Chapter 37
“ D eath , Ophelia.” Nyatrix laughs, a derisive sound, all bitterness and exhaustion. “They branded me as Death Herself, returned.” She props herself up on one elbow, settling her jaw into her hand, dinner forgotten. “In their defense, I am very good at murder.”
Opposite me, Agrippina tenses, her fingers wrapped tight around her spoon until her knuckles go white. “You know the Cult sees it as an honor,” she murmurs, her expression near-pleading as she looks at Nyatrix.
The knight holds the woman’s gaze, something dangerous in the depths of her eyes. Apprehension creeps over me, but the moment passes and Nyatrix leans back in her chair, the furniture creaking. “Well,” she drawls, “what’s another burden, anyways?” With that, she returns to her dinner, spooning the squash soup into her mouth.
I look down into my own bowl. When neither of them speaks, I begin to eat. The flavor is simple but rich, the meal filling. Agrippina tentatively begins to update Nyatrix on what’s happened in Liminalia—filled with names and terminology so foreign to me, it may as well be another language. Between the gentle lilt of their conversation, the warm fire, and a full belly, I find myself growing sleepy, as if my body is finally willing to accept how much rest it desperately needs. My mind fights this feeling of safety, this desire to curl up and sleep, intent on receiving answers for every half-formed question that races through my thoughts.
“When everything is settled,” Agrippina says, and I realize with a start she’s addressing me. “I want you to know, Ophelia, that Celia was one of us. I hardly expect you to join us in that way, to believe what we believe, but you are always welcome with us. Always. We are the keepers of the Old Ways, yes, but we are also the stewards of the heavy-hearted and the grief-worn.”
I watch her—the startling eyes, the warm brown skin, the firelight tracing strands of copper in her gray hair. Something deep in my marrow unfolds, wistfulness blossoming in my chest.
“Are the Creatrixes and the Cult an important part of life here in Liminalia?” I ask as Nyatrix gathers up our bowls.
“No,” the knight replies, reaching for my spoon. “As a whole, Liminalia has thankfully stepped away from such archaic beliefs.”
I look from Agrippina to Nyatrix, surprise creasing my brow. Considering Agrippina’s clear devotion and the level of belief among Liminalians she referenced, I’d have thought differently.
“The republic is separate from the Creatrixes,” Agrippina clarifies, watching the knight as she takes the bowls and spoons to the counter. Then she looks back at me, meeting my gaze. “People are free to believe what they want, as long as that belief dictates no harm to others.”
I sit back in my chair and turn this over in my mind. “How are people good, then?” I ask. “Without a god, I mean?”
Nyatrix prowls back toward the table, smiling at me, sly and cat-like across the slate tile. “If you only do the right thing to avoid punishment,” she asks, “is that truly goodness? And can a god so eager to punish you truly love you?”
I tongue the inside of my cheek and try to think—try to break out of the confines of everything the Host taught me. Try to think about what I might believe, not just what I’ve been told to think. Right now, tucked away in this small, tidy kitchen in the heart of Liminalia, is the first time I’ve ever considered such a thing.
“Unless, of course,” the Lupa Nox adds before I can find the right words, sliding back into her seat so our knees are once again pressed together, “punishment’s what you want.”
My brow furrows. “Who would want ?—”
“Nyatrix,” Agrippina snaps, spiky as a nun with a misbehaving student. The knight shoots me a private smile that makes every part of my body tingle, but she doesn’t continue whatever she was trying to say. “Ophelia, you’ll need somewhere to stay tonight.”
I startle and then nod, my heart fluttering. It was silly of me, I suppose, but I thought—I hoped—I’d be able to stay here. With Nyatrix. My face flushes at the thought.
“There’s plenty of empty insula rooms,” Nyatrix offers, folding her hands on the table. “The larger buildings we passed on the way in. We could certainly make one up for you.” She pauses, swallowing, her eyes jumping away from mine. When she meets my gaze again, the knight adds, “Or. . .you could stay here. With me. But only if you want.”
