Chapter 15
Priestesses led the captives through a set of double doors.
A short cobblestoned path led to the only building Audra had seen so far unscathed by whatever ailment of decay infected the rest of Holyvere Academy.
The circular building was a work of art.
The exterior was adorned with detailed mosaics of the seasons, which were lovely until she looked more closely and realized that each panel depicted a bloody battle scene.
A war between the fae, the soldiers dressed in golden armor, shining divine light upon them, and a host of hideous monsters wearing no armor at all, dead at their feet.
The expressions of agony depicted on the monsters were horrifying compared to the fae warriors’ exalted ones, and yet both unsettled her just the same.
The pigment used for the blood was such a vivid, garish red it made Audra’s eyes ache.
One priestess addressed the crowd from the top of the temple steps.
“Initiates. It’s time for recording. Please line up in three lines at the door and proceed for your interviews one at a time from each line.
If you answer the questions promptly, then it won’t be long before you can change into dry clothes. ”
After much shuffling, Wilder, Callum, Cersha, and Audra managed to remain together in the same line.
One by one, the lines shortened as initiates were called inside. None reappeared.
“I don’t like this at all. I keep hearing that song, it’s winding through my mind over and over,” Cersha whispered, wringing her hands. Her face was pale, blanched with worry.
“Me too. Even now I can hear it,” Wilder said. “I wish I couldn’t. Quick—someone sing a ballad or whistle a tune.”
“Here, this should help.” Callum raised his hands and mimicked a bard strumming a lute as he whisper-sang a popular ditty among traveling bards the past year, his voice comically off-key: “If it weren’t for the missing button on her vest / I wouldn’t have been blessed to see her chest / It would have been a treat / if the other button hadn’t flown so neat / now I’ve a button for an eye … ”
Cersha and Wilder laughed behind their hands, but Audra had a hard time joining in when they were being held hostage by murderous religious zealots.
“Stop, stop. You’re going to call attention to us.” Wilder said as she hit Callum in the arm.
“Alright, I can’t remember the rest of it anyway,” he said, with a wink.
Cersha had stopped wringing her hands, though. Callum’s song had done its job.
They were silent for a beat as they moved up in line. Then Cersha groaned. “Mist take you, Callum, now all I hear is your awful voice …”
It seemed like forever, waiting in the frigid courtyard, but finally Audra was next in line. The door opened, and a familiar voice called for the next initiate to enter. Lord Khari. Of course, it would be him to record Audra.
Audra hesitated. A gentle caress on her shoulder. “Audra, it’s your turn. Or should I go first?” Wilder whispered from behind her, concern threaded in her voice.
Audra glanced backward and met Wilder’s gaze, her brows knitted together in worry.
“No, it’s fine … I’ll go.”
Wilder nodded. “It’s clearly not fine, let me go first.”
Audra shook her head. She gave Wilder a quick, thankful smile and turned back toward the door.
Whether Wilder went before her or not, she would inevitably be forced to go in there.
She might as well get it over with. And maybe, if she were brave enough, she wouldn’t be the only one answering questions.
Audra stepped inside the temple’s atrium.
Blessed warmth washed over her. Bright, golden sunlight—some form of magical illusion—filtered in from the vast domed ceiling.
She didn’t venture far when a set of three doors appeared.
Only one was open. She exhaled a shaky breath and stepped up to the doorway, but she was suddenly unable to pass the threshold.
Lord Khari sat within a small chamber, his eyes cast downward upon the ledger in his hands.
Would he recognize her?
Vitriol caused her heartbeat to quicken, her teeth to grind painfully, as she watched the fae’s quill fly across the page.
She remembered the way he’d stormed into the inn as if he owned the place, how it had been his companion who had bludgeoned her father.
Yet it was his decision to instruct the priestess to save her father, not that it softened Audra toward Lord Khari. He was still the enemy.
She pictured, for a moment, stepping into the room, catching him off guard as she snatched the quill from his fingers and thrust it into his throat, pushing it as hard as she could. If only she were braver.
When a student failed to appear before him, his quill stilled its scritch scratching, falling silent. An exhale as he pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.
“Come now, the hour grows late, and it grows only colder. Close the door,” he commanded, finally tearing his eyes from the page. When they met hers, he showed no sign of recognition, nor did he acknowledge the rage that surely blazed in her features.
