Chapter Ten
Ten
An offering was made of the priests who didn’t flee.
Stakes driven into the ground, then into flesh, grisly rows set outside the entrance to the city.
The Green Garden, they blithely called it after, when it was clear the offering had been accepted.
When it was clear that the Flame Goddess wouldn’t raze the city to stone and ash.
—ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORIAN ADRELLIS, FROM THE WITHERED CITY
I REMEMBER THE STORM. THE way we’d hear the crash of thunder long before we reached the cliffs, following flashes of light that pierced the towering, ancient trees and their verdant canopies.
The growing smell of rain-soaked air and vegetal decay.
I remember emerging from the forest to the sight of those never-ending black clouds that clung to the jagged, windswept peaks, and how my mother would make her offering, opening her fists and letting the winds take it.
I remember that we were never supposed to speak of these visits.
I remember that it didn’t matter in the end.
The mother who birthed me had long hair the color of buckwheat honey.
Sometimes it would tickle my neck as she wrapped me in a cloak or a coat, or slipped boots on my feet if we were braving the snows of winter.
Which it always seemed we were. In the northern mountains, snows came early and left late.
But that, we whispered, was a gift from the Storm Goddess, a shield, because it meant the clerics who did their earnest best to sell the faith of Tempestra-Innara mostly came in the summer.
The ones foolish enough to risk the snows we’d find in the spring, frozen where they fell, occasionally gnawed on by a lucky woodland creature.
On the day soldiers arrived instead of clerics, my mother and I were at the overlook committing heresy.
Though the Storm Goddess was no longer with us in the way the Flame Goddess was, they still watched over us.
At least, my mother said, as long as we make our offerings.
We prayed to them as we made the shallow cuts in our palms or fingers, reaching over the cliff’s edge to let the wind take those red drops.
Blood to keep Tempestra-Innara far away, blood to make our harvests plentiful and keep our village as strong and healthy as the summer storms. We were blissfully unaware of the devastation we’d find upon our return.
Devastation that the Storm Goddess had done exactly fuck all to prevent.
By the time we were close enough to hear the screams, most of the village was burned beyond saving.
Smoke choked the air. Corpses littered the streets.
If my mother had been a little less simple and a little more familiar with how the Bellators and their legions went about a conversion, she would have picked me up and run.
But she wasn’t. Or she panicked. Or, or, or.
Whatever her motivation, we somehow made it back to our home unscathed.
My father lay in the open doorway, my grandfather a few steps beyond.
Both motionless in death. My grandmother, less lucky, was still making her way there, gasping weakly as the wound in her chest leaked.
I remember my mother rushing to her side, the older woman’s mouth struggling to form words.
Lannara… I hear the papery hiss of that name in my dreams sometimes.
Sometime after my grandmother’s trickle of red ceased, the soldiers appeared.
My mother screamed: not in fear, but with rage—the deep, primal fury reserved for cornered animals.
It was enough to make the soldiers take a fearful step back, allowing her the chance to grab the knife someone had been using to chop roots and tubers.
It was a stupid move. And I’m pretty certain she realized it when I made my own noise, one of pure fear.
I had enough time to see her remember that I was there, that she was a mother and still bore a responsibility in this world, before the soldiers cut her down too.
It gets blurry after that, though some memories stand out.
Terrified faces, some familiar—other survivors from my village.
Being herded like sheep through fields and forests I don’t recognize by a legion that wields the word heretic as freely as its blades.
The bone-deep chill of the early winter storm.
And, most of all, the cracking of the ice.
Most memories of life before Tempestra-Innara become increasingly distant, threadbare, as the years pass. But not that.
Never that.
On a sullen, soggy morning that very nearly has me longing for my Cloister cell, Belspire appears—almost abruptly—in the distance.
Right away, I see it’s no Lumeris. There’s no grace to the rising, weather-stained spires that stab at the sky, tattered wisps of fog weaving between them.
No welcoming glow of the flame as in the Goddess’s city.
