Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Ashara
The Heathen
The chamber filled with whispers, most of them lamentations concerning the wrath of the Blood God.
His faithful servant. A druid. Murdered!
Skin broiling under the attention of the Butcher’s veil, I broke his stare to glance at Demetri.
The sight of him turned my stomach anew.
His expression was guarded, unusually so, face blank as if we were back in the chappellum pews, held hostage by one of Capriche’s sermons.
But his eyes…
Ensnared on the druid, the bark-brown of them had darkened to coal.
Splaying each fist, I smeared two clammy palms down the length of my skirts.
Every inch of me felt sticky: hair clinging to my brow, thighs tacky.
The feel of him lingered, a phantom between my legs.
I returned to the Butcher, to his crown of jagged knives and pauldron-clad shoulders, a crimson robe toga’d over his chest like a great swathe of blood.
He fondled the hilt of a sword at his belt, the slow drag of his large, gloved fingers so like Demetri’s, I blazed.
Still, he stared. At me. At Demetri. At us both.
“All laurelian males,” he declared, voice grinding against the Ovidian walls, “are to follow me.”
I forgot myself alongside the rest, mouths opening, only to snap shut the instant the paxiams lowered their spears, the protests dying in our throats at the glint of their points. I reached for Demetri, hunting for the feel of his fingers through the flare of his sleeves.
When our hands caught and knitted, I let myself breathe.
Let them tear him from me. Let them try. Penance be damned.
Everything was ash now anyway. If they wished to slit our throats in the dark, then so be it—my blood would spill all the same under the moon or the sun.
“See how quickly the liberties of your Last Rite crumble,” the Butcher continued, no longer toying with the hilt at his belt but twisting a small, curved dagger in the palm of his hand. “See how they unravel when one befouls the small mercies of your Maker. You are to blame, laurels.”
He motioned to the room with its tip, angling it downward until it was aimed at our throats. “Not I, nor the druids, or even the acolytes.” Perhaps I imagined the way he spat out the latter like a kernel stuck in his teeth.
He paused once the blade’s point landed on our joined hands, as if deciding where best to slice them apart. I tightened my grip.
“When a rat dares nip at the ankle of a wolf, what choice does the pack have but to tear it limb from limb? Else the colony believes it has the claws to match to rest.” Returning the blade to a strap hidden under the folds of his robe, he crossed two vambraced forearms over his chestplate and scanned the chamber.
“As I decreed, laurellian males are to follow me. Without noise, without delay. Without so much as a godsdamned sneeze.” The silence was thicker than oil. “Women”—his large boot edged forward—“you will remain sequestered here until sunrise, when your offering is due.”
The boot halted, the tip of it parallel to the point of my slippers.
“Unless, of course, one of your hands is bloodied, too. A snake is a snake, no matter what sits between its thighs…” His helm lowered, as if perusing the length of my body. “Drenched in sin or otherwise.”
I flushed hot, head dipping to my skirts to check I’d unbunched them properly. He couldn’t have meant…
“By the Blood God’s wrath, we will find who did this, or else make your offering a deliverance of pain as well as blood. Paxiams.”
The clink of shuffling armour had me swerving left, colliding into the side of Demetri. I peered up at him. Gone was that strange neutrality; instead, his face was that of an open wound, vulnerable and weeping.
In it, I saw the truth. There would be no making good on our promise. No more touches, no more whispered, distracting words. No more pleasantries or pinches ‘til sunrise.
“Don’t leave,” I hissed, nails crescent-mooning his forearm as the paxiams edged closer.
“Don’t go—” I seized his face, the whisper of a beard scraping my palm as my fingers pressed into the fine curve of his bones.
“Let them smite us here, upon these cushions. We’ve always known this is how it must end… what is but a few turns earlier?”
I tried not to wince at my voice, each syllable fissured and sharp.
The paxiams started to round the men up like fodder, closing in from all sides. Their grunts rebounded off the domed ceiling as they pushed and prodded them towards the doors.
“A few turns is everything, darling, when you have so little left.” Demetri’s voice was soft, his touch far gentler than mine.
Kind fingers combed hair away from my face, thumbs returning to stroke the bow of my lips.
“Each minute and second there is air in your lungs and a beating heart in your chest is a boon. Do not squander a moment of it, even if we must say our goodb—”
The blunt end of a spear slammed into his ribs, the red gleam of paxiam armour replacing the white of his shirt that had stood before me only a moment before. He staggered into the wall, clutching his side.
