17. Chapter 17
Chapter 17
T he braziers and candles had all found their cozy, warm beds burning in comfortable ashen red coals by the time the Bandrui returned to me. Gone was the day-to-day finery of her station. A simple white-on-white embroidered chemise hung like a curtain on her lithe form, her dark-red hair pulled back into a forearm thick braid and secured with a leather strip.
The door opened a crack, and she poked her head in ahead of a small ornate lantern. “Psst, Cricket. Come. Leave him here.”
I squeaked, jumping with the shattering of the silence I had been slowly stretching in. “Who? Leave who? There’s no one here but me!” I hissed back in a whisper.
Her deep-red eyes rolled up, and she pointed toward the rafters. “I swear by the gods, Cricket. When they crafted your ears, they crafted a long hallway of nothingness between it. Look up. He’s always here.”
I followed the path of her finger and peered into the night-cloaked rafters. A shadow, darker than those around it, moved slightly. If my legs weren’t already exhausted from squats, I’d have leapt out of my skin. “What . . . is . . . that?”
“Your pet. He is always here. Has been since The Raven brought you. Come. Bid him stay.”
“Uh . . . Stay?” A small rumbling, purr-like, clicking chortle answered me from the darkness, and shivers ran up my spine as I hustled my way toward the door. “Nope, don’t like that. Not even a little. What the hell is that thing?”
“They have many names. The Darrigs called them kin’tha, and that name caught on as they evolved. Their original name was failinis. War dogs. Tamed and altered to suit the uses of some of the Fae. They were prized companions for a very long time, but they fell out of fashion when many of them started emulating cats.” She led me through night smothered stone hallways, whispering to the small flame that danced within the lantern, casting haunted shapes across the stonework. “I thought, at first, it was a stray when I kept seeing it in the rafters. The temple attracts them, as one of the few places where magic is still stable. But when I had to hold it back from attacking His Majesty, I knew it was no stray. You have a loyal pet, Cricket. Tell me, how does a human come to have a failinis as her loyal pet? One that can blend into shadow, can alter its form to suit its desires, and one that will not leave its vigil even to hunt for near upon a full season?”
With this last question, she stopped dead and rounded on me, her eyes narrowing on me in suspicion.
Huddled in the small slivers of warm yellow light. I felt small, trapped, and in more mortal peril than I had while the King hunted me in the cage of his quarters.
“I . . . I don’t know? It was the cage that Rictus kept me in when he kidnapped me. He sold me with it to The Raven. I thought it was just a device used by the Fae to control me,” I whispered hastily, pleading my innocence.
“It is.” She leaned forward, examining me, as if it were the first time she had ever seen me. “And yet for you, it is not. Why?”
“Fuck if I know, Bandrui!”
Her gaze felt like a hot brand on my skin, scouring down to the bone, looking for a deception. And as quickly as she had turned on me, she was turning away, seemingly satisfied by whatever it was that she had found.
“I see now.”
We carried on in silence, moving with hushed speed through the tunnel of a corridor until it opened to a cross of four hallways, and she paused again. “When we enter the temple proper, do not touch anything. You will be tempted. You will be drawn to them like a magnet. Do not touch them. Even if you think they are begging you to do so. They are . . . mischievous at this time of night. Especially Feidlimid.”
“What happens if I touch one?”
The smirk in my tone was not missed, and she turned on me again like a petulant child and tutted.
“Do not toy with things you do not understand, Cricket. If you touch the wrong one, you risk incurring the ire of étain. Touch the right one, and it is an invitation for more. Make no mistake, Cricket. You are familiar with a quiet god, a silent god, who is used to betrayal and has hardened his heart to it. These are not that god. These gods are alive, pulsing with life and all its vigors. They are capricious. They are malevolent. They are mischievous. They are bored almost always. And you are a bright flame foolishly flashing in the darkness. Do not call attention to yourself when you are not yet ready to be seen.”
I tilted my head to her, narrowing my eyes at the strange way she put that.
I didn’t like that each of her words curled up and rested on my shoulder, tittering with glee at my cautious suspicion.
“Right. Rule three,” I mumbled to myself.
She heard me, though, and smirked.
