Chapter 34 #2
His large hand unlatched the bolt. “No bath, actually. You can stay coated in your need for him. I ordain it as penance for having such blasphemous dreams.” He made quite the show of tutting before wrenching open the door, its hinges creaking in protest.
I knew my role by now: trail behind him, head down, hands clasped. That golden spot between loathing and submission; a show of hate but also a deference to his mighty will. It didn’t feel much like pretending.
Secured behind the arched door to his office, I unknitted my hands and shot him a scowl, though his armour-wrought back was turned to me.
Reaching for one of the cubbies, Vetrius selected a book written in Thromarrian, not Dendrae, for me to peruse.
Only druids and acolytes were deigned worthy enough to learn the markings of scripture, so my options were limited.
This was our routine, our pretense. He’d hole me up in his office, give me something to read whilst he scribbled away—the same bureaucratic nonsense to attend to day in and day out—and then, we’d rehearse what experiment I’d supposedly endured at his hands, lest any acolytes or druids came knocking.
He’d take a thimble-full every so often, though what he did with it, I hadn’t a clue.
That was the extent of his inquisition, other than to bore me to death.
“Are you going to use this time to educate yourself or simply stare at my hands?” he chastised whilst he scratched at something with a tawny feathered plume, not bothering to raise his helm.
I huffed and gazed down at his offering.
Thromarra’s Naval History
An enquiry into the changing craft of shipwrighting in the cycles after the Blood Plague and mastering the Red Sea.
Hardly the most riveting read, but I’d already bled his collection dry of the juicier texts. However dull it seemed to me, I imagined the other laurels longed for something as merciful as boredom. My stomach drew tight, muscles knotting uncomfortably.
I peeked over the book to examine the druid. The scratch of a quill faded to nothing as his helm lifted then dipped to where I fondled the pages.
“You must wait a little while longer, Seamstress.” I paused my fiddling, eyes narrowing on his veil, Demetri’s words seeming to echo around us.
He couldn’t know, could he? A coincidence.
“I’m not so sure as to what it is I’m waiting for,” I admitted, calming my heart. Futile, since he’d scent my panic anyhow. I almost asked him what it tasted like, then thought better of it.
“Patience is a virtue, and we must be patient. I cannot act until it has been decreed.”
Decreed. I wobbled my head, miming the word.
“Oh pray, Druid Vetrius. What decree is it we await? One from the Blood God or from men?” I slammed the book shut, tossing it aside.
“Both.” He ground out the word, an ache in every letter, before returning to his quill.
“I worry for them,” I admitted, picking a loose thread on my sleeve, wishing it was a button.
“I just feel so useless, trapped here, doing nothing. Whilst he…whilst they undoubtedly suffer.” He paused his writing.
“You needn’t tell me; I know without testing the beat of your heart.
You think I assume altruism after all that I’ve seen?
For whatever reason you’ve deemed fit, this is a pocket of kindness amongst a swathe of cruelty.
If there is no hope for me, for them, then better to end it.
What happened to butchers and mercy?” I blinked back tears, watching the sun creep higher over Dendra from his small window.
If we fly, we fly together. Or plummet…
After a few breaths, he returned to the parchment. “Demmerick’s fate need not be your own.”
“Demetri.”
“Devri,” he affirmed with a confident nod.
“I’ve told you before, he’d hate that,” I sniffed, reaching for the abandoned book.
I wetted a finger and separated the first page from the rest, feigning to read whilst I inwardly mapped the parts of the templum I’d come to know.
Three turnpikes, two lefts, a walkway and an arch, right door, another turnpike…
“Hate what?” The scrawl of his quill halted, interrupting my silent list. I kept my eyes on the page, not bothering to respond.
“This laurel, Devrick…” he continued anyway. “Do you love him, Ashara?”
The words before me bled into a blur as my heart skipped a beat, spluttering back into rhythm once I remembered to breathe.
“What right do you have to ask me something like that?” My eyes flicked back to his helm, the incandescence in them unnecessary.
I knew he could smell it. “That is none of your—”
“Do you love him, Ashara?” he repeated, talking over me as if he already knew the answer, but just needed me to say it. Whatever response I’d give, he’d know if it was a truth or a lie—though, I realised, perhaps it was I who wouldn’t recognise the difference.
“You put it to me so simply, but the answer is complicated.” I snapped the book shut.
A snort. “Complicated? That and love are one and the same. That is no reason not to give me your truth.”
“Druid or matchmaker? What do you know of love?” My words were pinched, enough to make him flinch, if only slightly. Under the desk, his knee bounced.
I sighed. “We were in love, once…I think.” From the pit in my stomach, something grew roots. “But it’s been so long…”
“Eight cycles?” Of course he remembered.
His fingers drummed atop his desk, as fast as my heart. “If he is truly important to you, and alive before the decree, I shall try to spare him.”
I leant forward, book forgotten, resting the tips of my fingers upon the rug. The one stained with Osric’s blood.
“What decree?” I whispered, hope blooming.
