51. Then Stake
THEN: STAKE
Are you ready for your mantle, daughter?
Mantle?
For it begins now. You will take it up tonight, or tomorrow if they drag it out.
She had known. As she had said to the priest, she had seen what I had not.
The woman was a trap, though her dire need had been real.
It had been the bait. Magda had seen it for what it was and still carried out our service.
And the question she had asked to me before I let our captors inside was one of inheritance.
Was I ready to take on her role? Was I ready for her mantle?
I was not. I spent what must have been a full day in that cell, pacing it back and forth, trying to quell the beating in my heart.
In the evening, I was made to follow a guard up a set of stairs I barely remembered stumbling down the night before. They put me in a wagon, and I fell to the floor of it when the driver gave me no warning and flicked his reins over the backs of the horses.
“Where is my mare?” I called to the guards riding behind the wagon, but they ignored me, their opened cresset torches held aloft to cast light on the night road. “She is my father’s property,” I reasoned. “She should be returned to him. Where do you take me?”
They ignored me, and the wagon made its way down the road that led from the keep and its fields to the town.
I will jail the girl and consider it.
Perhaps I would burn too. And that was why the horse had not been returned to me. I tried to breathe, placing my hands over my heart. I glanced around in the dying sunlight, but the growing dark only allowed for me to see so far. As we neared the town square, I saw torchlights and faces.
What seemed to be the entire citizenship of Sheridan was gathered.
A stake, something that would be the center beam of a roof, from which rafters would be structured, was driven into the middle of the square. Dry firewood and kindling sticks were tied to the base of it.
“Oh gods,” I said. “Oh gods. They are burning her tonight?”
The guards continued our procession and did not answer me.
When the wagon pulled into the town square, my mother spotted me from the crowd and began screaming. My father tried to calm her, but her outrage and terror were unchecked.
“My girl!” she shrieked and ran to one side of the square.
Torm, his wife, his sons, a triumphant Starling, and the keep’s guards were gathered. Two men held a tired Magda between them, her hands bound in front of her.
I made to get out of the wagon, but one of my captors tersely instructed, “You’ll stay put. If you know what’s good for you. Stay put, girl.”
I froze, not out of cowardice but from shock. What was my recourse? What should I do?
“Torm!” My mother was still shrieking, my father close on her heels. She threw herself on him, her fists hitting his chest. “That is my child! My child!”
My father called her name and reached out to pull her away, but she was ungovernable, frantic, and would not hear him.
Lady Sheridan gave my mother a cool stare.
Thane moved to step forward, but Bertram pulled him back by his shirt.
I saw Rowena running from where she had been in the crowd to where I stood in the wagon, tears streaming down her face.
“Back!” snapped a guard at her, holding his spear out to bar her. “Stay back! Return to where you were. Now!”
They closed ranks around the wagon.
“Madam, contain yourself,” Starling was warning our mother from where he stood near Torm. “I fear your intervention will anger our saint. You’ll only make the fire blaze hotter for your daughter.”
Torm Sheridan took my mother’s wrists in his hands as if to throw her off his person, but he pulled her close and put his mouth to her ear.
His eyelids fluttered closed. It was an odd intimacy, two people who perhaps had loved each other more than twenty winters ago but were now married to others, parents to children.
And yet, there was a poignancy in the tilt of his head, the way his mouth brushed over her temple like the most fleeting, wistful kiss.
My mother jerked away and fell into my father’s arms.
My father must have heard the lord, for he said, “Your mercy, my lord. We thank you for it.”
Before Torm could reply, Starling, a bitter scowl on his features as he looked at my mother, broke away from their grouping and crossed the square to where my wagon and the guards were.
The driver, sensing his intent, reached down a hand and helped the priest up into the wagon.
I stepped away from him, but Father Starling, a well-built man only in his forties, followed my steps, took my right wrist, and pulled my hand up into the air.
He was taller than me, and my shoulder felt nearly yanked from my back.
He sneered down into my face before he turned to the crowd gathered.
“See this!” the priest called out. “See the mercy of your lord? Torm Sheridan is a man of compassion and clemency. The Miller girl has spent winters under a witch’s roof.
She too was at the bedside of the woman whose unborn child was put to death by the witch.
She should burn too. They should be tied to the stake back-to-back.
But no! Torm Sheridan grants her lenience.
He shows this heathen girl charity and quarter.
You should call yourselves blessed, people of Sheridan. To have such a man at your head.”
He did not sound as if he praised the lord.
“Bring forth the malefactress!” the priest ordered.
The guards that had been holding Magda began to march her towards the stake. She was going willingly, but she was old and slow, and they were half dragging her by the time they reached the base of the stake.
“No, no, no, no,” I wept. I was crying, shaking, coming undone.
“Oh you will watch, girl,” Starling whispered in my ear.
“You should be there with her, but you’ll at least watch.
Every twig that catches light, you will see.
Every scream from her withered throat, you will hear.
If it weren’t for the fact that your mother’s still a beauty and temptress to our lord, if it weren’t for her having swayed him, you would be kindling too.
And believe you me, one day? I will see you burn too. One day.”
I tried to wrench away, dragging my arm downward between our bodies, but he pulled me closer.
“Trust it, Roberta. I will make it the cause of my life.” His voice had returned to that silvery quality he used, the nearly kind way of speaking. “It is the only way to save your soul.”
I was weeping, wilting, my gaze swinging from Magda to my sister to my parents.
I spotted a face I had not really noticed in winters.
Ilsit was standing closer to the side of the crowd that seemed to be mostly residents of the keep.
Next to her were Wynne and Kent. Wynne looked grim, and Kent looked intrigued but not upset.
Ilsit’s fingertips covered her mouth. Her often-ornery face was slack as she watched the guards deliver Magda to her fate.
Magda was being forced at spearpoint, barefoot and unsteady, to clamber up the sharp protrusions of the pyre to where a young guard balanced on a board nailed to the side of the stake.
He instructed her to put her feet on it, next to his.
They had untied her hands and he rebound them, this time around the stake and behind her.
My arm was still held by Starling.
“Look to this, people of Sheridan,” he went on, his call booming out in the square.
He had the attention of every soul gathered.
“Look to this and know that this be a holy thing. Our souls are doomed to burn in the demon realm after we die. Unless! Unless we repent for being born craven, wretched, feckless. Unless we seek salvation in the teachings of our saint, a man so selfless he worried over the souls of men and women everywhere and set himself on fire as an offering to the afterlife. He sent himself to hell in our place. So that we would escape the eternal blaze, so that our souls could be at peace after we depart this mortal life. But this? This is what happens when you do not repent. When you do not seek salvation. This woman? This Tintarian? She had every chance at salvation, and she spat on it. She lay down in those woods, prostrated herself to her goddesses and her gods. She made idols of trees and of rivers. She told your wives they did not have to have as many children as their bellies could deliver, that they could avoid the blessings of motherhood and be selfish. She robbed you of your very offspring, unborn, ripped them from the womb. And the only way to give her soul a chance is to have her burn here, in this life, for that refiner’s fire to have one last moment to reconcile her soul.
This is her reckoning. If she burns in peace, if she accepts her fate, then perhaps she will not awaken on the other side a thrall to demons, burning for eternity. ”
There was a hush. Every face in the crowd was stilled, eerie, lit by the torches held above their heads.
And then, unable to keep the sheer relish out of his voice, he said, “Light it.”
“No!” The word tore out of me, weak and broken.