The Kindest Lie

The envoys waited at the foot of the marble tongue, and behind them the king's herald held a scroll ready to carry the oracle's words across three deserts to the waiting armies. Whatever Saphira said next would become an order. She knew it. The god knew it. That was why he had shown her the truth so plainly: he was certain she would speak it. For sixty years that certainty had been the whole of her. She was the voice that did not bend. To lie now was to break the one vow that had outlived the college, the temple, the very name of her god in the mouths of men. If she lied, she would no longer be an oracle. She would be only an old woman who had once been trusted, telling a desert king a story. She thought of the children walking three deserts. She thought of how a god who has been forgotten for four hundred years might confuse his loneliness for wisdom, his grief for prophecy. And she thought: *He gave me the truth. He did not give me the right to spend the whole world on it.* Saphira rose. The smoke parted around her. And in the plain flat voice that had never once in sixty years carried a falsehood — the voice the whole world trusted precisely because it had never bent — she spoke the kindest lie ever told. "The gods do not favor your war," she said. "I have seen it. King Aldun who crosses the Sun Coast will not return; his line will fail; his name will be a curse on the