Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Thayana’s temple is down that corridor,” Thalric, Leif’s master, tells me, pointing toward a hallway enclosed in darkness. There are no windows to let in the white glow of the moonlight, no lanterns to cast shadows along the walls.
I take my first halting step, but Thalric—holding our one candle—turns in the opposite direction.
“You’re not coming with me?” I ask him.
He turns back around, his serious, intense green eyes on me. His face is a challenge. “If you need help walking down a dark corridor, Leina Haverlyn, you’re not going to last long here.”
I scowl back at him. “Aren’t you worried I’ll escape?”
He kind of scoffs. “Not at all.”
“I heard Archon Robias. You’re not supposed to leave me alone.”
Thalric sighs, but he takes a step backward.
“I’m more worried about angering a goddess than an archon. Prayers are a private thing, whatever Robias may say.” His lips tip up at the corner, by the smallest fraction. “Besides, there’s nothing but stone and adamas from here on out. You can’t escape. Silent skies upon you, Leina Haverlyn.”
He takes the candle with him when he walks away, leaving me to the darkness. And the gods.
I hate the darkness. It always tries to suffocate me in my sleep.
But I hate the gods more, because they’ve done nothing. Nothing at all.
Still, I make my way to the Temple of Thayana without stumbling once, my fingers gliding along the cool stones. My steps are calm and confident, but my thoughts are altogether less calm. They jump from one thread to another, jittery and confused.
Appeal to the gods , the Elder told me, after he explained the rules of the Trial of Last Blood. In a matter of hours, I’m supposed to face a trained, experienced Altor in the arena in a fight to the death. The winner is considered blessed by the gods.
I’m not an idiot. I know I don’t stand a chance. My all too brief “battle” with Ryot when he kidnapped me leaves no room for doubt in my mind—the death tomorrow will be mine.
Appeal to the gods.
I snort. I know exactly how effective prayers are, after watching my mother and my people pray for mercy, for relief, for a godsdamn break every day of my life.
The effectiveness of their combined efforts over the course of nearly 1,000 years?
Nil. So why I’m here, following directions to pray to a goddess I’m not even sure exists, I couldn’t say.
Except … except I want this. I ache for it. For a life where I’m the strong one, the feared one. Where I wield power as my right, where my words carry weight, where my very existence outranks the godsdamn king.
To finally, gods finally, protect my family. To change things—if not everything, then at least enough .
I slow my pace when a soft glow of light comes into view ahead.
I expected something grand. The temples in Lalica, where we bring our crops after the harvest, are constructed of the purest marble, with priests guarding the entrance to demand offerings before peasants can enter even the outer rim, never mind the innermost chamber.
But this temple is surprisingly simple. It’s made from the same stone as the fortress.
There are no statues or renderings of Thayana.
No epic scenes decorate the walls. No priest refuses me entrance.
I hesitate, wondering if I made a wrong turn.
Surely, this isn’t the temple of the great goddess of war.
I step into the room and freeze, goosebumps covering my flesh.
In the center of the circular room, a single candle burns. Mirrors adorn the stone walls from floor to ceiling, reflecting the light from the candle evenly and warmly.
The only sound in the room is the wax dripping down the candle and splattering on the stone table below, just like in my dreams. But here, the wax remains white, even when it melts and slides to the table.
There’s no black wax. And the room doesn’t smell of blood, but of incense.
I want to find that reassuring, but I don’t. Not quite.
I have no idea what to do here.
My gaze lands on the kneeling bench cut out of stone and adorned with a red, tasseled cushion. I brush my hands across the fabric. The plush give of the cushion makes me think its stuffed with only the finest of down feathers.
I lower myself to the kneeling bench, but I wonder if the goddess is annoyed by that cushion, by the audacity of humanity to make worship comfortable.
So, I pull the cushion out from under my knees, and the bite of hard stone against my joints is comforting.
The pain is real, not something distorted and out of a dream.
“Umm, dear Thayana …” I start hesitantly, but immediately trail off. That doesn’t sound right. It needs to be grander, I think.
“Oh mighty goddess!” My voice booms out, echoing against the mirrors and the stone. I wince. Yeah, that didn’t sound right either.
I clear my throat, and try again, keeping my voice more even this time.
“Goddess Thayana.”
Yes! That’s a good start. What next?
“I beseech thee …” Nope, nope, nope.
“Ugh,” I slap my hands against the stone in frustration. “Why is this so damn hard?”
Because I don’t believe she exists.
And if Thayana does exist … if she does exist, that’s even worse. It means the goddess of justice has ignored the plight of my people, the prayers of my mother.
My mother believed. She prayed to Serephelle, the goddess of luck and good fortune, for Levvi and Alden to come home.
Every day. For years. And when they didn’t come, she prayed every day to Thayana for justice.
She would prostrate herself in front of her home-made altar at our hearth, the heart of our home, and she’d plead.
Grovel. Her knees would pop when she rose after hours spent on the floor, her arms and her face slightly smudged with ash from the fire.