In the end, she did not have to close the door; somehow, it closed on its own with a soft click.
They were in a prayer room. It smelled of hot beeswax and smoking plumes of incense. Candles flickered on an altar to their ten major deities that filled the entire length of the far wall, casting shadows over the unadorned room. A cushion to sit on and pray was set before the altar.
And there, a curtain shifting in a breeze that Audra could not feel, a back exit.
“You may address me as Scholar Khari. I teach both incramancy and incra language theory. I just have a few questions; answer them truthfully, and this won’t take long.” Scholar Khari kept his eyes on his ledger. “State your full name, birth year, and nameday.”
“Audra Aisha Evers. The sixteenth of Terah, year 14,547.”
Scholar Khari fluttered through the pages, his fingers flying deftly through the stack. It took only moments for him to locate the desired page; his quill danced across the parchment. “I assume you were named fourteen days after your birth in alignment with the Vacant Realm’s custom?”
A nod.
“Speak, I need verbal confirmation.”
She grit her teeth. “Yes. Fourteen days from the day of my birth, as is Khaveahan custom.”
He ignored her annoyance at the fae’s use of the Vacant Realm for Khaveah.
“Place of birth?”
“Salt Hollow, northern coast of Ruscal kingdom.” No sign that he recognized the location, even though he’d been there when she’d been taken.
Scritch scratch. “Siblings?”
“Yes—one. Not by blood, though.”
He nodded in approval. “Good. Your answers match your previous statements upon retrieval.”
For the first time since his questions began, his gaze flicked upward from the ledgers to meet hers.
His eyes narrowed as they took her in for the first time.
What did he see? Blue lips from the frigid temperatures?
Red-rimmed and bloodshot eyes? Chapped, wind-burned cheeks?
She refused to shrink beneath his gaze. She raised her chin in defiance, though her teeth chattered from the cold.
If she looked pitiful, it was he who should feel ashamed for her sorry state—still, she wished he would cease the sudden scrutiny and return to looking at his ledgers.
Or better yet, dismiss her already.
His next question made her eyes widen in surprise.
“Do you possess any talents?”
She hadn’t been asked about talents back at the inn.
Did she possess any talents?
Where Scholar Khari had seemed apathetic earlier, with those first few questions spouted off by rote, his gaze remained level as he studied her, suddenly interested in her response now.
A clock somewhere began to chime. Talents …
Audra clasped her hands together and gnawed the inside of her cheek.
She could cook a meal for a packed inn without burning the bread.
Pour a pint with the perfect head of foam.
Scrub and wax floors until they showed her reflection.
She knew how to remove most stains, even the worst sort, from bedsheets and sew ripped linens.
Scholar Khari sighed, his curiosity extinguished as quickly as it had appeared. “Shall I record ‘none’?”
“No, um … I can swim. Rather fast.” He waited, his face impassive, his expression unchanging, and though she hated herself for it, she rushed to fill the silence. “I once won a race against all the others in my village.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A swimming race against … others in your village?”
Audra grimaced. She was proud of that win. She’d trained for weeks, and it had paid off when she’d bested even the adults.
“Anything else?”
She pressed her lips together, hating this moment, wishing she could just leave.
“Have you a good head for numbers? Can you draw exceptionally well, ride a horse … shoot a bow and arrow?”
“No,” she gritted out. Hating that she felt the heat of shame on her cheeks.
She’d never needed to learn arithmetic beyond basic bookkeeping.
What use did an innkeeper have for drawing (paper was damned expensive; she’d only ever drawn doodles on scraps of paper), riding horses (expensive), bows (outrageously expensive), and arrows (again, expensive unless one could carve their own, which she could not)?
“Very well.” He marked something down. It seemed too quick to have been swims incredibly fast, won a race, and thus was probably instead: none.
“Take this and think of the passing of seasons,” instructed Scholar Khari nonchalantly, withdrawing a triangular object from a container sitting on the desk beside him.
The object fit in the palm of his hand and was fashioned from a shimmering, flawless metal—some fae alloy.
The smooth purple-hued metal was carved with strange markings on all sides.
Symbols that Audra had never seen before.
The markings began to shift and change, but when she focused on just one, it remained still, constant.
A dull headache began to pound behind her eyes.
“Will it hurt?”
“No.”