Chapter Four
The Hands Raised in Prayer
‘A V-shaped stitch, simple to execute and pleasing to the eye. Of particular use in forming letters.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
To understand Virelith—at least, the Virelith of my birth—you need to understand the Plague. The Plague shaped everything about us. Mother had told me the story for years, as if it was a line dividing us into Before and After.
Before, or so I was told, bone mages existed harmoniously among those who had to sacrifice other parts of their bodies for potent magic—hair, teeth, or nails.
The replaceable parts of the body. Bone mages alone used something that could not be so easily replaced.
This meant that their spells were by far the most powerful—earthshakingly powerful—but each casting crumbled a little away from their spine or hollowed out a spoonful of their marrow.
Where a tooth mage could spit out a molar and almost immediately grow another in its place, a bone mage had to live with their loss.
They chose their spells carefully, therefore, and cast only seldom—but when they did, their enchantments reshaped the world.
This way of things seemed to work well enough for a long while.
The few bone mages that existed were revered and pitied at once, seen almost as saints.
Their bodies shrank and hunched over the years, until finally they walked with canes or crutches and had to abandon the practice of magic altogether.
And then, almost two hundred years ago—or so the story went—a bone mage went rogue.
This person, whose name was lost to history, discovered that they didn’t need to fuel bone magic with their own body, but could use the bones of others.
This upset the balance of things, Mother told me, as the magic-wielder must pay the price for power themselves.
Otherwise, what’s to stop a mage from running amok?
Which is, supposedly, exactly what happened.
The story is that one of the bone mages, carried away with the possibilities of limitless power, broke the agreements forged between all magicians and started to use the long-buried bones of the dead.
The soil was crowded with them, thousands of years of graves.
They ran wild with their castings, until bone magic itself, overfed and made bloodthirsty, broke free from its vessel and swept through the kingdom, killing the living and raising the long-dead from their graves to walk again.
There followed a time of horror … But the Temple saved us all.
That was their story, anyway, Mother would say, rolling her eyes.
The Temple had existed for a long time before the Plague, gradually gathering converts to the way of the One-Eyed God—but as their religion was fairly austere and joyless, they had never spread as far across the kingdom as they wished to.
Then, faced with the imminent destruction of Virelith by rogue, uncontrolled magic, they called on the power of their god (apparently) and banished bone magic for good.
The people—those who had survived—gratefully converted to the Temple’s religion.
The cult of the One-Eyed God went from a fringe belief to an institution as powerful as the monarchy, and to prevent bone magic from rising again, they ordered all graves to be opened and the bones within to be burned.
From that point onward, no one was buried—every corpse had to be burned and ground to dust in Temple crematoriums, which sprung up everywhere.
I suppose there must be some who adhered to the old ways across the kingdom, but the only named group—and the only one afforded any kind of protection—was the Followers.
What had happened to the bone mage who started the Plague—well, no one knew.
This particular Follower Priest—Herlind—had a placid, calming presence, and chatted with me gently as we walked, seeming to sense my nerves. They were strong and energetic despite their peacefulness, however, and I found myself having to almost break into a run to keep up with their easy strides.
Over the next two days, I grew used to their face, and to the faces of the others in the group, but I was startled anew by everyone we passed on the road—the infinite variation there was among human faces.
The unending shuffling and reshaping of various eyes, noses, mouths.
I was probably looking at them very strangely, and they looked at me strangely in return.
Of course, that might have been because of the giant bird on my shoulder and the red Hair that fell to my knees, in contrast to the neatly braided styles that I saw were the fashion among other women we passed (although the Hair behaved itself on the road and stayed still for the most part).
All fellow travelers were unfailingly respectful to the Followers, however, murmuring greetings and bowing as they passed—particularly to the Priest.
I tried awkwardly to make conversation with Herlind now and then, although of course I was unpracticed. “Why did you join the Followers?” I asked them.
“Because I wanted to follow my own path,” they said. “All of us here chose to wander rather than live a life sanctioned by the Temple.”
“I suppose I find it hard to imagine always moving—never settling anywhere.” As someone who had lived in the same small space her whole life and never left it until now, the idea was terrifying to me. “Never having a home.”
“The people who have settled under Temple rule are burdened by tithes and royal taxes. They follow a cheerless religion that tells them death is something to be feared.”
“Is it not?”
They shrugged. “Before the Temple, a death was a celebration—an offering of yourself back to the earth. The family would walk their loved one down the Corpse Roads to their final resting place with music and ceremony.”
“But you have to burn your dead as well,” I said.
Their eyes flicked to me. “That is the law, yes.”
Which wasn’t really a confirmation.
“The Temple also demands tithes for the burnings,” said the Priest. “Only Temple officials can perform them.”
“Why?”
“They claim the One-Eyed God presides over the proceedings, keeping the Plague at bay. Of course, this proves very profitable for them,” they said evenly.
The Priest stopped suddenly, stooping to lay their palm flat against the dusty ground.
“You may not know this,” they said, “but we follow the paths of the old Corpse Roads in our wanderings. They connect every holy place and every city in Virelith. We follow them on the surface now as people used to walk them in the time before the Plague—to honor the forgotten dead.”
I thought of Mother and hoped that I was not unwittingly walking in her funeral procession. She had to be alive somewhere, surely? We had been so entangled, just the two of us, for so long—surely I would know in my heart if she were truly gone?
We made our way to Quell stride by stride …
or inch by inch, it felt like, at the Followers’ placid pace.
In all the stories of maidens and knights that Mother had told me, I had never heard more than the most minor details about the actual journeying part of their adventures, getting from one place to another.
I was not prepared for the sheer amount of walking. The tedium.
I suppose it wouldn’t make for much of a story, hearing how the heroine’s feet felt like they were about to burst from blisters, or how her stomach growled enough to raise the dead from the Corpse Roads underfoot, nor how—in one memorable instance—the heroine squatted to urinate behind a shrub and realized too late that she had chosen a patch of stinging nettles, to the Followers’ great amusement.
They certainly didn’t comment on how dirty you felt after a day of walking, or on that particular sour-milk smell when you haven’t washed your skin or changed clothes.
I longed for a bath, but I had to make do with washing myself in the little streams and creeks we passed—as quickly as possible, teeth chattering, before the chill set in.
I used my blanket as a makeshift towel, which meant it was still damp come nightfall, and all in all, I reflected that I could have done a much better job of packing my bag for the journey.
My Hair, fortunately, had some quality to its magic that kept it clean and untangled no matter what the rest of me looked like.
Although it probably hadn’t been the wisest decision to bring all my silks and embroidery when I could have used the space in my pack for more practical things, I didn’t regret it.
I would have gone mad if I hadn’t been able to sit before the fire at night and work at my stitches, letting my mind dissolve into color and pattern rather than worrying at the gap in my memory that felt as dark and teasing as a missing tooth.
Baldbeak liked to sit on my shoulder and hold spools of thread for me, which fascinated the Followers.
I felt them watching me with interest as I worked, but only one came to sit beside me: one who appeared to be a young woman about my own age (although of course the Followers used no signifiers of gender, so I had to think of her as they), with curling dark hair and long lashes.
“You’re very talented,” they said after watching for a little while. “How long have you been sewing?”
“A while,” I said.
I had been desperate for ways to occupy my time in the Tower, and on one particularly dreary day, I dug out Mother’s old sewing box to try my stitching skills on something other than spellbooks.
Mother didn’t concern herself with such frivolous things as appearance, but I found that something in me yearned for color and beauty—to bring the vividness I saw out in the meadow into our dour Tower and colorless, well-worn clothing.