Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Ashara
The Blood Tree
I heard them before I saw them. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, the rods kept us steady and moving despite the abyss of shadows around us.
The jarring cadence of Falstaff’s voice pierced the air, joining with the deep thrum of the acolytes in a rhythmic pulse of song.
The sound was inhuman: layers of deep, tremorous humming underpinning a cacophony of high-pitched warbles, like screams given melody.
It came from everywhere and nowhere. A scream of my own ached to join them, but I swallowed it down, along with the last kernel of hope that we might yet avoid our fates.
This was the song of death, and it was sung just for us.
Stopping as abruptly as it had begun, our interlinked bodies jolted to stillness.
Stone grinding on stone punctuated the heavy silence, a pinprick of light piercing through the Room of Rite’s ceiling, no bigger than the eye of a needle.
The beam faltered, a cloud, or perhaps a bird, passing overhead.
A hoot echoed from above, and I knew my answer, the sound as haunting as the acolytes’ chants.
I followed the thin blade of light to where it fell, bracing for whatever horror awaited me there.
Ahead, raised on a platform of twisted roots, towered an olive tree.
I pressed my knuckles to my eyes, rubbing to banish the image, half-hoping I’d succumbed to madness rather than believe what I saw.
But when I opened them, it was still there.
The same olive tree. Taller than the silver firs that skirted Mount Garnet, its trunk thicker than the width of five or six oaks.
Bathed in the spear of sunlight, its roots had braided into the shape of stairs, paving the climb to its base.
But its monstrous size was not why I had the overwhelming, consuming need to run to my mother—my dead mother—and hide in her skirts.
It was the red. The red staining its leaves, bark, and roots.
No olives clung to its branches, but clots of crimson fruit; some the size of dates, others like grapefruits, glossy and viscous, their orbs glistening beneath the light from above.
A tree of blood.
The stench of death clung to it, so potent it stung my eyes and crawled over my tongue, flooding my mouth as if I’d bitten my cheek.
Under its weeping branches lurked Druid Falstaff, his silken hands cupped below its dripping leaves.
Two acolytes fingered the hem of his veil, lifting the chain with trembling hands.
Bringing two palms to his lips, still hidden from our sight, a hideous slurping ensued, Falstaff draining whatever he’d collected from its branches like it was the finest of wines.
Seven heads or so away, a laurellian man retched, lurching our collars forward as he vomited last night’s pomegranate wine upon himself and the soil underfoot.
After came the expected mulch of metal on skin as an acolyte beat him senseless.
I didn’t wince this time, not even when the shudders traversed through the rods, tugging at my neck.
From behind, under the wet rip of flesh, a sound so soft, so faint, I may have imagined it, someone breathed out a singular word, “Douloo.”
I tried to turn, bones protesting the metal band at my throat.
“Eyes forward, laurel. Never back.” An acolyte’s belt brushed my thigh, his face swallowed in shadow.
I breathed through my mouth as the scent of blood turned almost acidic, arms trembling with something more than just fear.
I fixed my gaze on Falstaff atop the olive tree’s dais, fighting the yearn to grab the acolyte’s belt, feel it pucker my palm, and launch it into the darkness and hope it struck true.
Veil secured, Falstaff reached above, pinching a sodden leaf between two fingers. They shook, just like my own.
“Laurellians, ye have this day borne witness unto the Act of Communion. As a vessel, I have partaken of the offerings of the Blood Tree, a gift from our Father, that I might be made pure, sanctified to serve as a vessel of the Blood God. Behold, I stand ready to deliver unto Him the lives He hath demanded this day. And know ye this…in the act of sacrifice, I take no pleasure; my hand is but His hand, my will is His will.” He relaxed his fingers, releasing the leaf and rubbing the pads of them together.
“But I must confess, I do taketh pride in being His shepherd, in herding His flock to the beyond. In helping thee and absolving thee.”
An acolyte to his right knelt at his feet, crimson robes dappled in shadow and light from the canopy above.
Hands thrust upward, he presented a glint of something laid on a pillow of blackened silk.
Falstaff’s tendinous fingers curled to grasp whatever it was that was cushioned there.
The rods stiffened, our breaths held, the lot of us craning and straining to see what the druid now lifted high above his head.
“Behold!” he rasped. “The Sanctifying Needle—the tool that will return thy blood to its maker.” A long metallic spike winked in the light, catching the ray of the sun.
A needle.
A…needle?
Needles, threads, linens, sheaths, sheers, looms. Tools of a seamstress, not a druid.
The rods vibrated, buzzing with the whispers and confusion of a hundred lambs cornered by no wolf, but a hedgehog. A needle. Would he stab a thousand tiny holes into us? Burrow it into a vein? We would be here until the next harvest if he sought to let our blood with a needle.
Falstaff’s helm snapped to the line.
A faint clink struck us silent. Unclasped from the rods, the first laurel was ushered forward, guided towards the stairs of roots with two acolytes flanking each side.
His light, cropped hair and slim build were a mercy, and I exhaled, grateful that whatever awaited, Demetri would be spared a little while longer.
He walked unfaltering, ascending the roots on sure feet until he stood before Falstaff, silhouetted against the blood-soaked tree. Taller than the druid, only the spikes of Falstaff’s helm were visible behind the male’s outline.
“With my hand, I absolve thee.” He set his free palm upon the laurel’s hair, his fingers like spider legs against the pale strands.
“With my other, I take this needle, the first of the laurels, that I may draw the blood that is owed and guide you to the beyond.” Falstaff lifted its tip towards the sky, as though it were a longsword in battle, not a small prick for embroidery.
“That you may be reunited with the First and she with you. For Blood Demands Blood, and though He demanded hers first, we all must render our due.”
The words I had spoken to the First felt like an age ago, though in truth, I knew it to be less than a day.
Unblinking, I tracked its tip, intent on looking, resolute to watch.
Would he go for the heart? The jugular? Between the eyebrows?
Blessed with absolution, not strength, his frail arms seemed not to have the power in them for that.
The low thrum from the acolytes resumed, its warbling note growing until it vibrated from the soles of my feet to the tip of my crown. With trembling hands, I clasped either side of my face, breath huffing from my nose, pinning my gaze in place.
Look. Look. Look.
Falstaff plunged the needle down with a speed that defied his meagre form until its spike met skin. Our gasps were lost amongst the chorus of the acolytes, and I blinked, ready to witness the sight of a body slinking to the floor to bleed itself dry.
But that moment never came.
A restless sort of bustling reverberated through the rods, the laurels shuffling their feet, and I along with them. Falstaff raised the laurellian male’s hand, squeezing from his index finger what must have been a singular drop of blood. His helm fell to watch it drip to the roots below.
No slit throat, no sliced artery. No dead laurel.