by CW Thomas
Tavia was quivering, her cheeks red, and not just from Rose’s disciplinary slap.
Rose reached under the table and withdrew a stiff leather whip with a curled loop on the end.
Brynlee noticed Tavia’s jaw tightening in anticipation of the pain to come.
“This should teach you,” Rose said. Then, as though a brilliant idea had struck her mind, she handed the whip to her guest. “Sir Dunmore, I seem to recall you have a knack for this sort of thing. Would you mind disciplining this clumsy young girl?”
Sir Dunmore grinned. “With pleasure, my lady.”
In that moment, all the preconceived notions Brynlee had of Sir Dunmore faded. A refined knight he appeared to be, but as his eyes filled with a cruel lust she realized that he was no gentleman at all.
“Come here, girl!” he said.
Tavia stepped toward the man. He bent her over his lap, pulled up her dress and yanked down her knickers, exposing her bare bottom to further humiliate the girl. Using the leather whip he lashed her across the cheeks, leaving a bright red mark, and causing Tavia’s body to jolt and yelp at the pain.
Brynlee stood by with Korah, flinching at every painful smack.
“Well,” Rose barked at them, “don’t just stand there like two dawdling fools, clean up this mess!”
She sat back down, crossed her long legs, and sipped her tea as she watched Sir Dunmore savor his moment.
Brynlee cleaned up the spilled cakes while Korah collected the shards of the broken plate.
With his arousal now at an obvious frenzy, Sir Dunmore tossed the leather whip onto the table and flipped Tavia up over his shoulder. She cried as he carried her off the rooftop and down the stairs, inside to one of the bedrooms where he slammed the door.
“Well done, both of you,” Rose said, once Brynlee and Korah had finished cleaning up the mess. “It should be obvious by now that I expect nothing but perfection from my girls. The smallest slip, the tiniest trip, is a most unflattering thing on a young courtesan, and not something I will tolerate.”
She pointed to Brynlee. “You are far too knowledgeable for someone of your age. Where did you learn how to do this, and don’t tell me it’s because you read.”
Brynlee shoved her nervousness down deep and forced out a confidence that she didn’t come anywhere close to feeling. “I was raised in the castle of Aberdour, mistress. My mother was a cook there, my father a blacksmith for the King’s Shield, and I a servant to Lady Lilyanna. I was schooled by the same tutors who taught her children.” She stopped, hoping the dashes of truth she’d sprinkled in with her lies would be enough to fool the clever mistress.
Rose eyed her as though sensing deception. “A remarkable privilege for a young servant girl.”
“The Falls were very kind to me, mistress.”
“Do you miss your life there?”
The question cut to the core of Brynlee’s heart, unearthing memories and feelings she had long kept buried. She would’ve answered had it not been for the lump in her throat that seized her voice.
Rose smiled. “It’s obvious that you do. I want you to consider my palace your new kingdom, Emma. As of this moment you are my head girl. I want you teach the others how to properly serve a meal without bumbling and ruining the fine reputation of my establishment.” She looked at Korah. “You have a fine reputation as well, young lady. More than once has a man come to my house singing your praises. I’ve brought you here to shape you into the finest courtesan in the realm, and to help me instruct some of these other promising young ladies. Starting with this one.” She caressed Brynlee’s cheek and offered a charming, but fiendish smile.
Brynlee felt a cold shudder run down her spine. Her life, she knew, had suddenly changed, and not for the better.
DANA
“Move quickly, my child!” said Sister Eeliana.
Dana ran from the bedchambers of Duktori Bendrosi just as the abbot leaned over his bedside again and wretched into a wooden bucket. She was relieved to be out of the bedroom, away from the stench and the awful sight of the duktori’s mangled hands and feet. Pounding in her chest was an urgency to reach the kitchen before any more grains were consumed by anyone.
It was probably too late. If the duktori had been poisoned by food it had happened days ago. If any others were infected they would be showing signs soon enough.
