Chapter 9
The monastery sits at the edge of a green lake, high enough in the mountains that there’s still snow on the ground.
It looks like a wooden layered cake, the tiers widening as they descend.
The posts around the entrance are carved with flowers and with the sign of the Fever, three interlinked circles, one for the life before infection, one for the life after, and one for the Fever itself.
Ranos and the woman—-Nyx—-escort the Knights, their hands still bound behind them, into the monastery and down creaking hallways to a wide, bright room.
A stove sits in its center, a chimney funneling smoke outside, and arranged around it are colorful cushions.
It’s the first comfortable place any of them have been in since the Getty.
Kesia is already standing inside it.
“This is a sacred place,” she says to them.
“It houses our most honored citizens: those who see deep into the past, who we call ‘epocha’; and those who can pass the Fever by breath, who we call ‘priests.’ ” Hearing her say “we” with such ease makes Theren feel sick.
“The people here are all peaceful. They are also protected by our highest laws. If you attack them, if you so much as move threateningly toward them, you will be burned alive. Understand?”
As she speaks, Ranos moves from one of them to the other, cutting the ropes that bind their wrists.
“They’ll bring food and water,” Kesia says. “This will be the last meal you have before exposure to Fever. This is to give you strength. But there’s no evidence that strength helps you survive the Fever. It just prolongs your death. So if you want a quicker end, don’t eat.”
Ranos and Nyx leave. Lisia chokes on a sob and sinks to the floor, her hand clamped over her mouth. Maeve sits next to her, an arm around her back. Kesia is lingering by the door.
“Theren,” she says to him.
“There’s nothing you can say to me that I want to hear,” he says. “Not anymore.”
He can see that it wounds her, and he feels regret, but only for a moment. He’s here in this place, staring down death, because of her.
“You can’t be angry with me forever,” Kesia says.
“I can be angry with you until I die,” Theren says. “And thanks to you, that’ll be in a few days’ time.”
She stares at him. He doesn’t think she knows what to say. Neither does he. When she walks out of the room and closes the door behind her, it’s a relief.
“These people are insane,” Fenn says. “They bring their own here to get sick and die, and they call it a holy place.”
Theren sits, rubbing his wrists where the skin is raw. He feels strange. Detached, almost. Like he can’t bear to be in his own body, knowing it will soon betray him.
The notion of “surviving” the Fever is a flawed one, a kind of translation error. The Fever is fatal, and the death it brings about is total. No heartbeat, no brain waves, nothing. And then, as if time is running backward, the body puts itself back together again. The heart starts. The lungs fill.
The eyes open.
It’s no wonder they call this place holy. What else do you call a place where people routinely come back to life?
Lisia’s sobs subside. She and Maeve sit clutched together, quiet, as the others stare into the coals of the stove and wait.
A woman comes that evening to get them. Older, her face lined, wearing a deep blue robe with a heavy hood.
The sleeves are stitched with copper thread in a repeating pattern: the three interlinked circles, over and over again, so tiny he doesn’t recognize them at first. She wears a necklace of black stones that creeps all the way up to her jaw.
Nyx follows her in, her hand poised over the knife at her side. But none of the Knights even stand up, let alone move against the—-priest. Monk. Whatever she is.
“I am an attendant to priests of the Fever. I will take you one by one to be prepared for the ceremony.” Her English is slow and deliberate, each syllable pronounced. “Which of you would like to go first?”
No one moves.
When he was a child, Theren feared the monster under the bed, the monster in the closet, the monster in the dark.
So his stepfather gave him a mechanical flashlight.
Better to know what’s there than fear what isn’t, he said, and this sounded like a profound insight to Theren.
After a few weeks of shining the flashlight under the bed, into the closet, into the dark apartment . . . he stopped feeling so afraid.
The Fever has been waiting in the dark all his life. It’s time to meet it.
“Let’s get it over with,” he says, and he comes to his feet. He didn’t eat with the others; he doesn’t want a slow decline. The dread of death is probably worse than death itself.
Maeve gets up, too. Hugs him. Furik wraps his arms around them both. Lisia touches Theren’s hand where it rests on Maeve’s arm. Theren lifts his eyes to Fenn.
Fenn nods. It’s more than Theren expected.
