Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Ashara
The Acorn Laurel
Needles. That’s what they looked like: needles and pins and spits.
The Grand Templum’s turrets jutted upward, each sharpened point adorned with an olive tree, the symbol of the Dendralis.
Barring the Cor Tower, the atrium was its highest pinnacle, mounted atop the westerly turret: spireless, flattened, crowned not with an olive tree, but with a ring of pillars.
Pillars like the one I clung to now, staring out at the open sky and the sprawling mass of Dendra below.
Beyond the pillars, a knee-high wall of ashlar stone served as the only barrier between us and nothing.
How easy it would be to leap over it. Fingers finding its rough grooves, I rounded the pillar and approached the small wall.
No longer shielded by Ovidian rock, my hair whipped my face in twisted strands, looping my neck and masking my eyes.
Clawing at it, I tucked it into the back of my dress, wanting, needing, to peer over the drop.
A curious feeling, curiosity. Curiosity kills not the cat, but the mice, my mother had warned, but being neither cat nor mouse, I lowered to my knees.
With one last fleeting look to the sea of laurels, I scooted towards the barrier, giving up my search for Demetri lost amidst the crowds to glance below.
Stone. Stone and steps and turrets and walls.
Breasts flattened to the ashlar, my head dangled in the open air.
There, like fleas, the civitas of Dendra darted around the piazza at the Grand Templum’s base, scuttling between market stalls, most lugging barrows and carts piled high with Third Day wares.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
Compelled by that damned curiosity, or perhaps it was sadism, I looked all the same to the smudge of red where templum wall met square: the Reach of Atonement and its stained, bloodied scaffold.
I pulled back, face numbed by the wind.
He’d return, eventually. He promised. I peeked over the ledge again, steering my gaze away from the scaffold to marvel at the crooked villas, winding streets, and chappellums, their sandstone walls shining bright against Dendra’s deep greys and muddied browns.
Oh, to be a bird. To always see the world like this, as if gazing down from the beyond.
Why would they ever land? Better the sky than the muck, the piss, the blood.
Holding on tight, I edged farther, shoulders passing the boundary.
A small thrill jolted through me. If I jumped, would I land atop the scaffold’s planks?
Or would I end up a smear against the reach wall?
Perhaps I’d be skewered by a spire long before that.
How long would it take to get from way up here to way down there?
I retracted, bottom meeting heels, no doubt dirtying my skirts.
Howling, the wind drowned out all else. I tried to listen anyway, straining to catch the clackety-clack of cart wheels on stone, the splosh of chamber pots emptied from second-storey windows, the cries of the butcher or baker or candlestick maker, all eager to make a drachmae or two.
Nothing. Just the call of the wind and the murmur of laurels at my back, as if I were no longer permitted to be part of that world anymore.
“Tempted?”
A body knelt beside me, hair the colour of acorns masking her face. Slender fingers copied what I had done, coaxing the strands into a knot she tucked into the neckline of her white woollen dress. A coarse blend, unribbed and bodice-less, but comfortable. Enviously so.
“To jump?” I replied, raising my voice to compete with the growing gale.
Shaking her head, her eyes skirted to the mountain range beyond Dendra’s suburbs, mapping their snow-capped peaks.
“To fly.”
A joke, but the laughter died somewhere in the hollowest part of my chest. I faced the mountains, just like she.
“Perhaps if we flapped hard enough, we’d manage it.
Fly to somewhere far, far away,” I mused, eyes searing into the streak of red scarring the face of Mount Garnet, the tallest of them all.
“Spend our remaining cycles on Sorren’s golden coasts, feasting on mackerel and roe.
Assuming frostbite from roosting in the alps didn’t claim us first.”
She turned to me, nose and cheeks crimson from exposure.
“Oh, sister laurel. The farthest corner of the realm wouldn’t be far enough to flee from His demands.
Besides”—she inched closer, laying an icy hand atop my own, and I resisted the urge to pull away—“it is our kin who would suffer His wrath. A longer life, but a sour one, knowing our betrayal may unleash another bout of the plagues. The cost be too steep.”
I hummed. She was right, of course. No one ran, not with the knowledge that the avoidance of our fate would lead to the destruction of others.
Grip tightening, her fingers curled around the expanse of my palm. Her touch was so like my mother’s.
