Chapter 24
Darkness came swiftly to the hill. Elver only had to wait a little while for the last supplicants to file out of the temple, and then one by one each lit window fell into darkness until the only light was a faint pink glow, which she suspected must come from the great heart in the foyer.
She wondered where the priests of the Threshold went at night; whether they had rooms inside the temple somewhere, a place where they all gathered and ate their supper together.
She imagined Sam sitting with his fellow priests, sharing with them the stories of Markan, who had secretly preferred his girlfriend’s sister, or the strange couple who made it all the way to the rite of connection before being shown something that caused the handsome young man to flee the temple in a huff.
She imagined them chuckling over it, shaking their heads.
They would see such things every day, she supposed.
There was a woman standing by the grand entrance that Elver initially took to be a guard, but as she drew closer she saw that it was one of the priests; an older woman with a mop of soft grey curls and a pair of silver spectacles on her nose.
She was smoking a pipe and leaning against the wall, puffs of white smoke rising to form a small cloud over her head.
This was annoying. Elver had expected guards, and had been prepared to poison them to make her way inside the temple, but an old woman taking the night air?
Mother Maura , she reminded herself. If they could get this spell from Sunay, then she could destroy the mage’s plans and have some small taste of revenge for what had been done to her.
And as much as she hated to admit it, the idea of letting Artair down at this point was…
uncomfortable. He’d trusted her, and she’d already failed him once.
She needed to get the Frozen Heart, if she could find it.
So what was one Threshold priest in the face of all that?
But when she crept towards the woman, keeping to the darkest parts of the shadows and moving silently, she did not slip the knife from her belt, and when she reached out to brush her fingers to the back of the priest’s neck, she gave her only the briefest touch.
And when the woman gave a gasp and sank to her knees, Elver made sure to catch her and deposit her out of the way of the doors, on a patch of grass that looked soft enough.
She even picked up the woman’s pipe and left it near her outstretched hand.
Inside, the place was quiet, the lamps dimmed so that the shifting pink lights from the vast magical heart gave the impression the temple was caught in a silent, magical storm.
There was no one around that she could see, although she could hear a number of people nearby talking.
Perhaps upstairs somewhere, the priests were indeed enjoying the supper she had imagined.
She crept over to the chamber where she and Artair had been ushered through the rites earlier that day, until she stood once more in the Room of Hearts.
The firepit was cold, and the place was empty, the little oil lamps at the edges of the room dimmed down to tiny fireflies of light.
Except, she realized, it wasn’t entirely empty.
There, on the floor by the firepit, was an object where previously there had been nothing. It looked like a tiny version of the heart that had been hanging in the foyer of the temple, its tubes and chambers made of white clay and glazed with a faintly glittery sheen. It had to be the Frozen Heart.
Hardly able to believe her luck, Elver ran over to it and scooped it up, but the second her fingers touched the slick surface, she saw—
—she saw a forest filled with the mauve shadows of twilight, moss as green as emeralds and as thick as flesh underfoot.
Artair was there, but he looked pale and dishevelled, his shirt soaked with blood, and Elver stood opposite him.
She was clutching a posy of poisonous flowers in one hand.
As Elver watched, her future self stroked Artair’s cheek and then his jaw, brushing the hair back from his face in a gesture of tenderness she barely recognized.
She said something that Elver couldn’t hear, and then she kissed him, dropping the posy.
After a moment, his free hand buried itself in her hair, they were pressed close, and—
The images faded, and as Elver came back to herself, her heart thundering in her chest, she saw that the chamber was once more filled with magenta light and the Threshold had reappeared: a hundred beings of soft pink light, watching her with identical rueful expressions.
‘What was that?’ she demanded. ‘What did you just show me?’
‘What you came here to find,’ said the Threshold in their many voices that were one. ‘A glimpse of your future. You left without taking your Frozen Heart, so we have placed it here for you to collect. We knew that you would return.’
The Threshold hummed. If it was possible for a hum to be smug, she thought the Threshold was managing it.
‘You mean we passed your stupid test?’
‘Child, you can hardly deny the truth of the connection between the three of you, now that you have seen the vision granted by the Frozen Heart.’
‘You don’t expect me to believe that was real , do you?’
‘We are only capable of the truth, Elver of the Jih Forest. Whether you are capable of seeing it is another matter entirely.’
Elver treated the god to a recitation of every curse word she’d ever read or heard on the streets of Addersport, and, with a chuckle, the Threshold faded away.
‘So full of yourselves,’ Elver said to the empty chamber. ‘Well, we fooled you, so you’re obviously not that wise.’
She bent to pick up the Frozen Heart and once again, her mind was filled with the scene in the forest—the blood-stained shirt, the fingers threaded through her hair, how closely they were pressed against each other—and she snatched her hand away like it was a hot coal.
This time, it occurred to her that the person she was kissing in this glimpse of the future wasn’t necessarily Artair…
It could be Lucian. She had no way of knowing.
Swearing again, she pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her hand, picked up the heart and put it in her pocket.
They had the Frozen Heart, which meant they had the spell.
Supposing that Artair ever spoke to her again, they were a step closer to foiling Mother Maura’s plans, which meant she was a step closer to returning to the woods and solitude.
Yet, as she made her way to the door, she found that her mind was full of other thoughts entirely.