The woman ushers him into the hallway, and then falls into step beside him, her hands clasped before her.
“He’s the one who speaks Talusar,” Nyx says to the attendant.
“And he’s the one ready to meet our God,” the attendant says. “How fitting.”
Despite the dark wood that hems them in on all sides, the hallways feel open, their ceilings vaulted.
They pass through a narrow, two--story--high space with stained--glass windows on either side.
The images are of a fragmented Earth, thrice--encircled; of a woman in a blue robe performing the sign of the Fever over her mouth.
“I thought anyone could pass on the Fever with their blood,” Theren says, as he pauses to look at the windows. “What makes priests different?”
“Their breath is the breath of a god,” the attendant says. “There is no wrong way to meet the Fever, but the ideal is through the air. ‘What a clever--strange thing it is, that life’s deepest mystery is gently adrift, like a seed carried by the wind,’ like the poem from—-”
“Volyn,” Theren says quietly. “I know.”
Kesia read him that poem once. She told him that some people shed enough of the Fever virus to transmit it through breath, but she didn’t tell him those people were considered holy, marked and robed and sequestered here in a monastery.
“Then you already know that it’s good to receive the Fever from one who is Fever--blessed to speak it into your body.”
Theren knows no such thing. But he follows the woman down stone steps and into a basement. The air feels moist. Nyx opens the door, and gestures them in.
The room below is long and narrow, with a deep pool in the center, full of dark water.
All along the edge of the pool are arches and columns, with lanterns positioned at intervals to fill the space with dim, flickering light.
It reminds him of the temple where Isre was Imbued.
And maybe the infection is a kind of Imbuing.
Shuffling through the space on light feet, all around the pool, are people in blue robes—-deep blue, like the sky after sunset.
“No one here will harm you,” Nyx says to him. “But you must do as they say, or I’ll hurt you.”
The attendant reaches for Theren’s hand. When she touches him, she freezes, and stares up into his eyes. Her own are shadowed and dark. Her hair is the color of ashes.
“I see a man,” she says, and she sounds like she’s far away.
Her hood falls away from her head, and he sees a tattoo on the side of her throat, but he doesn’t know what it means.
She squeezes him tightly. “A man descending into darkness. Your father, I think. He is not what you think he is, your father.”
His father was a Talusar soldier. His body is buried under a tree outside of Valla.
“You must be mistaken,” he says to her. He stares at the mark on her throat. Does it mark her as an epocha?
Is she looking into his past? Kesia lied about being loyal to Cedre, lied about betraying everything he’d ever known—-did she lie to him about his father, too?
“Unmistakable,” the attendant says, and she releases him. “Come.”
He follows her to the edge of the pool, and he stares as she kneels and starts to untie his shoes. He crouches, stilling her hands, and their eyes meet again in the half--light.
“What is this?” he says.
“A ritual of cleansing,” she says. “You can’t stand before a priest without it. Don’t be bashful. You aren’t the first I’ve seen, and you won’t be the last.”
He hears Nyx moving toward him, and he releases the woman’s hands. She keeps at his laces like there was no interruption. The room is hushed, the others busy in the shadows, where he can’t see them.
It helps that she’s quick and businesslike, tugging off his shoes, peeling off his socks—-spotted with blood at the heels and toes. She doesn’t object when he unbuttons his own trousers and steps out of them. His face is hot. He tries to ignore it.
“Get in,” she says, leaving him to take off his underwear and undershirt. She walks away, and Theren hurries to undress and get in the water.
It’s warm, and clearer than it looks, only dark because of the deep color of the tiles that line the pool. He stands with water lapping at his rib cage, and waits. One of the other attendants wades in, and then another, and another. They surround him.
He smells smoke. One of them holds a copper bowl with something burning in it. They wave it under Theren’s nose, and by instinct he breathes it in. It burns his lungs. He coughs, and his head swims, his muscles relax. He’s still awake, still aware, but he feels even more distant than before.
It’s easier to submit to their attentions after that.
To the hands pressing him down into the water, and guiding him back up again, then working soap into his hair, his shoulders.
The sight of them, and the lanterns, is dizzying.
He closes his eyes and he’s not sure whether he feels fingers in his hair, along his knuckles, over his legs—-or if they’re just phantoms.