“I hear the Other’s call, too,” she confessed, her voice dancing with the wind.
“He is not as patient as the Blood God, not by half. But oh, how He yearns for our souls to return to His ward. Druid Tommen always said so. It is He you hear, begging you to fly and abandon your sisters and brothers…listen.”
Back arching, her nose tipped towards the beyond, her slim neck long and pale, marbled with thick, bluish veins.
Try as I might, I heard no begging from the Other, nor the demands of the Blood God, only the wind and the hacking cough from someone behind.
“It is most fortuitous that I have arms rather than wings, then,” I murmured, unlacing my fingers from hers and placing both hands in my lap, stroking the buttons.
Eyes opening, she smiled at me as one does the village dolt—a soft, pitiful thing.
“Snowflakes. Dragonflies. The first crocus of spring. Nothing beautiful is meant to last forever, save for the gods.” Cupping her hands, she lifted her face to the clouds. “For Blood Demands Blood.”
“Blood Demands Blood,” I dutifully mimicked, turning away. I envied her, if only a little, for how sweet those words must taste on her tongue. On mine, they soured like cud, bitter as rue.
“Too much honey spoils the wine, darling girl.”
Indeed.
My gaze swept the atrium, unable to spot a curled crop of chestnut hair. Or the tent of Osric’s shirt.
Instead, a paxiam, helm decorated with a long white plume, mounted the raised platform in the atrium’s centre.
Heads turned when his gloved hands cupped over his mouth.
“To the doors, laurels!” He repeated the command four times, addressing each corner of the atrium before gesturing to the redwood archway opposite the dais of the First. “The Last Rites are concluded. Onwards to the Grand Templum’s Chamber of Offerings. Make haste and form an orderly line!”
“Together?”
I startled, having forgotten that another body knelt beside my own. The acorn-haired laurel extended her hand, eyes crinkling into a placating grin.
I didn’t take it.
“I wish you well, sister, but I will go alone.” Always alone. I half expected Demetri to part through the bodies, Osric long forgotten, and entwine our fingers together once more. But he didn’t. So, I stood.
She nodded, letting me step past her without a word.
Alone it was, then.
Steeling myself, we funnelled through the doors single file, sandwiched by paxiams to our front and rear.
They opened onto a tight, winding staircase, its narrow steps a corkscrew.
Down we went, the laurealian white of our gowns and shirts glowing like moonlight under the sconces.
I gathered my skirts into one hand, lifting them as I fixed my eyes on where slipper met stone, praying I wouldn’t trip.
One misstep, and we’d go down like dominoes.
It would be easy to lose myself here, in the dark. Easy to give in to my lungs, which longed to drag in hard, desperate breaths; easy to allow the pooling tears to finally spill.
One step at a time, one foot before the other, and it would be enough.
It would have to be enough.
Countless steps later, legs cramping, the corridor levelled, an archway spilling light onto the dark walls, painting them the colour of tangerine peel.
The Chamber of Offerings was how I had imagined the inside of Dendra’s Grand Templum would be, rather than the dank, dismal space of the corridor.
Upon the floor lay plush cushions and thick woven blankets, all in tones of red: crimson, scarlet, pomegranate.
Like raw dough, they sank under my weight as I used them like stepping stones, taking me deeper into the room.
Laurels plonked themselves upon them, some alone, others in couplings or small groups, but none of them were Demetri.
A few huddled by the tapestries adorning the circular walls, likely stitched with silk from the way each thread glistened like liquid.
He wasn’t there, either. I made for the arched windows, towards the last of the light, the sun now near-set behind the mountains.
Ahead, framed by the central window, Mount Garnet towered above its peers.
A red smear carved down its face, the eternal scar from the first plague.
I thought of the First, now alone. Her little hands exposed to the chill.
Pressing my nose to the glass, I wiped at the condensation spreading from the heat of my breath.
As with the atrium, the chamber sat lower than the templum Cor’s peak, despite rearing high above Dendra.
We were still in the westerly tower, only now blessedly out of the wind, a large fire crackling in the hearth to my left.
A small mercy to spend our final turns warm, and with a view no less.
I wondered if my mother had once stood here, looking out at this same view.
If Adelaide’s breath had misted the glass, as mine did now.
Did they both strain for one last glimpse of their homes before their blood returned to its Maker?