I lurched towards him, but someone hauled me back, two sets of arms throwing me against the ruins of our cushioned fort. Confronted with their armour-clad backs, the paxiams spoke only to Demetri.
“Crave a taste of the pointy end? Then, haste, laurel!”
Winded and gasping, they dragged him to his feet.
Gauntleted hands clamped over his shoulders, forcing him forward as he tried to twist and writhe from their hold.
Ushered through the doors, his last words were drowned beneath the thumping of boots and the clatter of metal.
The Butcher’s bulk eclipsed the threshold, his crimson cloak blocking any final glimpse of Demetri as the darkness of the corridor consumed him.
I hollowed.
Arms binding round my chest, I squeezed and squeezed, lest all of me crumble to the throw at my feet.
“For Blood Demands Blood,” a feather-plumed paxiam declared, locking the doors now that the men were all gone.
“For Blood Demands Blood.” Our efforts were an asynchronous mess, some beginning the first word just as others had finished. My mouth moved in habit, though no sound breached my lips. I stared at the doors, at the planks of grooved wood, banded in iron.
Speckles of white dotted my vision, retinas burning with the stubborn refusal to blink. If I gazed long enough, perhaps the Blood God would bless me with sight, let me peer through wood, stone, and mortar, to where they’d taken them…to where they’d taken Demetri.
When the paxiams, their numbers halved, had all returned to their posts, my lids finally shuttered, spilling tears down both cheeks.
I slumped to the floor, like most of the others, prostrating myself over a raft of cushions and praying they might keep me afloat.
Clutching the fabric, I shook with the urge to take a knife to them—to split open their bellies, claw out the feathers, rip a sconce from the wall and set fire to it all.
Burn the chamber, the atrium, the whole Blood God-forsaken templum, the promise of His plagues be damned.
But I didn’t. Couldn’t.
Forsaking fire, I made do with down. Mouth muted by the press of a cushion, I uttered a word over and over into its seams. A word Demetri deserved to have heard from my lips, both this night and after the scaffold eight cycles ago. A word I’d never had the courage to say.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
***
Awakening to the low cluck of chatter, my first thought was that I should have already been on my feet, hands cupped, neck stretched for the kiss of a blade like a good little offering.
But dying women care not for the rulebooks of men.
So, I stayed there, splayed on the floor, ears attuning to the noise as I waited for them to drag me out by my ankles.
“Perverse, those in whom is no faith.”
“The unbelieving, the vile…their place will be in the pit that burns hottest with fire and brimstone.”
“Such obstinacy. For shame, for shame.”
Cracking one eye, I lifted my head, surprised to find the sun was still yet to rise and Dendra was shrouded in night.
The murmurings swelled.
“Nay, Paxiam,” came the high lilt of a woman, her voice louder than the rest. “This is un-Blood-Godly…heathens in the templum.”
“Blood is blood, heathen or no. Where did you think they were offered?” a man, most likely a paxiam, replied. I searched for the source, neck twisting to the far left, below the tapestry of a tree laden with olives.
“This is sacred ground,” the woman protested, hair the colour of a rooster’s comb and a piercing voice to match.
“It’s a holding pen,” someone said from behind, their eye roll almost audible.
“It’s an affront, is what it is, an insult,” the woman insisted, thrusting a finger at the doors.
They’d opened. Huddled before them were a handful of women, with pin-straight, dark hair hanging long past their waists, every one of them thin and bedraggled with wrists bound in rope.
Heathens.
“Captured from the east,” Capriche had taught us. “Deniers of the Blood God; wild, depraved, little better than beasts.”
Laurels pressed themselves against the circular walls, their faces pinched and lips downturned.
I rose to a kneel. It would have been far better to stay asleep, where the absence of Demetri didn’t feel like a knife to the liver.
The small gaggle of them settled onto the emptiest stretch of floor, next to the archway to the latrines. Falling to their knees in a loose circle, they did their best to lower themselves with tied hands, facing one another.
All but one.
Breaking from the huddle, she padded over the cushions, barely dipping under her weight, towards the central window framing Mount Garnet.
Where Demetri’s lips had moulded to mine.
Laurels parted in her wake, huffing and complaining about the smell whilst gathering their skirts with all the pettiness of those with a full life yet to live.