I was not prepared for the temple proper. I don’t think I could have ever been prepared for it. I had seen so many bizarre, otherworldly things in my short stay in Magh Meall, but this was different. It was not just the great splendor laid out before me. It was not the nine massive towering stonework sculptures of godly perfection. It was not the redolent scent of the loveliest incense I had ever smelled in my life. It was not the magic of thousands of sootless candles burning all around me.
What I was not prepared for was a sensation I had been hunting my entire life. It was the sensation of stepping into my home. My own home. That was the sensation that washed over me the moment I stepped my bare foot from the cold blue-grey stone of the rest of the temple. The warm polished black marble shot through with iridescent marbled veins cast dark rainbows back on me. It was like I had fallen into a cosmic womb of some sorts, with a motherly figure humming softly to me as she rubbed the taut belly between us.
The Bandrui set her unnecessary lantern down at the side entrance nestled between two of the statues and bid me forward. “Come and meet them.”
I followed, too stunned by the feeling to speak. How was it that I had spent twenty-seven years hunting for this, and only when I was kidnapped, tortured and enslaved did I finally find it?
“Honored assembly, I bid you see and welcome our guest, Cricket.” I expected her to whisper. Weren’t priests supposed to whisper when in the presence of the divine? She did not. She spoke with her same laughing voice, as if she were speaking to old friends rather than stonework statues of deities. “Come, Cricket. Let me introduce you.”
She pressed a long rushlight into my hand and lit it against one of the nearby candles. She gathered up nine small fat candles and waved to me to follow.
I did, moving into the narrow passage carved in between the two rows of statues.
She paused in front of one of them, searching through her burden before handing me her selected candle. It smelled of mint, crocus, and fresh rain. “This is Senán. Lord of Winter. God of suffering, mourning, hidden things, deception, and grief. Bid him a fare greeting.”
I took the candle, looking up to the stern-faced Fae man before me. I expected the statues to have symbols carved into them. To have some iconography that would be associated with whatever they were a god of. But aside from the glowing string that bound the wrist of one of his outstretched hands, there was nothing remarkable about him. His long, carved hair was pulled back, away from his stunningly handsome face. A delicately tatted lace veil covered his carved face from the bridge of his nose, his eyes, and his forehead like a blindfold, but there was nothing else.
“Hello, Senán, it is nice to meet you—” I paused and looked back at the Bandrui, searching for how to address a god.
She mouthed, My lord .
“My lord? ”
She nodded happily and looked up to the covered face of the statue. “Be good to her, Senán, if you have the inclining to do so. She is a guest.”
One by one, we moved through the temple, and I greeted each of the gods by lighting one of the candles the Bandrui handed me and introducing myself. Faolán, The Great Wolf of Spring, god of nature, harvest, new life, natural creatures, and creativity. Caoilfhionn, Lady of Summer, goddess of primordial forces such as lightning, floods, and magma. Odharnait, Benefic of Autumn, goddess of nightmares, fear, subterfuge, illusion and sworn enemy and lover of Senán. Feidlimid, Lord of Dawn, god of joy, love, sex, hunting, and music. étain, Lady of Night, goddess of jealousy, passion, sorrow, death, and darkness.
Each of them bore no symbols that would guide the uninitiated as to their purpose, their job. They were presented as individuals, knowable and touchable, merely encased in stone before me. The act of greeting them and speaking to them as if they were living, breathing entities that one would bump into at the Market slowly rooted this idea into me. By the time I bent to set a crackling and spitting angry candle at the foot of Ailbhe, I needed no help from the Bandrui.
“Hello, Ailbhe. They call me Cricket. Thank you for sending your drui to assist me in regaining my strength. I feel so much better, even if the exercises hurt a little. It was very kind of you to grant them that knowledge.” I looked up at the androgynous features of the statue and watched them be kissed by the crackling light of my naughty candle.
Closer . . .
The whisper was as soft as the subtle chewing of the flame in the wax at the foot of the statue.
Come closer, little guest. You have greeted all of us so politely. Do you wish a gift in return? It is rare that a guest thanks me with such impeccable manners. Tell me, Cricket, do you wish another gift?
I leaned closer to the statue, trying to hear the soft whisper. I could almost make it out. It was an itch at the edge of my consciousness.
A claw-like hand gripped my shoulder and pulled me back away from the statue. “Dammit, Ailbhe! You know the rules in my temple! Hospitality! When I see you next, you will apologize,” the Bandrui barked at the statue.