There are a handful of votive offerings on the table with the candle—several precious stones, a few arrowheads, someone’s chainmail. A hysterical laugh rising in the back of my throat. Because I have nothing to offer. Even the clothes on my back aren’t mine.
I have nothing to offer. Damn if that isn’t infuriating.
After all my family’s sacrifices, after all our prayers, after hours upon hours spent with our faces in the dirt in prayer … we have nothing. I’m still in Ryot’s too-large shirt that I’ve cinched with a belt.
And suddenly, being on my knees before a goddess who has never lifted a finger to help us feels wrong. I know I should be expressing supplication and veneration. But instead, I’m angry.
I’m furious.
There’s so much rage inside me it could burn me up, and right now, it is directed at this goddess for ignoring my mother’s prayers. It’s directed at the gods in general for the life they cursed us with.
“Fuck this,” I say it as a whisper, but the words are swallowed up by the silence too quickly for my liking.
I jump to my feet. “Fuck this!” I shout it this time, getting a satisfying echo back from the wall-to-wall mirrors and stone floor.
I won’t kneel here. I won’t kneel anywhere . I storm around the chamber.
“How dare you? Who do you think you are to play with people’s lives? To ignore people’s prayers?”
The only answer to my shouting is my own words bouncing back to me until they disappear. But this feels good. It’s cathartic.
“How dare you turn a blind eye to all the suffering? Are you not the goddess of justice? And yet you allow an entire kingdom of people to live a paltry, pathetic existence. You don’t care about your worshipers, so long as you get your offerings,” I spit the word, and take a swipe at the pretty bangles on the table.
The clattering of the precious jewels and metals dropping to the ground pleases me.
There’s no response. I didn’t expect one.
“And now,” I laugh, but it’s brittle. “Now I’m expected to come here and grovel to you, to beg for your intervention so that I might live.
No! You owe me! You owe my people, my family.
You owe for every prayer of my mother’s you ignored.
You owe for every boy that never came home from the mines.
You owe for every whiplash from every soldier, for every mouth that goes without food, for every child that learns fear before they learn wonder.
You,” I jut my finger in all directions, swinging around the room, “all of you gods, living your comfortable life in Sol’vaelen, have debts to pay! ”
The rage in my chest expands until I think I’m going to catch on fire.
It boils dangerously until it overflows and I strike out, flipping the table holding the candle stick and sending it flying across the room.
It hits the mirror across from me, shattering the glass into millions of little shards that rain down on the room even as the wax splatters back at me.
The heat of the wax on my face shocks me into silence.
My heavy breathing is the only sound in the room.
The candle, now laying sideways on the ground, flickers brokenly on the shards of glass, creating a prism of light that fractures. Then the flame of the candle goes out altogether, and the room plummets into darkness.
I kick uselessly at the pile of glass, and it jangles on the stone as it scatters across the floor. “Godsdammit!”
“Such a temper, daughter of Selencia,” a light, musical voice says from the darkness.
The unexpected voice has me whipping around, but I’m not able to utter a sound or take a single step forward before pain flares from deep within my body, paralyzing me.
I drop to my knees, unable to control my fall.
Even the pain of my knees slamming into the glass-covered stone floor pales in comparison to the agony inside.
Every bone in my body must be at risk of shattering from immeasurable pressure.
A match flares against stone, and the room immediately brightens again as a new flame blazes to life.
The fingers holding the match are unadorned, but are elegant just the same.
The hand guides the match to a new, pristine white candle.
The flame lights the candlewick in an instant, and the woman brings the match up to her mouth, so close it might be touching her golden lips, before she puffs out a breath to extinguish the match.
The pain cascading through every piece of me is so overwhelming, it’s difficult to process all I’m seeing.
My vision is blurred. But I still notice the room is …
different. For one, there’s no newly shattered mirror.
There’s no mirror at all, just a vast nothingness where the walls should be.
There are no offerings on the ground, no kneeling stool.
And the woman in front of me … she’s magnificent.
Even with the low light, her dark skin radiates with glossy perfection.
Her hair is a deep, dark black and luxuriously thick, falling around her face in waves.
She’s tall, with a lithe build, but it’s her eyes that really take my breath away.
They glow, and the tint of her irises matches her lips—they’re gold.
“You’ll need to learn to control that temper,” she says. “Or it will carry you away.”
Part of me wants to laugh in disbelief—is she serious right now? But I’m still paralyzed, and making any sound at all is completely beyond me. I desperately try to stand. The attempt is torture, searing pain shooting down from my shoulders to the tips of my toes.
“How the mighty do fall, no?” She laughs at me. “Perhaps you’ll find after this that kneeling isn’t so bad.”
I raise my eyes back to the woman before me, but I’m suddenly distracted by the candle. Because the wax now melting and oozing down the side of that pristine white candle? It’s black—exactly like it is in my dreams.
But this is no dream.
It’s a nightmare.