Page 27 of Captive

“I suppose everything should be about elves, instead?” That was certainly the way Ysurans saw things.

He shook his head. “I don’t care what humans do as long as they leave Kuda Varai out of it.”

“What do the Varai think of her?” she asked, nodding toward the statue.

“We believe she exists. We do not worship her.”

“How can you believe a god exists but not worship them?”

He looked amused by the question. It took him a few moments to think about how to answer it. “She’s never shown herself to us. She doesn’t answer our prayers. She doesn’t favor us, so we don’t ask for her help.”

She’d never shown herself to most Ardanians, either. Whether gods could be seen or whether they answered prayers did not seem to be a prerequisite for worship in Ardani.

“You follow the goddess of night,” Novikke wrote, looking up at him to confirm it.

He nodded.

“Does she have an equivalent in the Ardanian pantheon?”

He shrugged, then shook his head.

She paused, then tentatively wrote, “Moratha?” Another of the Five. The goddess of death, whose very name was taboo among Ardanians. She was the only one of them who was considered evil by nature.

He looked up at her, frowning, and shook his head. He looked more baffled than offended by the suggestion.

“I don’t know much about theology,” she confessed.

“I can see that.”

She twirled the pencil in her hand, considering him. “You know more about Ardanian culture than I expected.”

His eyebrows pinched together slightly. He turned back to the previous page and pointed to the line that read, “humans make everything about themselves.”

He thought Ardanians didn’t know about night elves because they were too self-centered to bother learning about other people?

“We can’t learn about you if you never come out of your forest,” she wrote.

“Leaving the forest has not gone well for us in the past.”

He wasn’t wrong. Once, the Varai hadn’t been so reclusive. That was before their war with the Ysurans four hundred and some years ago, and then the crusades a hundred years after that, when anti-Moratha priests had convinced the King of Ardani to attempt to liberate the Varai from their dark goddess. It hadn’t gone well for either side.

But that had been long ago.

“The crusades were over three hundred years ago. Ardanians aren’t zealots anymore.”

“That’s not so far in the past. My grandparents’ parents were there.” After a moment, he added, “And evidently, Ardanians have not grown much wiser or kinder in the past three hundred years.”

And again, he wasn’t wrong, so Novikke didn’t argue.

It occurred to her that he might have never left Kuda Varai before. If he had, it probably hadn’t been for more than a few miles. She could hardly imagine being bound to one place for her entire life, never getting to see the rest of the world.

“Don’t you ever want to see the world outside Kuda Varai?” she wrote.

He regarded her coolly. “Can’t,” he wrote with a clear trace of annoyance. She’d struck a nerve. He closed the book and started to turn away.

Novikke grabbed his arm to pull him back. He stiffened, his hand jerking toward his sword.

She quickly let go of him, raising her hands, and pointed to the book. Aruna, looking mildly embarrassed by the reaction, handed her the book.

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