A deep masculine laugh intertwined with the bell-like laugh of a woman filled the chamber and ruffled the flames of the candles around us. I snatched my hand that had been reaching on its own toward the statue back and held it close to my body like it had been burned.
The Bandrui was pulling me away, clucking her disapproval. “Of course Ailbhe would show the most interest in you. Patron of Day. Divine ruler of rage, transformation, new beginnings from destruction and healing. You might as well be carved in their image for all your hissing and scratching.”
She placed another candle in my hand. This one scented in warm honey, carnation, and clover. A sadness fell over the Bandrui’s beautiful face as she turned her gaze up to the statue of a woman. “Airgetlám. Lady of Dusk. Honored wife of Túathal. Goddess of luck, wealth, communication, and persuasion.”
I held my hand back, resisting the urge to light the candle and greet the statue. The sorrow in the Bandrui’s face pulled at me like it was my own. I waited for her to go on.
“She was one of my greatest friends.” The Bandrui took the candle from me and lit it herself, then set it down in front of the bare foot of the statue. “Wherever you are, my friend, come back to us. You are deeply missed. If you wish to return to magic, let me be greedy and hold your hand one last time and kiss your cheek as you descend to your beloved. It would be the greatest of boons.”
I held my tongue as a single glittering tear slid down the Bandrui’s face and plopped heavily into the wax of a candle. She sniffed and pushed aside the tear’s friends before turning on me. “She has been missing since the War of Thorns. And I miss her laughter every day. I have even grown to miss her cheating at cards. Rude as it was.”
I followed her gaze up into the face of the Fae above me. “I didn’t know a god could go missing?”
“All of those you have met today are living, breathing Fae, Cricket. Every last one of them walks Magh Meall somewhere. Connected to this place by infusing their statue with a small shard of their magical essence when they ascended. All of them were once a Fae, like I am, chosen to ascend to godhood by their predecessor. They are just as alive as we are. And as such they can go missing, and even be killed. Like Airgetlám’s husband, Túathal.”
She turned to the last statue, the only one that stood alone, this one in the center of the back wall. Unlike the others, this one had both of its wrists bound by the glowing rope. I followed the line of each as they draped delicately off of the other statues wrists and then connected with one of this one’s. It looked like the others were bound to him, and he to them. It was also the only one that was draped in a massive sheet of sheer black cloth.
Candles littered its feet in great mountains of sleeping potential. None of them had ever been lit. Their wicks were as pale as they had been when they were first poured.
“Túathal. Dead Patron of the dead House of Magic. God of Magic.” With her delicate hand, she reached across the mountain of candles and brushed away specks of dust that had dared to gather on the carved, booted foot of the statue.
“How . . .” I let my question trail off to be swallowed by the solemnity of the scene before me.
I felt like I was intruding on her quiet mourning for this friend of hers who had gone missing and her dead husband. It was awkward to be witnessing such bald grief, as it haunted the temple and gathered in a spectral pool around us for a pair of complete strangers.
“Murdered,” she whispered and leaned back to stare upwards into the darkness that wreathed the head of the statue. “He has that in common with your human god, you know. His house turned on him. We never found out who, exactly, but someone turned on him and pierced his heart with a shard of salt crystal. Drove it straight through him while he napped before his journey into the heart of magic. They found him, stripped bare of all his finery, pinned to his bed like a bug. His face frozen in shock. Every single bit of the heirlooms of his house were stolen from his chamber. It was Airgetlám that found him. I remember going to her, holding her hand, but it was like every bit of her spirit had fled. Her eyes were dull except for the glass of a fountain of tears that never stopped falling.”
She sighed heavily, her pain radiating from her in palpable waves. “I should have stayed with her. I thought it was just grief, everyday grief, like any other, and that she would heal in time. I was the Bandrui of the Temple of the Ascended, though, and the God of Magic had returned to it, even if he had not done so by choice. It was my duty to ready the temple for the ritual of ascension. So, I left her. I left my oldest friend in her time of need and attended to my duty.”
The regret pooled between us, threatening to drown the Bandrui. No one had ever trusted me to show me the unmasked truth of their heart before, and I felt a painful lump gathering in the back of my throat as I shared in her sorrow.
I let my hand reach out to lace into hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. We were no longer a daoire and her de facto captor but two women standing in a single space, sharing the burden of anguish.