Chapter 5
Chapter five
Ashara
The Penance
The whip’s tail cracked, splitting the air, a wet smack proclaiming its kiss upon Demetri’s back.
It is a lie on thou’s tongue to claim a penance is greater than thee can bear.
I clung to the small passage from the Book of Dendralis, repeating it over, and over, and over under my breath until the words drowned out the sounds of the whip parting his skin.
Tied to a post not five paces away from where I was bound, Demetri’s penance was well under way, both of us reunited on the scaffold.
Strips of flesh lay in tatters down the curve of his spine.
Blood, flowing in thick rivulets, puddled beneath him, adding to the crimson stains and urine already seeped into the wood.
My body flinched as he turned limp with the twentieth strike.
The tear, the audible rip of flesh burrowed into my ears, scratching and tearing until it clawed its way into my skull.
Slumped against the post, Demetri’s face was shielded from me, angled towards the opposite end of the scaffold.
A part of me flared with guilt—guilt that I was grateful for it.
Better to witness the ruins of his back than whatever would lurk in his eyes.
“Twenty lashes, the due is rendered,” an acolyte confirmed, leering over Demetri’s weeping flesh, his dull eyes momentarily lightened. “The female next, Your Holiness. Twenty, also.”
I shook with violent, full-body tremors. Like in the cell, I begged my body to calm—be still, be still, be still—but it remained defiant, rattling the post like a mast in high winds. They would think me possessed if I couldn’t tame the tremors, and then the lashings would only be the beginning.
“You scald the demons out,” the druids preached. “Cleanse the skin in boiling waters to purge the evil from within.”
Those who didn’t die spent their lives in agony, skin mottled and deformed with burns.
I shook harder.
“Cease this needless shaking, laurel. You will only incite more of His wrath.” The acolyte’s rancid breath washed over my neck, standing its hairs on end.
“Heed the lessons of Druid Capriche through his expertise in pain.” Spindly fingers accompanied his commands as they closed around my cheeks, squeezing them, the tips of them almost as red as his robes.
“Put an end to this foolishness and remain still for his teaching.”
He yanked my head back, forcing me to meet his glassy eyes.
The stench of blood clung to him, so potent it watered my eyes, almost acidic in the way it singed.
“It is a lie on thou’s tongue to claim a penance is greater than thee can bear.
” The words I’d recited transformed in his mouth from a comfort to a threat.
“Have we not been clear in our teachings? Are the druids not thorough in their reasonings? You must show penance to appease the Blood God, unless you wish Him to release another plague upon these lands. Is that what you want, laurel?”
As if full of stones, my mouth struggled to move.
“N-no,” I finally managed, near-choking on the sound, or the smell.
I chanced a glance to my left, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. Demetri was red, so red.
All of him: red, red, red.
“Brace.” The acolyte’s benevolent advice was the only warning afforded before Capriche raised his whip.
I did brace—for the sting, or the stab, or the ache. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to expect. What I didn’t consider was fire. An inhuman sound, between a groan and a scream, forced its way through gritted teeth as my body moulded to the post, attempting to distance itself from another hit.
If the first burnt like hearth flames, then the second was an inferno, a bonfire licking my back.
By the fifth, I reasoned this was no post but a pyre. I, its offering, broiling in unseen flames.
I thought of Demetri with the sixth lash. Five cycles old when he knocked out my milk tooth as we wrestled in his mother’s kitchen; how I had spat tomato seeds at him through the gap in my smile all summer.
The seventh. Once, I thought him dead after falling from a tree. I’d prodded him with a stick until he’d lurched for it, swatting me over the head.
The eighth. Nights spent round the hearth fire, counting the small, dark patches on Adelaide’s face that he’d insisted were buttons. Her face of brown buttons.
The ninth. I nearly chuckled through the agony, remembering the olive pit he’d crammed up his nose and how it had made a home there for a week.
The tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth. Dancing to the sound of crickets in the moonlight. Trips to the market to buy spiced sausage. Making daisy chains in the meadows to the north.
The thirteenth. When we were forbidden to meet alone. The threats, the worry, the panic of our mothers.
The fourteenth. His hand around my wrist as he dragged me to an old smith’s yard, captured on my walk home from the sewing guild.
The fifteenth. The stolen turns spent there. The laughter, the talking, the quarrelling. Kisses and touches, bruised lips and smiles.
Had all of that been worth all of this? This agony? I was ashamed to think it, but I couldn’t say yes. Not when I would do just about anything to escape another lash.
By the nineteenth, I was pain. Just pain. It had no beginning nor end, it just was; woven within me as much as the sinew or muscle that clung to my bones. By the Other, I wanted someone to take pity on me. Whoever was listening, mercy. Have mercy.
