her at all. It’s not like she’s remotely personable. She even talks differently than the gods down here, as if she’s saying words she thinks are something a human would say.

I don’t even know if I should trust her.

What if Louhi has already gotten to her? The thought terrorizes me. What if this is a trap to take me out of the equation?

“You know what?” I say uneasily. “On second thought, maybe it’s better I stay here and help fight as I am. Vellamo and I just have to find the other Gods, the real ones, and Lovia and Tuonen, and then regroup. Tuoni and my father must be making their way through a portal somewhere, and honestly, I feel I should discuss this with him first before I?—”

But before I can finish my sentence, my mother reaches out and grabs my arm, plunging my world into blinding light and an electrifying hum that makes my ears feel as if they’re about to explode.

And then suddenly…darkness.

CHAPTER TWO

LOVIA

“You haveno idea what my mother will do to you when she finds out what you’ve done,” Rasmus says like a sniveling little weasel we’ve trapped.

I yank at the mycelia cord wrapped around him, causing him to stumble behind me over a tree root.

“Ourmother,” I sneer as I glare at him over my shoulder. “Don’t pretend we aren’t related.”

He regains his balance at the last minute, his red hair falling across his brow, his eyes full of hate. I know enough about the kind of hate that’s programmed into you; I’ve seen it in my voyages to the Upper World. It’s the kind that’s passed down through generations, coddled by society until it blooms into something wretched. I have to remind myself that Rasmus was just a mortal boy living in that world until my mother decided to use him for her own gain. The hate that burns in his eyes was put there byher, ignited under controlled circumstances.

Careful, a voice reminds me.Don’t make excuses for him. He’ll kill you the first chance he gets, and then it won’t matter who taught him how to hate.

I glance over at the Magician. He meets my eyes with two swirling galaxies amidst the black void of his face that’s sheltered beneath his hood. While we’ve walked through the beginning of the Hiisi Forest, the roots high, the trees thickening the further we go, we haven’t said much to each other. Rasmus has blathered on and on about how fucked we are, that we’re on the losing side, that we’ll regret this, but we’ve been more or less silent. A lot of thinking, a lot of planning.

And while I’m unsure how much capacity the Magician has for worrying, I’m doing enough for the both of us.

Still, I’m glad he’s here. When I thought he died, I felt the ground collapse under me. The thought of having to do all this alone was terrifying when it shouldn’t be. I should be stronger than that. I know how to fight, I know I’ve proven myself time and time again, and yet…with the Underworld as I know it, my land, my home, slipping through my fingers, I couldn’t bear facing the end of it alone.

I’m glad you’re here, I think, hoping he can maybe hear me.

The galaxies in his face swirl into a cosmos of pink and purple before turning into shooting stars. I don’t know if that means he heard me or not, but it comforts me regardless. Actually, it more than comforts me. It causes my heart to skip a few beats, for my blood to run hot and my skin to grow tight.

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