Dana emerged from the dormitory building and sprinted down the street toward the chapel, through the garden just off the east wing, and into the dining hall. Breakfast was long over, but two male lay servants sat at one of the long wooden tables hunched over bowls of broth.
“Don’t eat the bread!” Dana shouted.
She charged into the kitchen. Sister Marleenious and one of the lay servants, Lenasa, were rolling dough.
“Don’t eat the bread!” she said again. “No flour. No grain.”
The women stepped back from the dough, lifting their hands to their shoulders as though it were poison.
“I knew it,” said Sister Marleenious. “He’s got the fire in him.”
“How is he?” Lenasa asked.
“Not well,” Dana continued, panting.
Marleenious swept her pudgy forearm across her brow, her hand leaving a trail of white powder above her blue eyes. “Allgod have mercy. The fire. If–if the duktori is sick… if he… then surely us?”
Prior Gravis swept into the room, his robe trailing along with his billowing black velvet vest cloak. There was a look of controlled concern upon his weathered face. He instructed the cooks to show him where the flour and grains were kept. Dana followed them into a dark room surrounded by cold stone walls lined with wooden shelves packed with food and cooking ingredients. Upon the floor sat brown sacks of wheat and flour.
Gravis cut into one of the bags and pawed through the white powder. Next he tore open a grain bag and raked through the kernels until he found a tiny black pod. He lifted it, exhaling long and slow.
Lenasa gasped and covered her mouth. “Then it is true. The fire will soon be in us all.”
Gravis gestured with his hand for calm. “That’s not necessarily true.” He pointed to the sacks of flour and grain. “This needs to go. All of it.”
“All of it?” the cook asked, shocked.
“Every bit.”
“The duktori,” Lenasa said, “is he going to be…”
Gravis just shook his head.
Sister Marleenious closed her eyes and bowed her round head, a second chin forming on her neck. Her lips began to mutter quick prayers, the words of which Dana couldn’t hear.
But she didn’t have to hear them to find them irritating.
A developing hatred was growing inside of her for how the nuns and priests were always so quick to turn to their religion for help, like it was a giant support beam in a storm. Whenever there were signs of inclement weather they would seek the aid of a some giant, invisible esoteric spirit that Dana didn’t understand. The Allgod, they called him, Kintiere in Efferousian, which meant King Bear. They prayed to him day and night, and, regardless of whether or not he answered, they always seemed to find peace.
Sometimes Dana found it hard to be sure if she wasn’t just jealous.
She followed the prior back to the duktori’s bedchambers on the top floor of the dormitory. His bedroom was large, but plain, and lightly furnished with just a few necessities. Everything looked old, from the dusty bookshelves to the mangy bearskin rug to the desk by the bow window, the top corner of which was covered in a small mountain of old melted candle wax.
The abbot lay in a wide four-post bed on mottled sheets, his elderly face ashen. She watched as his feeble body convulsed and contorted underneath a patchwork blanket of faded reds and yellows. She could see the toes of his gangrenous feet, black and misshapen, protruding at the end of the bed. At one point it appeared as though his right leg had stopped moving altogether, but then Dana realized that it was because the infected appendage had fallen off.
The monastery’s doctor and sever
al nuns continued to tend to him, even though everyone, including Bendrosi, knew that there was nothing they could do.
Dana stayed by the duktori’s bedroom all afternoon, afraid to leave lest Gravis, the doctor, or the nuns tending to him needed her. Once his body had excreted all of its fluids and the infection caused by black wheat grains had finished ravaging his body, Dana moved down stairs.
She cried in silence as she walked outside, eager for fresh air that didn’t reek of fecal matter and human sweat. Her hands were clammy, her throat tight, and her stomach was dancing as if a swarm of butterflies had been stirred up within it.
She grabbed her bow from the barn and stomped across the road, the ground muddy and pocked with hoof prints. Turkey vultures, the fingerlike fringes of their wing tips unmistakable on their black silhouettes, wheeled above as though they knew death was in the air.
Dana retreated behind the barn to sling arrows at targets in the hope of calming her nerves.
