Chapter 17 Before
17
Before
We hold rituals in the sea cave on Scopuli’s southwestern shore. It’s accessible only when the tide is low, neither above the earth nor below it, neither a part of nor separate from the ocean, a sacred place between the worlds. The grotto’s opening is oblong and curves up in the corners. Jagged rock formations stand guard along the ground, giving the aperture the appearance of a crooked sneer. Outside, the sun straddles the horizon, half in the sky, half below. Its last light spilling onto the waves, staining the sea red as blood. Soon Jaquob’s will flow to meet it.
The sight makes me shiver, so I turn to Raidne. She’s kneeling before a ring of stones we placed in the middle of the space centuries ago, striking two rocks together over the wood that sits within its sphere. A spark emerges and catches the kindling ablaze. Warm light bursts across the cave walls, giving life to all nature of shadows. Only once the bonfire roars does Raidne meet my gaze. Her eyes are sympathetic, though I don’t need them to be. I know what must be done. This is why Jaquob is here; he was always meant to be a giftto her. They all were—it’s their punishment. Otherwise, Proserpina would never have sent them here. My skin crawls with anticipation, and each sense is heightened by the knowledge that for the first time since these offerings began, this will work.
Yes, she’d said. He’s mine.
So I’ll give him to her. A long overdue gift, more potent than those flowers I failed to gather for her.
The sound of footsteps draws my attention to the mouth of the cave. Pisinoe approaches on the exposed, rocky beach. Jaquob follows. One look at his slack-jawed grin and glassy eyes confirms that she sang to him, bewitched him into submission to follow her here willingly, like a dog follows a bone. He stumbles over the rocks beneath his feet, but Pisinoe waits patiently for him to catch himself each time he loses his balance.
A lump forms in my throat. The men I’ve killed before were all strangers, but Jaquob isn’t. My fists tighten at my sides, forcing away the pleasant memories. If sacrifices were easy, they wouldn’t be called sacrifices. Perhaps that’s why all the others went unanswered—Ceres could sense the offerings were too easy to give. But Jaquob will hurt. Another reason why Proserpina chose him for me, out of all the others.
“Thelxiope.” He beams when he sees me. He sounds like he’s drunk, and in a way, he is, only this time it is on our voices and not on liquor. What future does he envision waits for him inside this cave? Pisinoe leads him into its maw toward the far left wall, where she slips shackles around his wrists and ankles, locking him in place, his body an X. He looks at the irons, eyebrows piqued. “What are these for?”
“Those women,” I begin, knowing that the magic of our song will prevent him from lying. I already have the answer I seek—I feel it in my bones. But I need to hear it from his lips. It will make what I’m about to do easier.
“Who were they?”
He groans, eyes rolling up to the vault of the cave. Even in his current state, he recognizes what he’s about to say won’t be received well. “I knew you would be mad.”
Every single muscle in my body constricts at the admission, so tight that I worry they might split my skin apart. “Who were they?” I ask again, my voice hard.
“Don’t look so upset. They were Iroquoian women who were gifted to us. We’re not barbaric like the Spanish. We were taking them back to France.”
“Not barbaric? They were bound!”
“That was unfortunate, but we couldn’t get them onto the ship willingly. They were too ignorant to recognize the gift they’d been given—the chance to be civilized!”
Revulsion skitters across my skin. His enchanted eyes are bright, pleading—Jaquob desperately wants to believe his own words, to ignore the hypocrisy they carry. He’s trying to reassure himself that stealing the women from their homes, their families, and spiriting them across the sea wasn’t an act of savagery simply because somewhere in the world, the Spanish are treating people worse.
“It was for their own good,” he adds, but his voice wavers. Jaquob knows, deep down, that something inside of him is vile, rotten. And he knows the importance of keeping that part of himself hidden. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have lied to me about their existence.
“You offered them a life in chains and wondered why they refused it. The only fool I see is you.”
“Thelxiope, you don’t understand.”
Rage blazes inside my chest, and I rush forward and grab ahold of his precious relic, the piece of his saint that he wears around his neck. He opens his mouth to protest, but I’ve heard enough. I tear the necklace from his body in one rough tug and throw it to the floor. The golden pendant clinks when it hits the stone, but it doesn’t break. Watching his most prized possession ripped from his chest makes his eyes widen. He calls out to me in alarm, but his words are incoherent.
“Bon Dieu, femme! Pourquoi fais-tu ca?”
I turn my back to him. He continues to babble, his tongue indecipherable. The words, devoid of meaning, wash over me with little effect.
“Let’s begin,” I say.
Raidne and Pisinoe say nothing as they follow me into the farthest recess of the cave to the small pool where salt water collects when the tide recedes. As much as I want to throw myself into its dark halo, to wash the filth of Jaquob’s admission from my skin, there’s an order that must be followed. Raidne doesn’t make me wait. She submerges herself first, taking care to rinse any dirt from her body. Pisinoe follows. I’m the last to be consecrated in this holy water. As I sink below its inky surface, it takes all my strength not to scream into its depths.