But I knew better.
The owl knew better.
Thromarra knew better.
Through streaming eyes, I spied the tail of the whip slithering over the floor, drawing a serpentine line in the blood to my side.
The final strike.
Could I endure? A darkness, hovering since the fifth or so strike, crept in ever further from the edges of my vision, lulling me to follow it into an abyss—to close my eyes, to sleep, to slide down the post and curl around its base like a cat next to a hearth.
Nothing would feel so much better than everything.
For I was burning.
“Final strike, laurel. Then your due is rendered,” the acolyte declared, tightening my binds further up the post so I straightened, my knees having buckled.
“Move, acolyte,” Capriche grunted from behind, his feet squelching in the blood. “And let us be done with this.”
I leaned into that darkness, urging my mind to wilt into its promise. Drift away from here, I told myself. Other, take me. To some place cool. Some place without fire. Some place without the burning agony of parted flesh.
But the warmth came anyway. Though something within it had changed.
For I felt not the blaze of the whip but a gentle heat, like a budding sunflower blooming in my chest.
I gasped at the sensation rippling through me in gentle waves.
From that place in my heart, what felt like tendrils of light reached outward and outward.
Wrapping around my exposed back like a menthol leaf, they cooled and ignited all at once.
Pain gave way to pleasure, terror to elation, but I was unafraid, basked in a bliss unlike anything I had ever known before.
Had the beyond taken me? Had the Other? Had the Blood God bestowed mercy upon me at last?
The whip snapped, and I smiled. Gods, how I smiled. I licked the salt from my tears where they’d dripped like honey into my mouth. Delicious.
When the tail of the whip landed, I felt no thrash upon my back, though my body quaked with the impact.
I opened my eyes to a world of colour. The sky above our enclave a sparkling blue, Demetri’s bloodied body a ruby.
Swivelling my neck, none of the expected pain flared from between my shoulders, just a warmth, leaking down and saturating my spine until it drenched every vertebra.
The Thromarrians gathered to watch our penance seemed almost to glow—all of them, beings of beauty and light.
Though some were smiling, I couldn’t understand why so many looked so sad, so ashamed, so ashen.
I wanted to cheer alongside them and share this warmth, this glorious exhilaration, till we were all drunk with it.
We would make merry after this. Tap the cobbles with our dancing shoes, toast with flagons of ale, sing songs of true love.
Perhaps the gods did have mercy after all. Perhaps they were the benevolent, almighty rulers the druids promised they were. I could stay like this, bound to this post, forever. It felt so—
The warmth dissipated.
The numbness, the elation, the joy…gone in the space of a blink.
I screamed.
Oh gods, how I screamed.
In its wake came an agony that made the prior lashings seem like mere scratches.
“Ashara?” a voice croaked.
I didn’t look, I couldn’t look, blinded by the searing marks that crisscrossed my back.
“Ashara!” The voice, still hoarse, sounded louder this time.
Demetri.
It was not he who was to blame for this; it was the acolyte, the druid, the Dendralis. The Blood God.
“Ashara.” His voice warbled as it broke, the defeat in his tone as telling as my silence.
Veering my head away, the movement sent a wave of roiling torture through the muscles of my back. I sealed my eyes shut, panting.
His whimpers danced with my own as we waited to be unbound, the minutes dragging like turns. A hand, slender and scarred, thumbs hardened from the eyeing of needles, brushed over my wrists, unpicking the knot.
Mother. My mother was here.
Untying me, I wept into the pressed pleats of her skirts, losing myself in the folds of her gown. She helped me to my feet.
Limping across the scaffold, every jeer became a grain of salt in my wounds.
We passed Capriche, who surveyed me with cold disinterest, his large hands stroking the length of his whip with a cloth, raining droplets of our blood onto the wood.
Rather than blood rising from the ground, like a plague, the Dendralis now made it pour from the sky.
“Say your goodbyes. Do it now,” my mother whispered, her tone disarmingly gentle. Far more gentle than I’d expected. Demetri, supported by his parents, had caught up to our slow pace at the base of the steps.
I buried my head in her neck, inhaling the comforting scent of bay leaves and boiled thread.
“Ashara, this will be your last chance.”
I paid her no heed.
I didn’t lift my head; instead, I hid it. I didn’t look but fixed my eyes on the small curls of her brown hair, damp on her nape. I didn’t say goodbye, for there were no words for it this day.
Everything hurt.
It hurt.
It hurt.
It hurt.
My body, yes, but also the sting of inevitability, spearing into my heart like the spikes of an acolyte’s belt.
Eight cycles. Eight cycles before we were offered.
It was a truth that pressed down upon my shoulders with the weight of mountains. Demetri would be at my end as he was at my beginning.