With the duktori gone, Prior Gravis was in charge. She tried not to think about what implications that had for her and her brothers. Gravis had never wanted them at the monastery. He had never condoned the violent training that Khalous put the boys through, and Dana feared he would send them away at the first chance he got.
She notched an arrow and drew back the string of her bow. The draw weight was too light, decreasing the range and power of the projectiles. Granted it was little more than a hunting bow, but in her grief she craved for a more refined and violent weapon.
Her fingers released the string and the arrow surged toward the target, hitting the center, as usual. She inhaled satisfaction, enjoying the wave of power she felt coursing through her limbs.
“Do you ever not hit the center?” Pick asked as he sauntered around the corner of the barn.
Dana drew another arrow out of the quiver at her hip. “Sometimes.”
“I’ve never seen you miss,” he said.
“You obviously don’t watch me practice enough.”
She loosed the second arrow, which landed next to the first one in the center of the target.
“You’re too modest,” Pick concluded.
Dana leaned on her bow and shut her eyes as more tears ebbed their way to her cheeks.
“If I’m intruding I can leave you be,” he said.
“Bendrosi’s dead,” she managed to say.
Pick walked over to a small maple tree and leaned against its trunk. “I figured he wasn’t going to last much longer.”
Dana didn’t like how Pick seemed so calm when inside her was an inferno of rage and fear and uncertainty.
“Are we going to have to leave now?” she asked after a moment.
Pick was quiet as he gazed up at the swaying branches of green leaves above him. “Maybe. But the Allgod will take care of us. You just wait and see.”
Her teeth clenched at his words. “How can you say that?”
Dana ripped an arrow from her quiver, notched it, and let it fly. It struck the target just left of center.
“I’m sorry?”
She huffed. “The Allgod. I’m sick of hearing about the Allgod.”
“He was the god of your father, was he not?”
“I don’t know what my parents believed,” she said, which was a lie. Both of her parents were ardent believers in the god of the ancient High King Vala Hull, a being commonly called the Allgod. What she didn’t know was why.
“I do. Your father was a man of deep faith. He would often pray with the soldiers, and he—”
“Well it’s not what I believe,” she blurted.
“Why not?”
She had no answer at first. “I don’t know.”
“Do you believe in the ancient gods?”
She scrunched her face at him. “Please. Ancient superstitions, that’s all they were.”
Pick chuckled and crossed his arms. “I won’t argue with that. My mother was from Tranent. Her family was faithful to the Middies, Cuir and Cotch, allegedly the gods of sunshine and earth.” He shook his head and smiled. “Her father never once raised a successful crop.” He laughed.
Dana only frowned. “I can’t believe that the Allgod is who they claim him to be, benevolent and kind, not while someone as evil as the Black King ravages my homeland.”
Pick nodded. His understanding eyes helped Dana relax.
“What do you believe?” she asked.
He slid down to the grass. Breaking off a piece of straw he tucked it into the corner of his mouth to gnaw on. “Hope. Love. It’s hard to say, I guess. I grew up being told about Edhen’s ancient gods—the Northern Gods, the Southern Gods, the Middies—but they seemed silly to me. The Allgod, I don’t know, he seems real. This peace they have—” he waved his hand toward the chapel, “—it’s real too. I don’t understand it, but in it I find hope, and that gives me the strength to face another day no matter how bad things get.”
Dana didn’t know what to make of Pick’s words. Her analytical mind couldn’t wrap itself around something as vague as faith, not when everything in her life was falling apart.
She filled her target with a few more arrows in quick succession before she realized that her bow was not going to relieve the anxiety she felt inside.
She watched from the barn later that afternoon while the priests and nuns of Halus Gis, along with the lay servants, orphans, and refugees honored their deceased leader. They celebrated his life with songs and words of prayer.
The duktori’s body was taken deep into the crypt below the chapel. There he was sealed in a private room where he would remain until his bones were ready to be added to the great macabre mural they called The Ossartes, or The Place of the Honored Holy.
