Chapter 2 #2
Rowenna gave an awkward shrug and not quite a smile. “Suit yourself.”
Red-faced, Ilys shuffled faster, catching up to the girl. They moved through the dim passage like ghosts, footsteps fading into slate.
“Being quiet is good,” Rowenna said, “but if a priestess passes, don’t linger near me.”
Ilys nodded, ever eager to please.
Far from the temple’s ornate wings, the lesser hearth tucked into a soot-dark alcove. Rowenna knelt with practiced ease, stacking the kindling with quick, sure hands. Ilys stood off to the side, unsure what to do.
“You can sit,” Rowenna ushered without looking up. “If you want.”
Ilys lowered herself heavily, knees brushing ash. “Do you do this every night?”
“Most nights.”
“Do you mind?”
“It’s warm,” Rowenna replied, adjusting the wood with practiced precision.
Ilys inclined her head, though she didn’t feel the warmth yet. She looked down to her hands, trying to smooth her fingers flat.
“You’re quieter these days,” Rowenna remarked after a moment. “Last time we spoke, you were smaller and wouldn’t stop talking about rabbits.”
A small laugh of exasperation escaped Ilys, along with a flush of heat to her cheeks.
“In here you can make conversation.” Rowenna raised an eyebrow. “The priestesses don’t bother us here.”
Ilys grappled for words, a newfound self consciousness strangling her vocal chords.
“Well.” Rowenna reached for a pouch tied at her waist and tugged it open. “Then I guess I will make noise for both of us.”
She held out two flat gray stones, fitting snugly in the center of Rowenna’s palm.
“Toss marks,” she said. “You know it?”
Ilys shook her head.
Rowenna pointed to a faint crack in the wall. “We aim for that. Closest wins. The winner gets to ask a question.”
“What kind of question?”
“Any kind.” Rowenna’s left eyebrow arched once more, a thick brown caterpillar of a thing. Ilys welcomed the sight; she tucked the mannerism close, a souvenir of familiarity. “But I’ll keep it fair. No Veilwalker secrets.”
Ilys teetered, then bobbed her head avidly before urging her body not to give away just how pleased she was to make a friend.
Rowenna tossed first. The stone clicked against the wall. Close, but not perfect.
Ilys’s stone missed wide. She winced.
“Try again,” Rowenna directed.
The next few tosses were closer. Rowenna landed one just shy of the crack and grinned. “That one is mine.”
Ilys managed half a smile. “What do you want to ask?”
Rowenna’s mouth curved, theatrical in her delivery. “Who do you find the most pleasing to look at?”
Ilys stared into the fire, thinking hard. She was new to this sort of game and still learning the rules, uncertain what counted as an answer.
“Baron,” she tried at last, tentative.
Rowenna looked up, disgusted. “The captain? He’s a million years old.”
Heat climbed into Ilys’s cheeks. It wasn’t his face that drew her. He treated her kindly, kinder than most. She sometimes wished he could be her father; on the loneliest nights, she even let herself believe it.
Rowenna’s gaze softened, but her confident resolve remained. “Try again. Someone nearer your age.”
Ilys sifted through the halls in her mind, uncertain, then found herself picturing the stablemaster’s son, Jorrin, with hay in his dark hair and that unshakeable grin that always seemed to make room for her.
“Jorrin,” she delivered.
Rowenna’s smile returned, pleased and approving. “Now that, I understand.”
No candles burned in the Study Wing chamber, but pale, grudging light teased from the narrow windows. The priestesses sat silently in their stiff rows, while Mother Inrith spoke.
“The Veilwalker walks with Death. You understand this?”
Ilys nodded, urging her mind to disengage from the muffled noise in hallways beyond. How she longed to leap from the chilly stone floor and join anything else. Swallowing the dry air, Ilys chided the child inside. Focus, she iterated. Gods, Ilys.
Mother Inrith continued, oblivious to the battle for attention.
“From the first frost of autumn to the last thaw of winter, you will leave the city and cleanse Annon with Death at your side. You will seek those who have bound themselves against fate: Cursed kings. Priests who have written their names out of The Book of Endings. Warriors anchored to relics. You will strike them down so their souls may be taken. When you return to Annon, you will not rest—you will answer Death’s summons here, carrying out executions the King himself cannot touch. This is your charge.”
Ilys’s fingers curled against her thighs.
She had been chosen when she was so small she could barely stand, before she could remember what her own name had been.
That name was gone now, lost somewhere she could not reach, and in its place was Ilys the Veilwalker, a name she would live and die under.
One day it would be written in the great books read aloud to the Faithful, her life condensed into a line of service: Ilys, Keeper of the Veil, Rider with Death, Executioner of the Faithless.
The Mother’s eyes stayed on her. “You will not marry. You will not bear children. You will not serve as the women of the temple do. You were born to the Bargain, not to the womb. That is all you are, and all you must be.”
The words lodged in Ilys’s chest. She tried to picture herself as the girl she might have been were it not for the robe, the blade, and the temple’s walls closed around her. The image slipped away.
When the lesson ended, she did not return to her room.
Her feet carried her past the cloisters, down the worn path to the garden behind the Sanctum, a place where the walls felt farther away.
The garden behind the Sanctum had gone feral, untouched by shears and steeped in golden light.
Here, the air felt lighter. Her spine uncoiled, her mind stilled, and the world seemed impossibly small and endlessly wide all at once.
She’d fashioned wings from two bent branches, a scrap of ribbon, and her veil. They sagged and scraped the ground, yet in her mind they floated, dignified, catching the wind.
Through the tall grasses she ran, scratchy stalks brushing her legs. She leapt from stone to stone, mud clinging to the hem of her skirt. A giggle escaped her, startling sparrows into the air, and oh, how she longed to follow—higher and higher, past the clouds, across the spacious, open sky.
She closed her eyes, pressing the feeling into herself like a fossil into amber.
In her mind, she was never alone. The King would watch her fondly from his dais, declaring, Be careful, my beloved. Grim and Baron follow behind, laughing at her mischief, pride unspoken but certain. This one’s mine, they would think.
She climbed onto the cracked altar beneath the ash tree, wings trembling in the wind.
Ilys, the bird, was loved. Ilys, the bird, was safe. Ilys, the bird, could fly.