He rarely spoke of the group he conspired with, the so-called opposers of the Dendralis that he currently served.
Whenever I asked, I was met with either silence or riddles.
I inched closer, prowling like a cat, ready to feed on whatever he might give me, longing for it to be enough to keep the hope that had begun to unfurl from being cut away.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, angling forward in his chair, hands splayed on the desk. “Is that your demand? That he live? That if, or when, the decree is ordered, you’d put good men’s lives at risk for the sake of his?”
“Help is coming?” I stopped short of his desk, peering up over its ledge, skirts tucked under my knees.
“A decree is coming, and I cannot act until it does.” “When?”
He hung his helm, inhaling deeply before blowing out a large breath. “I need the truth,” he said, more softly this time. “The whole truth. Who is he to you? What is he to you?”
I blinked a few times, eyes rummaging the upper part of his veil. A part of me urged to leap over his desk, rip it from his helm, to gaze into his eyes, so I might better decipher his truth.
I leaned back on my heels, eyes shutting as I ventured into the recesses of memories.
Memories that hurt. “I’ve told you, we were childhood friends.
Born on the same day, same turn; our mothers seamstresses in the same guild.
” He hummed his approval, the sound seeming to vibrate through the rug.
“We grew up together, the closest of friends, until we reached that strange first winter where touches somehow morph from playful to curious, though neither of you are sure why. When laurel girls and laurel boys, outside of their kin, are kept separate. The cycle where our mothers no longer permitted us to meet.”
“Wise, considering the penance. Did your druid not preach of the penalties for the unchaperoned meetings of laurels?”
“We know of the penance,” I spat, eyes shooting open. A bloodied whip, torn flesh, cold fingers. We knew better than most. “As I told you before. Might I continue?”
He extended his hand; an invitation.
“They forbid us from seeing one another, and for a while, we did not. Until, one drizzly afternoon, he approached me on my walk home from the guild. We stole to a smithy’s yard—”
“Of all the pl—”
“It was abandoned,” I cut in, eyes flashing.
“And it became our secret. We’d meet on the Seventh Day, mostly, after chappellum, for stolen moments between the tail end of work and the beginnings of supper.
Then, we were caught.” I swallowed, despite the apple sized lump stuck in my throat.
“We were penanced. I didn’t see him again after that…
not until the Last Rite.” I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say goodbye.
His hand rubbed the nape of his neck, palm disappearing under his helm. “If he loved you, he would have taken no such risk. He would not have deigned to—”
“He didn’t force me!” I made to stand, thumping my palms on his desk.
“It was my choice to return, day in and day out. I knew the cost.” How many times had I repeated these words not to another, but to myself?
Would he taste the lie in them—the cost had been an abstract thing, something without arms and legs.
It was hard to imagine the sting of a whip until feeling its bite.
But by the time I’d realised the extent of the toll, the debt was already collected.
“Oh yes, I’m sure the cost was worth it to him. What are a few lashes compared to the thrill of feeling what’s under your skirts?”
I swiped the book from the rug and launched it at his head, where it bounced off with a clang. Gods, I hope he smelt my amusement, or rather, choked on it.
“He was the one who insisted we did nothing to put me at risk! He was the one who reminded me of the acolytes’ hands…
” I trailed off, unnerved by the slide of phantom fingers crawling up my thighs.
The ghost of pressure, intrusion, the hot flush of shame.
“And a good thing he did”—my voice shook, but I couldn’t bring myself to care—“because when the acolyte did check…his insistence saved my life, and what a boon that proved. To spend it trapped in a templum while he is caged below, with a druid who demands all my truths, yet rations his own.”
Vetrius went still, the whole of him rigid as the armour he wore. Only the rise and fall of his chest hinted that he was still man and not stone. “Which acolyte?”
“What?” I concentrated on breathing, cajoling my heart to slow.
“Which. Acolyte?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know…they all look the same.” Empty, wrong, cruel.
Silence. One too many breaths worth.
“I must take you back now. There is much I have to do today. Come.” He strode to the door and then froze, a grunt echoing from under his helm.
With tense fists, he turned on his heel, returning to his chair.
Producing a long, thin key from the weighty ring at his waist, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, unspeaking.
The creak of metal preceded the extraction of a box, welded from iron, which he placed over the carving of Thromarra, Dendra lost under its bulk.
It was locked, too. One smaller key later and it squeaked open, its hinges rusted and groaning.
He presented me with its contents: an old, heavy book, free of dust but fraying at the edges, the leather peeling and faded.
“Here. You have a long evening ahead of you. Take this and read.”
I accepted his gift, holding it lightly so as not to further damage its cover, still reeling from confessions he’d managed to coax from me.
“The High Druid has seen fit to ban that text,” he added. “Do not show it to anyone or let another catch you reading it. Hide it beneath your skirts if you must, and when you’re back in your room, stash it under your cot, or the armoire, just in case.”
With curdling suspicion, I scanned over its title.
The Word of the Other