“Yes,” I murmur, barely audible over the crackling fire and the Godwinds. “I’d like to stay here, please.”
For some reason, at this moment, Agrippina gets to her feet. “I’ll leave you both to your evening, then,” she says, placing her satchel on the chair and digging into it. From its depths she pulls a battered, clothbound book—the kind we have by the hundred in Lumendei, much more common than the rare scrolls and papyri I worked with in the Libris Sanctum. “Nyatrix, here. My pretense for coming tonight, as I imagine Lucretia’s men are watching.”
To my surprise, Nyatrix’s eyes light up and she reaches across the table eagerly, taking the book into her hands like it’s a precious jewel. “ Mare Regina ,” she murmurs, tracing the fading title.
“Better read it quickly,” Agrippina says, still digging in her satchel. “Since you’re nearly three moons behind schedule.”
“I’ll try not to get taken prisoner again,” Nyatrix assures the older woman in a flat, dry tone, though one of her dark brows arches. “Wouldn’t want to mess up the book-share.”
Agrippina tuts at the knight like she’s a naughty little girl before depositing an unopened tin of salve on the table. “Twice a day, Ophelia,” she says, pointing at the tin. “And the Cult of the Mater Dea is here for you, whatever you may need. We loved Celia dearly, and we will love you all the more for that.”
I don’t know what to say—couldn’t possibly find words to respond—so I mutter a meek phrase of thanks as Nyatrix helps Agrippina out the door. How could she promise to love me when she knows nothing about me? Knows not if I have the skill in healing I claim, if I’ll make a good wife, if I’m sound to bear children?
Here I am, fed and clothed and housed in a place of strange beauty, while the people I’ve feasted with and cared for and prayed beside are trying to find ways to survive the truth of Lumendei. The blighted gardens. The charred rubble.
I take a deep, shaky breath as Nyatrix walks Agrippina to the door. When she returns, I look at her, my emotions swelling like a sea in my chest.
“I think,” I say, “that I should feel freed by these revelations. Unchained.”
She watches me closely, backlit by the hearth-light, gilded like a goddess. “But?” she wants to know, that single syllable so quiet that the Godwinds billowing over the roof almost devour it whole.
I squeeze my eyes shut. How fervently I want to step into this new world she and Agrippina offer, laid out like a glorious banquet. But I still wear my old skin, with all its weight and pain. If what they say is true—and Saints, that long-forgotten instinct rises in me again, and I know it is, just the same way I always knew something was wrong in Lumendei—then I . . . I . . .
“If I not just willingly but happily,” I manage to whisper, my tongue too thick in my mouth, “spent my entire life serving a monster . . .”
Nyatrix’s sharp intake of breath peels my eyelids open. My stomach twists with dread as I raise my chin to meet her gaze.
“. . . what does that make me ?”
I sleep for almost a week. I’m simultaneously ashamed of my sloth and also unable to rouse myself from bed for more than a few bells at a time. I weep. I toss, I turn, I wake screaming from nightmares. And I hate myself all the while for my weakness. For my stupidity. I should have known, shouldn’t I have? I should have seen Lumendei for what it was. Or, at the very least, I should have questioned. Instead, I served my mother’s murderer. I refused to speak her name.
My own mother. They told me she was a heretic, and I believed them. So easy, isn’t it, to swallow a lie—particularly if it’s coated in honey and you’re very, very hungry? The lie was simple, ingested in a single swallow, left to sow further falsehoods in my body. But the truth is larger, more complex. The truth does not fit neatly between my teeth, and it does not taste of wildflower honey on my tongue. It tastes of blood and soot and horror.
The Lumendei I loved doesn’t exist. There are no beautiful gardens at the end of the world. There is only the hungry God and the Sundering, spreading across the entire continent. Soon, Liminalia will fall. And then where will we go? Onto poorly built ships, only tested a handful of times, out into uncharted waters, all of Sylva’s maritime knowledge lost to war? What if there’s nothing else out there anyway? What if there’s only this horrible, vast blankness that I tumble further into each day?