Pisinoe waits with a towel when I emerge. We dry our frames; we don our ceremonial garb. We wrap our lower halves in white linen, twisting the fabric around our waists and tying the ends behind our necks. It’s not the traditional style, but the open back leaves room for our wings, so it must do. I place a golden circlet on Raidne’s head. She places one on Pisinoe’s, who in turn places one on mine.
Once we’re dressed, Raidne passes me a pitcher of blackberry wine. I take the clay vessel and step toward Jaquob. Our eyes meet once more. One final test. If he’s meant to live, he will not flinch. He will not bow his head.
I dip my fingers into the sticky dark liquid. They’re instantly stained black, and I pause to look at them. I have played this role countless times, but it feels different as I raise my hand and sprinkle the droplets onto Jaquob’s forehead. He doesn’t know the significance of the act when he lowers his head to shield his eyes. He doesn’t know our ways, doesn’t understand that he’s now consented to this.
It’s settled. He must die.
Pisinoe begins to beat a makeshift drum, which is no more than a large bowl with a deer hide spread across its breadth. The beat is steady, syncopated, like our pulse, and for the first time in a decade, I feel the blood pumping through my veins. A throbbing begins deep within my stomach, and I’m hungrier than I have been in ages. My body starts to sway. Raidne fans her wings and then I’m fanning mine as well. Our wings fuel the fire, and the smoke billows up through a tiny aperture in the cave’s ceiling before escaping into the moonless sky.
“Thelxiope?” Jaquob tries again, my name the only word I recognize in another garbled sentence. It’s no use. Raidne and I circle the fire, lionesses stalking their prey, faces locked on Jaquob’s. He frowns, his eyebrows furrowed with confusion. My pulse and Pisinoe’s rhythm quicken in sync, and all three of us are swaying, frenzied. The bonfire roars. We three become one: a singular, insatiable beast.
Raidne unsheathes a long blade from its scabbard and approaches Jaquob. This blade, like our butchering tools, has a sole purpose. It gleams in the firelight, its iron edges lusting for blood. The sight of it shatters his reverie, and for the first time since entering the cave, he lets out a long wail. I feel no sympathy. The women he captured float before me. I remember their decaying mouths and rotting fingers. I remember their empty eyes.
He’s no longer Jaquob. He’s a gift to Proserpina. A good one, too.
With a swift and powerful movement, Raidne digs the blade into the skin beneath his ribs and pulls it down to below his belly button, opening him like a present. His scream is shattering, projected by the cave onto the waves.
Entrails spill out of the wound, a dark and tangled gore. With surgical precision, Raidne, our haruspex, slides them through her fingers, checking for imperfections, for bad omens. When she looks up from the intestines with a rare smile upon her lips, I know she’s found no damning messages. Jaquob shrieks, unable to believe this is happening. Raidne hands me the blade.
I approach him one more time, resting a hand on his cheek. He leans his face into my palm, wailing. With my other hand, I place the knife against his throat.
“S’il vous pla?t…” he says between sobs. I don’t need to speak his language to understand the meaning.
Please.
We usually recite an incantation before the final mercy is delivered. This time, only one name is necessary.
“Proserpina,” I say. My voice booms through the grotto. It’s a dedication. It’s an offering. It’s an apology. My hand on his cheek slides into his tangled mess of hair to draw his head down so he’s facing the Underworld.
I slice.
His blood is dark, and it spurts from the wound like a fountain onto my frame. Jaquob sputters and gasps and sobs until he finally chokes on his own life force. I stand there, captivated, waiting for his last breath to pass between his lips before I remove my hand from his hair. Finally, he slumps over. I take his relic from the ground and place it around my neck before turning to the others triumphantly.
Raidne reaches for the blade and promptly removes his lungs, his liver, his heart, then tosses each organ into the fire. The smoke licks the ceiling of the cave, wrapping around the hanging rock formations like ribbons before escaping to the gods. When the organs have burned completely, we unchain Jaquob’s corpse from the wall and drape it over the flames as well. If this were a gift to Ceres, we could butcher him and eat the meat, but Jaquob now belongs to the Realm of the Dead, and it’s forbidden for the living to consume him. When only his bones remain, I toss a coin into the flames, the fee for his upcoming passage.
Take him to Tartarus.
Pisinoe slows her drumming. Our ecstatic frenzy reaches its low point, and we watch the fire swallow the last remnants of Jaquob’s skeleton until nothing is left but ash.
With his body gone, the sacrificial fever begins to dwindle. Raidne moves to start cleaning the blood from her frame. I take a step forward to follow her, but a sharp pain erupts in my gut. I shriek, taken aback by its sudden appearance, but the agony doesn’t relent. It intensifies.
I fall onto my knees, my arms wrapped around my stomach. The rough ground tears across my skin through the thin ceremonial dress, offering the linen two new blooms of blood to join Jaquob’s. Raidne drops to my side. I feel the warmth of her hands on my shoulders, and I think she’s speaking to me, but I can’t make out the words. Concentrating on her speech requires too much effort, and all my focus is turned inward. Pressure builds in my abdomen, as if something is forcing my intestines up into my lungs. Before I can warn my sisters, I’m on my hands as well, vomiting darkness onto the floor of the cave.