"A goddess is the sum of all her believers, all the prayers and hopes and curses and despair ever uttered in her name. Our goddess spans the lives of women, from the darkest night of a girl raped and beaten and left for dead in a waterfront alley to the silver-bright wedding day of the highest princess in the land. The hand of the Lily Goddess upon my heart is my own hand, multiplied a thousandfold. We serve her as she serves us. We are her, and she is us."

I knew that for as great a load of claptrap as any myth out of Mistress Danae's books. Gods were real, surely enough. Secundo's sleeping Blackblood back in Copper Downs had been real. But the various theogenies and dieophanies I'd read in my years under tutelage had made it quite clear that gods were bullies, children, pettifoggers and taskmasters different only from the worst of men in the degree of the power they held.