The king rolled his eyes.

“No knock, Your Majesty?” asked the acolyte. Her voice was ordinary, if condescending, without the oracular tones of Hephestia’s high priestess.

“Insellia,” the king said, addressing her by name. “I’m sure the Great Goddess needs no knock to be aware that I have come again to petition at her altar.”

Insellia frowned and put out her hand. “I will take your petition to the Oracle, and she—”

“Thank you,” said the king, ignoring the hand. “But I would be loath to disturb her. I will carry the petition myself.”

“Very well.” The acolyte turned her rejected gesture into an invitation, though a reluctant one. If any man could approach the gods, what need would there be for priests and priestesses? She eyed the crowd of guards and attendants behind the king.

“I would not see the sacred space before the altar overcrowded,” said the king politely.

“A single companion, then.”

To everyone’s surprise and the acolyte’s outrage, the king pulled me forward. “You said one. He is hardly even half of one.” The king steered me around her and into the dark entryway of the treasury.

The inside of the treasury of the Great Goddess is no mystery, though it is a place few have seen. Once the king and I had circumnavigated Insellia’s obstruction, we moved to the left through a heavy black curtain. When it fell closed behind us, we were in pitch darkness. The king knew his way and guided me to the right, into more curtains, soft and heavy, and this time with no obvious opening between them. In rising fear, I batted my hands in front of me.

“Shhh,” said the king, bending close to my ear. “There is no opening, and if you step on the bottom of the curtain, you are fighting against yourself. Slide a foot forward, yes, like that, now again.” Step by step, we pushed on, the king’s hand firm at my back. The soft heavy curtain slid up past my face, and I found myself in the central room of the treasury, lit by the smoke-filled rays of light that came through the lenses set all around the base of the dome in its ceiling. Four pillars supported the dome, and between them was the altar of the Great Goddess.

Her statue sits facing away from the doorway where Insellia had awaited us, looking in the opposite direction from the enormous statue that now occupies the center of the completed temple. The larger statue of the Great Goddess lifts her staff. The smaller avatar of Hephestia keeps her staff against her shoulder and raises the orb of Earth to the heavens instead. Around her feet, the smoke from smoldering coleus leaves, constantly renewed, pours over the lips of their braziers.

As the king began to walk around the pillars to the altar in front of the Great Goddess, I followed until yanked back by the collar by the acolyte, who’d followed us through the curtains. At my squawk, the king turned to frown at us both. Then he waved me to a bench along the wall. The acolyte sat beside me. She nodded with approval as the king placed a small bag on the altar, with the deliberate clink of coins.

“I am Eugenides, by the will of the Great Goddess high king over Attolia and Sounis and Eddis, and I have come to ask . . . if war comes to my people, should I not lead them in battle?” He dropped to his knees and from his knees to his stomach and laid himself out very gracefully on the stones before the altar. The smoke from the braziers drifted over him in irregular billows, as if moved by a breeze I could not feel. The king breathed deeply and did not cough.

After a while, I assumed he had fallen asleep. Increasingly bored, I examined everything I could see in the dim light. There were shelves on all the walls, some of them already bearing treasures dedicated to the goddess. There were pitchers for pouring out libations, some gold and some silver, one shaped like the head of a lioness. There was a matching set of gold cups, figured with bulls and flowers. My bottom hurt. I shifted uncomfortably and the acolyte frowned.

I studied the Great Goddess, shining in the darkness. The treasury was new, but her statue was much older; the wood from which she was carved showed through the gold leaf. The pillars supporting the dome were tree trunks, smoothed of their bark and inverted, so they were wider at the top than at the ground. They too were older than the treasury, had once held up some other dome in some other temple of Hephestia.

The sunlight shifted while I sat, illuminating the orb of the Earth from a slightly different angle. It had phases, then, like the moon, and could have been read like a sundial if I had been sufficiently familiar with its aspect. Distracting myself from the growing ache in my hip, I figured how one might estimate the time. My feet did not touch the ground. It was an increasingly painful way for me to sit, and every time I moved, the acolyte’s frown deepened.

I had long since begun to regret being chosen, wishing Xikos in my place, when between one heartbeat and the next, Moira appeared. She stepped into view from behind a pillar too narrow to have concealed her, and I sat straight up in surprise. The acolyte hissed, and I turned to her in disbelief. Did goddesses appear every day?

Goddess of scribes and messenger of Hephestia, Moira was robed all in white, except for a shawl over her shoulder, which was a thousand different colors. Her coiled hair was held in place with silver wire. Her feather pen was tucked into her belt. She smiled at me, and I was stunned like a rabbit hit with a stone.

The reader may believe a goddess came bearing a message for the king or believe it was only the effect of the smoke from the braziers. The acolyte can offer no corroboration. From the slightly bored expression on her face, I gathered that she saw only the king lying on the floor, not Moira bending over him, the pattern on her shawl changing in the dim and uneven light.

“Eugenides,” said Moira, and I heard for the first time what the Oracle’s voice only echoed. “Tell me again why you pester the Great Goddess?”

“I ask humbly for instruction,” he replied, without lifting his head, speaking in the accent I hadn’t heard since I’d been ill, without the diplomatic overlay of Attolian vowels.

“You ask to have all things made plain to you. How is that humble?”

“Asking for guidance is not humble?”

“Asking may be. Expecting an answer is not.”

“I no more than hope, goddess.”

Moira sighed, shaking her head. “Lies, lies, Eugenides.” She crouched beside him and pushed his hair to one side, tucking it behind his ear so that she might whisper softly into it. “Here is your answer then, humblest of mortals. You will fall, as your kind always fall, when your god lets you go.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Now you know what many men do not.”

She straightened, and stepping behind the pillar, did not reappear on the far side.

It was a little longer before the king pushed himself to his feet. As he rose, so did the acolyte beside me. Relieved, I slid myself from the bench and held on to it while I eased my leg.

“Have you received your answer, Your Majesty?” the acolyte asked dryly.

“Indeed, I have,” said the king, in a speculative kind of voice. I turned to see him watching me. I think I had that air of a stunned rabbit still.

“You are one surprise after another, Pheris,” he murmured, patting me on the back before leading the way out of the dark treasury.

“You have had your answer,” said Attolia.

“Indeed,” said the king, evidently pleased with it.