Chapter 4 #2
A hush descended upon the piazza as heavy steps echoed, and a druid ascended the dais.
Capriche?
Head snapping up, I searched for his whip, scanning his hands, waist, and back for its cruel length. That blessed numbness wavered, something far more dangerous stirring at its core, crawling beneath my skin and breaking me out in sweat.
“Have mercy! I am of Druid Tomin’s enclave, not his.
” The weeping woman in front of me had rounded on an acolyte, her hands, blotchy and red like the rest of her, clasped to her chest. “I was penanced three fingers for watering the wine; he’ll take the whole hand!
Or my arm!” The acolyte stared ahead, a curl to his lips, ignoring her pleas.
“Be still,” a monk hissed, blocking her view of the acolyte. “Druid Vetrius comes for the crusiax, not for thee, tavern wench.”
She whimpered, offering a small, trembling nod, her eyes flickering between him and the scaffold.
Fear, flammable as cotton, buzzed through our line. For there, astride the scaffold, stood not Capriche, but Druid Vetrius.
He was a smudge of black against the reach’s grey stone, his armour wrought of the darkest iron, swallowing the light rather than reflecting it. A shudder crept from the base of my neck to my tailbone as the truth settled once more: I was no smarter, nor cleverer, than the rest.
The Butcher was here.
“To your knees, Dendra! For His Holiness, Druid Vetrius, commander of the crusiax, second only to His Eminence, the High Druid of Dendra! For Blood Demands Blood.”
“For Blood Demands Blood,” we echoed, falling to our knees.
“Rise.”
If Capriche’s point was a twisted spire, then the Butcher’s were knives, three melded to his helm like a crown of swords.
Other druids began to line the scaffold behind him, a frontier of black metal: chest plates, pauldrons, veils of chain masking their faces.
But none were like him. Not only was he taller, broader than the rest, but there was something other about him.
He prowled the dais, animalistic, primal, preternatural in his movements.
I bristled, feeling a queer kinship with the hens of my mother’s coop.
But it was my hair, not feathers, that rose in his fox-like presence.
Druids were predictable in a way: enforcers of rules, champions of scripture.
But the Butcher…he was no mere shepherd of an enclave; he was the commander of the crusiax, the holy soldiers of Thromarra, and armed not with a whip but a sword.
I pushed out a breath, sucking in another lungful of damp, late-morning air. If Vetrius was there, then it would be a fruitful First Day indeed. There’d be no mere rodding of knuckles.
Movement at the foot of the reach swung every head left, drawn by the beat of atonement. Every First Day sounded the same—the steady drumming of feet upon wood as Thromarrians mounted the scaffold. Then came the screams.
Three crusiax, marked by their surcoats, the olive trees stitched to their chests, mounted the platform.
Monks hauled crudely carved chairs upstage, the acolytes following with chains, their links dragging alongside their iron-spiked belts.
The first two sat obediently, letting the monks bind them to the wood without protest. But the third…
he writhed and squirmed, pleading, begging, threatening, his words indecipherable from my position so far back in the line.
I thought not of wooden chairs, but of wooden tables, leather instead of chains, and both of us at the mercy of an acolyte’s hands.
My thighs clamped together, but I willed my eyes open.
All of Dendra seemed to be looking, and so I looked, too.
“Dendra.” The Butcher’s voice bouldered through the piazza.
I felt it in my chest, turning my bones to mulch.
He rarely spoke—I couldn’t recall if I’d ever heard his voice before.
Usually, he’d enact his penancings with heavy silence.
Even the crowds quietened in the wake of his brutality, Thromarrians quick to learn the limits of what they could stomach.
“Crusiax, the swords of the Dendralis, do not only battle with armies, soldiers, or steel.”
I’d bore witness to a crusiax penance but a handful of times—always gruesome affairs. I squirmed with the knowledge that, this day, I had no mother’s skirts to hide behind.
“They wrestle not only with flesh, but with rulers. With souls. They fight for the salvation of heathens, blind to the Blood God’s mercy. This duty demands not just faith, but courage and strength. And these men”—he turned, a giant gloved hand motioning to the chairs—“have neither.”
With that, he drew the longsword from his back, its wicked tip levelled at the last of the soldiers, still bucking and squirming. Hands twitching to cover my ears, the air thickened with the desire for blood as the crowd erupted.
’Tis a special day when Druid Vetrius penances at the reach.
“This man”—he moved to the side of the wiggling crusiax, towering over his quivering frame—“took three women against their will.” I straightened, disgust at the soldier overwhelming my weak stomach.
Dendra jeered and my lip curled, a chant of “Blood Demands Blood” swelling from the heart of the piazza until it filled every mouth.
“For Blood Demands Blood,” I breathed. Some sins, at least, were worthy of a druid’s wrath.
Then, he struck.
In one fluid arc, Vetrius’ sword sliced through the air.
I blinked once, twice, too slow to shut them completely.
The writhing crusiax stilled, face blanching, noticeable even from where I stood in the line.
He watched, alongside the rest of us, as his legs toppled to the floor, severed from under his knees.