I await Nyatrix’s judgment, but it never comes. I know she fought hard for the Centuria to permit me a week and a half to recover before the Votum. She certainly wasn’t given any time to recover from Lumendei and our journey through the Sundered Lands before she had to protect me again, this time from her own people. When I try to argue with her, though, she just sends me back to bed with a gently stern look. It is hard, I’ve found, to say no to her, so I acquiesce.
She also makes me broth and herbal tea and even braids my hair when I mention that I’d prefer a proper sleeping plait but can’t quite get my arms in the right position with my still-healing flail wounds. She helps me bathe, too—the only time I feel like I’m a living thing and not a corpse, my entire body pulsing with a need I cannot name, my cheeks flushed the entire time.
Nyatrix spent days in my city chained to a moldy pallet, beaten and questioned, while I slept in my own bed. When I mention this to her—in the bath, of all places, fool that I am—she meets my gaze and reminds me that I was tortured in Lumendei, too.
Agrippina visits, often just reading by my bedside without saying a word unless I speak first. I don’t—at least, not for days.
Late one evening, I wake to find her sprinkling dried herbs at the foot of my bed.
“What’s that?” I ask, curious despite myself.
Agrippina doesn’t immediately jump to answer my question, though she looks over at me and smiles. I pull myself up with a groan, wrapping the bed linens around my body. Her lips move as she sprinkles the herbs, like she’s working a Blessing.
“It’s sympaethetica,” she tells me when she finishes, sitting down on the end of my bed—not the chair tucked into the corner. “It’s a form of miracle-working that doesn’t require Mysterium.”
I swallow, one hand curling into the linens. Despite the exhaustion that claws at me, the voice that tells me there is simply no point in continuing any longer, something in me reaches for the knowledge she offers.
“Could you tell me more about it?” I ask, my voice hoarse from disuse.
A shimmer appears in Agrippina’s eyes, and she tries to hide her triumphant smile from me, but I catch it, glinting like pearl in the evening darkness.
Agrippina explains that we can use plants, herbs, animal parts, and more to support the kinds of outcomes we desire in our lives. She cautions me that it’s much different from Mysterium, that there’s no innate talent required, that there’s no calling upon any gods at all. Just a nimble mind, sheer willpower, and a good dose of stubbornness. There, perched on the edge of my bed in the falling city of Liminalia, she explains that if we, for instance, wanted to forget a bad memory, perhaps we could create an effigy to represent that memory.
“And then,” Agrippina says, spreading her hands across my bed, “if we took that effigy and buried it, perhaps we could bury the memory, too. Sympaethetica. Symbolic actions in the hopes of achieving material goals.”
“Is this what the Cult of the Mater Dea teaches?” I ask. I think of my mother, plucking the asphodels, turning a flower into a sword. I think of that flower, associated with Moryx, with death, with the places that await us when our mortal bodies fail us. I think of the petal’s scent—sweet, spiced earth and dark honey, tattooed fawn skin and shimmering hair, thunderstorm eyes and a blackberry mouth.
“Among other things,” Agrippina says, her tone light. “Ophelia, you can ask me, if you want.”
My head snaps up, and I look at her, lips parting. “Did...” I begin, the words crawling up my throat. “Did my mother engage in this practice?”
Agrippina smiles, smoothing her faded blue linen skirts. “Celia was particularly knowledgeable,” she tells me. “She would’ve taught you. It’s often passed down matrilineal lines.”
My heart aches, thrumming so hard against my chest that for a moment I think it may slip between my ribs, reaching and reaching, in search of something I can never quite hold in my hands.
“Is there a . . . Would there be a way to banish something inside you?” I ask, clutching at my chest. “A vast plane, blank and endless, like snowfall but without any snow. Just the cold. Just the emptiness. Would . . . Could sympaethetica do that?”
Agrippina reaches for my hand, and I let her take it. Outside, the Godwinds howl. She takes a deep breath and then says, “I think, Ophelia, we could certainly try.”