Belspire is an aging city—waning in size, wealth, and prestige—but once a place of unparalleled plenty, whose favor from the Green God meant bountiful fields, orchards, and gardens that yielded everything from fine fruits to coveted aromatic oils and tinctures used for the finest incenses and perfumes.
After their fall, the city’s main trade endured but was much reduced, its prior fortune never reached again.
Now, it is as much known for the bells that gave the city its name, which, according to our lessons, ring with an unparalleled beauty that draws visitors from across the Devoted Lands. A real tourist attraction, for sure.
I keep my gaze on those spires, which grow larger and larger as the land around us turns cultivated. Soon we are surrounded by a sea of grains and vegetation, tended at intervals by hunched, gray workers.
No, penitents.
I slow Mortimer as I spot the overseers on horseback: sworn clerics, all of them, but of the militant variety.
Somewhere there’s a Bellator they answer to, perhaps even the one whose legion we encountered on the road.
This is where the survivors of my village might have ended up, toiling away to prove their fealty and atone for their sins…
if. How many years punishment for a heretic late to turn their faith toward Tempestra-Innara?
Five years? Ten? The offenses of the people scattered through the fields are likely more common sorts—petty thieves, drunks found one too many times passed out in the street, the occasional weirdo devotee who simply likes this particular brand of reverence.
I slow without realizing it, watching backs bending, turning earth, on their knees picking rocks out of the dirt.
Nolan notices, but I urge Mortimer forward again before he can say anything.
The work of penitents helps keep the Devoted Lands happy and fed—that was the gist of our education on this particular topic.
Our company on the road grows steadily as we draw closer to the city, turning irritatingly crowded by the time we arrive at Belspire’s main gate.
Mortimer gives a nervous shimmy as a wagon laden with barrels passes rudely close; I pet his neck to calm him.
Inside the walls isn’t much better. In Lumeris, the roads are wide and clean.
The buildings shine, sometimes literally with gold.
But here, streets tangle like a briar, shadows clinging to its tight alleys and doorways, and the eaves beneath hard, sloping roofs.
There are piles of horse shit stamped into the cobbles.
It smells—not like fresh air and incense, but the way a room does in the morning, after a night with too many bodies sleeping in it.
Still, I drink in every inch, picking out hints of prior prosperity remaining in the ornaments and stonework: flowers and fruits, vines that twist and curl.
Innocuous enough symbols, too common and impotent to pose a threat to the Goddess’s insignia.
And while its finest days have past, the city’s citizens teem with a vibrancy that seems misplaced in the shitty weather.
It doesn’t take long to figure out why—broadsides are pasted all around, advertising a festival to celebrate the day the city pledged its devotion to Tempestra-Innara.
Not every conversion is bloody. But Belspire’s certainly was.
The city was ancient enough to have been a kingdom of its own once, with the castle to prove it.
And when Arcadius-Viktori fell, the royal family wasted no time in enthusiastically proving their new devotion, lining the road with a thousand heretic corpses to adorn the Goddess’s triumphant approach, including every one of the Green God’s priests not smart enough to flee as soon as their master fell.
Excessive, to say the least, but it successfully bought the royals their continued existence.
“Seems we arrived just in time,” Nolan says, eyeing one of the posters.
I catch his drift. The festival is tomorrow. And it’s not a real party if there isn’t some grand spectacle. Like, say, a public execution.
We’ll have to make our interrogation quick.
We weave our way slowly through the crowds, making for the castle in the center of the city, passing by markets and shops, and clerics offering blessings on the street corners in exchange for prayers…
and coins, obviously. At a juncture of streets, traffic stops suddenly.
A wedding party passes through, their laughter and joy wet around the edges thanks to the wine bottles they brandish.
They wear the warm reds and orange of the Flame, but there are vines woven around the wrists of the young couple.
Gold vines, yes, but in Lumeris, it would be linen or silk cord or even cloth of gold, if the wedding purse was deep enough.
We make it only a little farther before a sweet wind smacks me square in the face. I pull Mortimer to a stop.
“What is that smell?” It’s exquisite, my mouth aching from watering.