“The Butcher carves his first cuts!” a nameless voice roared from the piazza’s centre before an explosion of cheers.
Amongst the gushing of blood and his warbled screams, monks and acolytes approached, primed with more weapons.
Not weapons, scorchers—rounded stamps of heated iron they’d use to cauterise his wounds.
With the hiss of burnt flesh, they sealed each weeping stump, staunching the flow to save some for the offering.
A small mercy that it would be done within the templum’s great walls, sparing us witness.
Gagging, wishing I hadn’t looked, I retched into the balls of my fists whilst the clamour of Dendra drowned out his cries.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Vetrius lifted his blade, blood running down its side in heavy, red streams.
Facing away, eyes closed, I implored my stomach to settle. By the First, I wanted Demetri, wanted to meet his warm eyes above the heads of our enclave. But then I remembered what I’d see there would be worse than the scaffold.
“This man”—he stalked away from the mutilated last, towards the crusiax in the centre, the slow thud of his boots rattling the wood, leaving bloody footprints in their wake—“deserted his brothers, left them for dead, surrounded by heathen swords in the Isles of the Other.”
It was a frenzy now, as even the tavern maid shrieked for justice. Had she so soon forgotten that it would be our turn next? The soldier’s eyes stared vacantly ahead, a sneer crinkling his long, crooked nose as if all this was beneath him.
I managed to seal my lids just in time.
Another swish of steel, two more thuds, and the sneering soldier screamed just like the last.
Eyes opening, I soaked in the carnage.
When the din had settled, the Butcher stepped downstage.
A monolith of dark metal, his chain-mail veil seemed to bore into the very heart of the piazza.
I stared at his boots, hoping to avoid the sweeping gaze of attention.
“And this man…” His voice carried well, despite the mesh, but it was quieter than before.
Still hard, still deep, only now the edges had rounded, like a pebble rather than the sharpness of flint.
His free hand twiddled with something at his waist, while the other angled his blade downward, wiping some of the blood on his breeches.
“This man,” he repeated, lowering his sword until its point needled the wood, “dared to seek comfort in a heathen deity, renouncing the Blood God as his creator and master.”
Ignoring the boos, the last soldier fixed his gaze on something far beyond the angry mass of Thromarrians.
Rotating, I followed it. Behind us, Garnet Mountain reared above Dendra, its westerly ledge scarred red from the first of the plagues—Ferrovia—where the First had succumbed.
He stared, blind to all but the mountain.
I returned to the scaffold, eyes straining against the fresh sunlight that had finally burnt through the clouds. Vetrius’ helm angled down to his sword, its three polished points jutting out to the crowd. I could smell it now…the iron.
I shouldn’t look.
But today, I was alone, with no one to stop me, with my mother at home or lost to the crowds and Demetri waiting somewhere unseen. Try as I might, nothing could tear my eyes away as he gripped the hilt, preparing for one final blow.
An acolyte wormed his way to Vetrius’ side, pressing his face close to the helm, as if to whisper through the mesh that guarded his face.
Vetrius stilled his sword and leaned away, forcing the acolyte onto his toes, crimson robes rising to reveal skinny ankles.
A thin hand brushed the druid’s arm, the acolyte trying to right himself.
I shuddered at the memory of an unwanted touch, just as the Butcher recoiled from his.
Not a breath later, he was dead.
I struggled to piece together the scene on the scaffold.
It was not the crusiax’s body, but the acolyte’s, that lay at Vetrius’ feet, blood oozing from his severed neck, mingling with the rest.
What had he said? Blasphemy? An insult? A threat?
“Don’t look. Don’t look, darling girl.”
The Butcher’s cape trailed through the mess as he stepped over the body, still twitching, towards the final bound soldier. The crusiax remained lost to the mountain, unperturbed by the acolyte’s death. Despite the now glaring sun, there was no mistaking the faint, small smile that ghosted his lips.
Hands shielding my face, they did nothing to mute the last swish of metal. Then, a single thud, not two.
Parting my fingers, I peered from their frame. Druid Vetrius stood, like the Blood God Himself, gazing down upon the ruins of flesh. Not one head, but two, decorated the wood at his feet.
The shorn head of the acolyte glistened like a ruby, and the matted hair of the soldier faced away from the square.
In a graceful sweep, the Butcher returned his sword, or cleaver, to the sheath at his back.
Wordlessly, he descended the dais.
“To your knees, for His Holiness, Druid Vetrius of the Dendralis!” an acolyte squealed, scrambling forward, his herald tardy. But the points of Vetrius’ helm had already vanished through the colossal doors of the reach, not bothering to check whether we’d lowered ourselves to the ground.
We had. Every last one.
Gaze sweeping over the kneeling piazza, I landed upon the little girl, hunched in the mud with the rest of us.
She stared straight at me. In that moment, it was impossible to determine which was more disturbing: the limbs scattered like offcuts across the scaffold’s weeping planks, or her wide, toothless smile.
I shuddered.
The smile. Most definitely, the smile.