Up until the burial ceremony, Dana had only heard about the frightening display of old bones in the underground room. Halfway through the burial she decided she never wanted to see it again.
Khalous, Pick, and Stoneman lined up along the walls of the crypt with the boys during the ceremony. They all stood with pale hands clasped over dark mourning robes, heads bowed in respect. The high collars of the priestly garments made her brothers look mature and dignified, Dana thought. She realized how much they had a grown up over the last few years, boys becoming men, taller and stronger.
“We’re getting kicked out, aren’t we?” whispered Nash as the priests offered songs of mourning.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
“That dog Gravis has hated Khalous since the moment we first got here,” Clint muttered. “He’ll have his way now.”
“Quiet!” whispered Brayden.
Later that afternoon as Dana was helping the kitchen staff prepare for the evening meal she saw Gravis retreat to the duktori’s office in a private section of the chapel. There he summoned the other head priests for a closed-door meeting that lasted long into the night.
Dana finished her evening chores in the chapel. She hurried across the road to the dormitory, eager to make it to her bed before night’s incoming chill sank through to her bones. She washed her face and hands in a bowl of lavender scented water, slipped into a cozy nightgown, and huddled under the blankets of her small cot.
She lay in the darkness and the silence for a long time with an unsettled mind, wishing for sleep, but finding none.
“Things are going to change, aren’t they?” came Nairnah’s petite voice from the cot next to her.
“Yes,” Dana whispered.
“Are they still awake?”
Dana peeled back the blankets to her bed and tiptoed across the cold floorboards to the window. The chapel’s office torches were dark.
“No.”
She hurried back to her cot, the cold of the wooden floorboards nipping at her feet. She jumped into bed with an audible shiver.
Nairnah’s cot creaked as she slipped off her mattress, patted the two step gap to Dana’s bed, and climbed up alongside her. Dana lifted her blankets to make room for the girl’s small form and then the two of them hunkered down against the chil
l like they had done many nights before.
“I’m scared,” Nairnah whispered.
“Scared about what?”
“I feel like we’re being abandoned again. First on Aberdour, now here.”
“Don’t worry. Even if Gravis makes us leave, Khalous will be with us. He’s—”
“I mean by the Allgod.”
Dana went silent.
“They say he abandoned Aberdour, that the kingdoms of Edhen got so wicked he had to leave. What if, because we’re from Edhen, he’s abandoning us all over again?”
Dana hated the girl’s question as much as she hated the answer she wanted to give, but she wouldn’t crush Nairnah’s hopes. If the girl wanted to have faith in some distant deity that was up to her, and Dana wasn’t about to take it away.
“I don’t know,” she managed to say.
Nairnah looked up at her. “Will you pray with me?”
Dana’s insides pinched. “No.” When she feared she had upset Nairnah, she added, “but you can.”
After a moment, Nairnah curled her head down and began praying in Efferousian, just like Dana had heard the priests of Halus Gis do many times. She prayed for help, for protection, and asked for the Allgod’s care and mercy. Her tiny voice rose to Dana’s ears, half muffled by the blankets that hugged them.
The following morning came rumors that Gravis was sending a messenger to the duktori of a neighboring monastery. He was being summoned to help nurse Halus Gis through this time of loss and to appoint a new leader.
Until the duktori arrived or sent instructions, Gravis was in charge. Already his leadership was casting a cheerless rigidity over the grounds that did nothing to ease the heartache of those mourning Bendrosi’s loss. He ordered every building in the monastery sterilized, cleaned from top to bottom, and put through a rigorous inspection to help prevent the spread of any infection. He became controlling and more contemptuous of the refugees of Aberdour.
After just a few days Dana couldn’t stand the sight of him.
She decided to spend the afternoon riding Meikia, one of the monastery’s draft horses. The massive beast was bigger than any horse Dana had ever ridden, with the curve of its back standing well over her head. The horse had always terrified her, but fear, it seemed, was the only antidote to her despondent spirit.