Hail the Rising Tides

Before

Lina

If she was lucky, she would burn for this. A pyre was kinder than what Castor might do to her.

“Pray,” he commanded behind her. His fingers tightened around her hair and he finished, barely-controlled rage making his voice tremble, “and hope He hears you.”

The Sun God Sowelan’s ruby eyes gleamed in the candlelight. If Lina concentrated, she could smell the blood dabbed beneath each of His eyes: tears of joy, the priests said, for the souls of the cleansed.

For Lina’s soul, soon.

Her shoulders protested as Castor gripped her wrists tighter behind her.

Pain jolted up her elbow, only just healed, and Lina breathed, willed herself still.

She studied the Sun God’s altar, a distraction from the guttering pangs.

Drew her eyes across the splayed feathers of His cloak like sunrays cast in gold, the sticks of spiced amber incense at His feet, the bowl of pomegranate seeds like tiny hearts.

The necklace of charred fingerbones, trophies; one, newly added, belonging to a girl who had lived across from Lina in Soliz Shrine.

A priestess, just like her.

Evening lamplight danced off the tiled walls, casting an ominous shade to the hand-painted hexagons in red and gold and teal. A distant chime of laughter reverberated in the near-silence, a ghost of music, clinking goblets.

“Just upstairs,” Castor said, “our people celebrate another victory. Their new Blessed Heliade; the bountiful purification of more traitors to the First Light.” He kicked her knapsack.

Regret roiled through her, dizzying: the bag’s absence from her quarters was what tipped Castor off to what she’d been planning.

“You want to leave? Leave this, leave us?”

Lina had always been good. Kept her head down, her thoughts to herself, even if it meant listening to the screams of the cleansed.

She heard them now, let the familiar terror fill her, bring tears to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, the weakling, the baby, the misled lamb.

“I made a mistake. I’m so sorry, Castor. I – I shouldn’t have listened to Sera.”

Sera. She, like the worshipers of Menon – traitors, blasphemers, Snakes – was innocent. Reduced now to cracked phalanges hanging from Sowelan’s neck.

His grip on her loosened. He shushed her, wrapped hands around her arms, warm through her thin cloak. “You shouldn’t have,” he agreed, soothing, soothing. “I don’t know how I can fix this for you.”

There was no fixing attempted desertion, of course. She fingered the scar on her elbow, dredged up the recent pain. That was the last straw, she’d promised herself.

He was still behind her, murmuring hymns – her crying had put him in an indulgent mood; if she quit now, gave in, he would grant her an honourable end. Poor fool, he called her. Blind and misguided. Let Sowelan love you; let the wind scatter your ashes.

All the while Sowelan stared down at them both, an adjudicator, eyes glinting as though lit by His own ancient, immaculate sunlight.

Lina held His gaze. Loathed.

If running makes me a sinner, she thought, balling her hands into fists, then I’ll see you in hell.

She jerked back, whiplash, her skull connecting to something squidgy. She heard a crack – felt it, quaking – heard Castor scream out a curse. Lina whirled, saw blood; jammed her palm into his jaw, pop, her own bones ringing.

She was sprinting before she knew it, Castor’s screams echoing not far behind her. She had seconds, a minute at most. His footsteps beat against the tiles, his stride just a little longer than hers – still Lina ran, her lungs burning, her pulse a thunderous roar in her ears.

She was dead either way. Cold comfort. It was better to die on her feet, wasn’t it?

Lina flew down a cramped stairwell, panic climbing, closing a fist around her heart.

A storeroom yawned open at the end of the far passage, dark – Lina flicked fire into a lantern, then doused it, Stupid, stupid.

She groped her way past barrels and crates just visible in the scant light leaking in from the hall; beyond a door she could not yet see, the scent of winter air beckoned her, pricked her eyelids.

“Lina.” Castor’s gait had slowed. He was toying with her. “Show yourself before I find you, Lina.”

Her fingertips found the wall, the bricks rough and cold. She groped for the doorjamb, hands shaking, breaths coming out faster, shallower.

Something creaked behind her. Lina crouched, pressed herself into the side of a barrel. Liquid sloshed inside, reeking of verdure, of warm anise and hard liquor.

His voice resounded, its relaxed cadence making Lina’s stomach churn: “So close.” The inner door opened wider; a column of light spilled into the room, marred by the black shadow of his broad shoulders. “And hiding in the dark like a coward.”

Tears welled, but Lina blinked them back, bit her tongue. Crying never worked twice.

“You’ve always been sensitive,” he said, sauntering. Searching. “I know that.” The lid of a crate groaned, slammed back shut. “Surrender yourself, Lina, and I’ll talk to Archpriest Rigel. Ask him to give you something for the pain first.”

Lina made herself smaller, a sharp crag of wood digging into her side.

“There.”

Fingers twined in her hair, pulling. Lina swung without thought; sparks burst at her fingertips, but Castor caught her wrists, held her still.

“You,” he whispered, inches from her: a mirror, a man minutes older and yet worlds different. Dried blood crusted his nose. “are humiliating me.”

Unwisely, she struggled. Heat bloomed beneath his hands, and very quickly, pain. Her skin sizzled and Lina shrieked, terror making her struggle harder, push, kick, anything to escape the agonising blaze, the revolting, meat-like stench of charred flesh.

He healed her after. He always did.

Lina cradled her arms, ran her thumbs over waxy handprints. “It’s nothing if I go,” she gasped, barely believing she was still trying. “Tell Rigel you killed me, Castor, please.”

“You know he won’t believe that without proof.”

Lina gulped for air. Thrust out her left hand. “Take a finger. All of them, I don’t care. Say the rest of me was too charred to recognise.”

Something like pain flickered in his eyes. “You want to go so badly?”

Ridiculously, her heart kicked. No, she nearly said, as though it would matter now. Of course not, Castor. I’m sorry. Please don’t tell.

He softened. “It’s different out there, Lina. Without your family to support you.” He clamped her shoulder, squeezed hard. “Not just me. You’d leave Mum and Dad?”

She would.

She thought of the lives she’d only lived through books. Imagined how simple life could be as a nameless priestess for a peaceful, wronged goddess. How she might begin, in tiny, tiny steps, to make amends.

Her hesitation cost her. He thrust her head back, fingers around her jaw, the bite of a dagger white-hot against the base of her throat.

“I have given you countless chances,” he hissed.

“You’ve no idea what Archpriest Rigel has planned for me – heliade, holy successor, so much more.

If my family – my sister – betrays the shrine, what’s that mean for me?

” He pushed; she felt a thin line of blood drip down her chest. “Come with me, Lina, or I won’t even cleanse you.

I’ll carve you up and let you burn for eternity in the bowels of Sowelan’s hell. ”

Lina knocked into something, the barrel, liquid sloshing. Verdure. She lurched out of his grasp and kicked the barrel over, splashing gallons of verdure over both of them, over every wooden crate.

“Let me go, Castor.” She lifted a hand, bade a soft orange flame to dance between her fingertips, and poised it inches from his soaked chest.

And there it was: fear. And proof, sweet, intoxicating proof that despite the purity of Sowelan’s fire, the glory of death by immolation, Castor, too, did not want to burn.

He stepped back, a smile bisecting his face, although the fear was still plain in his eyes. The smile widened, a mean grin, the familiar, giddy excitement of a game.

“All right.” He moved aside, one arm out in a genteel bow. “Go, then. And see how long it takes me to catch you.”

It was not a victory, she knew, but a death deferred. A delayed gratification.

Still, Lina stole past him, out the door and into the cool winter night. And beheld for the first time in her life a freedom as infinite and frightening as the moonless night sky.

And as fleeting.