Chapter 30. Now Maris #2
I swallowed down the rising urge to vomit.
I thought I had hated. I thought that I knew what it was to hold malice in my heart.
But this—this clawed thing inside me was darkness itself, unfurling like the leaves on the vines in the atrium.
The cold, dead feeling bled through me again, that black pit expanding.
I’d given up everything to wear these robes because I’d believed they were the answer.
I’d dedicated my life to the gods. But now there was no more Forum or Illyrium or Citadel.
There was no New Legion or Lower City. Now it was just me.
Isara was an empty tomb and I just a corpse within it.
I let my eyes linger on the stylus for another moment before I placed it back in the obsidian box. Its light snuffed out as the lid closed, and I stood, a floating feeling coming over me.
My hands smoothed out the wrinkles of my robes, retying them the way my mother had taught me.
The eyes of the Magistrate portraits followed me as I walked down the Tribunal Hall, sandals like a heartbeat on the stone.
A deep calm settled in me as I took the narrow, winding staircases down into the catacombs.
There was a bone-chilling silence that waited in the dark.
I kept my eyes ahead as I moved through the stone-walled passages, my steps steady when I saw the shine of armor at the entrance to the Priestess’s chamber.
The gazes of the legionnaires posted there were fixed on something invisible in the distance, reflecting that same empty look I knew was in my own eyes.
One of the legionnaires moved as I came closer, retrieving the alabaster box, and when I stopped before the door, I could see Ophelius in a haze of incense smoke.
I gave a nod to the legionnaires and they opened the door, letting it swing out into the corridor.
I stepped inside the cell, going to the altar and setting the box down as the legionnaire unlocked the cell door.
I took the whalebone knife from inside, and once the chamber was closed, I turned to face Ophelius.
The Priestess was crumpled on the cold floor, propped up by a single silk pillow, but when she saw me, her chapped lips moved just slightly.
“Casperia. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Thinking of her as a woman didn’t feel right anymore.
This creature huddled in the corner barely looked human.
The Ophelius I knew wasn’t visible in the husk who sat before me.
How this weak, deformed vessel could still have godsblood running in her veins, I didn’t know.
This was the creature Nej wanted me to bleed. Hers was the blood he wanted.
The ties of the robes suddenly felt like they were choking me, my lungs unable to draw in the air.
There was too much death in the room. I came low, folding my legs beneath me as I pressed my forehead to the stone, and I could smell it—that tinge of rot in the air.
But I could see by the look in Ophelius’ eyes that she couldn’t feel it anymore.
She was suspended between this world and the next, her soul stretched thin.
Her bony hand slid across the floor toward me, but she didn’t touch the fabric of my chiton. “Your path has changed since the last time I saw you.”
“You’ve said that before,” I said, heart sinking with the weight of it.
“Tell me.” Her voice crackled, eyes slowly blinking. “Where is your husband?”
I pressed my lips together, a sharp pain igniting inside my chest the moment I heard her say the word. Husband.
“I don’t know.” The words broke.
A rattling woke in her chest and she coughed violently, curling into herself. I watched as she struggled to breathe. Her eyes seemed to focus and unfocus, as if she were watching something at play in the dark that I couldn’t see. But there was a clarity in them that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“I told you,” she said. “There are some bonds that cannot be broken.”
“I know that now.”
Ophelius’ chest rose and fell raggedly. “You have a question for me,” she whispered.
Even now, inches from death, she could see inside my mind.
“Why did he do it?” I asked. “Why did Hermaus give his blood to the mortals as a gift?”
She grinned. “You are thinking like a Priestess now.”
The emotion buried deep in my belly woke, making my nose prickle with the sting of tears. And the way she looked at me said that she knew what question I was really asking. It began with a kindness. The love of a mortal. And when Hermaus gave the gift of magic, he gave us our doom.
“There are two versions of the story,” she rasped. “The one we tell—the one painted in the temple—says that the mortals saved Hermaus’ life that day.”
“And the other?”
“The one told by my great-grandmother Ursu was different. It’s the one painted on the temples in Valshad.”
I waited, breath pinned in my chest.
“It tells the story of five women who happened upon the wounded god. And they did not help him. They did not tend to his wounds. They drew a blade against him in his helpless state. They drained his blood and drank it.”
“They stole it.” I stared into the torchlight behind her, lost in its glow as my mind pulled at the threads. If this version of the story was true, then Valshad had taken this magic with the blade of a knife. Then Isara had stolen it again, with the same violence.
She looked at me gravely, as if I’d spoken aloud some secret. “It is a terrible thing to touch the power of the gods.”
She shifted suddenly, making me flinch, and her hands slid across the floor in jerking movements toward me.
I watched in horror as she dragged her useless legs behind her, slithering like a snake on the stone.
I was frozen as her skeletal fingers drifted through the air and found my face.
I could hardly breathe as she pulled me toward her in an embrace.
To the legionnaire watching through the door’s window, maybe it would appear as a dying Priestess saying goodbye to her novice. Or a desperate woman begging for her life. But there wasn’t a tender or delicate bone in Ophelius’ body.
Her grip on me tightened, pulling my hair as her bony, bloodless cheek pressed to mine. Her voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear it over the rush of the pulse pounding in my ears.
Her macabre grin widened. “There are some shadows you can see coming. Death is one of them. Remember that.”
She let me go, hand falling to the floor, and her eyes rolled back before they found me again. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve really come, Maris?”
I leaned in closer, letting my voice fill the small space between us. “I need something from you. And in return, I’ll give you what you want.”
Another ragged breath filled her weak lungs before she nodded. Carefully, I pulled the transcribed message from inside my chiton, handing it to her. Her eyes brightened just a little as they moved over the words. And then a tear rolled from the corner of her eye.
“What does it say?” I whispered.
“They’re coming, Maris.” She drew out the S in my name like the hiss of a snake. “Valshad. They’re coming.”
She rocked onto her back, a smile breaking on her lips as she closed her eyes.
The words fell heavy in the air, all of it suddenly making sense.
The messages weren’t to some lost contingent of the Loyal Legion or an unknown ally who was coming to save us.
Nej had summoned the only people who wanted to see us burn more than the rebels. He was signaling Valshad.
“You see them for what they are now, don’t you? The gods are not kind, child. They are not benevolent. They are mercilessly hungry beasts, just like us.” A laugh cracked in her throat.
I leaned over her, hand stroking her thin hair with a prayer to the gods silent on my lips. I cursed them before I asked them to forgive me. And then I pressed the whalebone knife into her palm.
I was finally doing something that fulfilled the promise Luca and I made to each other.
I’d considered it a betrayal when he’d crossed that river without me and turned against his own people.
I hadn’t understood him. But nothing right could fix what was wrong here.
For the first time, I would have blood on my hands, making me finally understand what Luca had done.
He’d known what I hadn’t. He’d seen long before me.
The tide was turning, and we were the wind.