by Cara Witter
He reached her side again and set the decanter down between her splayed knees. Then he gripped her hand, squeezing it gently. “And our child, love, will play an important role in that cause. I only wish you could live to see it.”
She moaned, managing to wrench her hand away from his. That had been her last hope, she realized, her last prayer that her husband still existed, the man who would protect her at all costs. “You bastard,” she growled. “Leave our child alone.”
“I can’t,” Finnian said. “Don’t you see? She is what all of this was for.”
She?
They had a daughter?
Liara barely had time to process this before she saw the flash of the blade in his hand and another searing, ripping pain—her stomach being split apart across its crown.
Through her screams, which were hoarser than before, she could make out chants, words that flicked at the edges of her agony like the tongues of snakes. She lifted her head enough to see her stomach cut open, to see Finnian’s hands inside, blood and pink flesh. To see the other man, pouring the blood from the decanter onto the pulsing mass in her stomach.
She did, perhaps, pass out then, but was jolted awake again by the crack of her head onto the table. Bile burned in her throat, leaked out the sides of her mouth.
“All done,” Finnian said, his hand cradling her cheek. “For now, at least.”
She blinked at him, her eyelids so heavy, like her eyelashes were weighed down with stones rather than tears. “For now?”
“The baby can only absorb so much at a time, so I’ll have to keep doing this until she is born. It’s the only way.”
She was so weary she could barely focus. And surely she was going mad, because as she strained her head to look at her stomach, she could see the skin knitting itself back together under the hands of the other man. The wounds closing, the blood becoming dried stains on an unblemished mound of flesh.
And yet, the threat of more of this, of even one more heartbeat of this . . .
“You can’t keep me here for months,” she said. “My mother will come looking. She’ll find me and report you to the Speaker and—”
“Your mother will see you next week, when we return to our house in the city. She’ll find you in good health and refreshed from our visit to the country—so much so, she’ll be thrilled when we continue to come out here for a few days every month until our child is born.”
Liara tried her shaking her head. “I won’t do it. I won’t tell her—”
“Lukos will take care of that, love,” Finnian said, lifting a dish and collecting the blood from the cuts around her side. “He’s quite good. You won’t have to do anything at all. You won’t be able to do anything at all.”
Her throat closed. A blood puppet. After all this torture she couldn’t even begin to understand, he was going to make her a blood puppet.
She wanted to curse at him, to scream every vile thing she’d ever heard at this monster who’d tricked her into believing he was a man. She wanted to claw out those eyes that she’d once stared into lovingly, wanted to rip out that fiery hair that she’d once hoped their child would inherit.
But all she could manage was one word. “Why?”
Finnian smiled. “Because the world needs to be better. And our daughter—my creation—is going to make that happen.” He stroked her hair again. “Goodbye, Lia.”
Behind him, Lukos began to chant, the words dark and cold.
Our daughter, Liara thought, aching to hold her just once.
Then all her thoughts ceased.
One
Twenty-Six Years Later
Sayvil tromped through a snowbank, wending her way up a trail she hadn’t climbed in twenty years. Behind her, Nikaenor followed, muttering to himself for the third time that he’d always expected snow to be lighter, as if it should wisp up from the ground like spun sugar. The boy huddled up under his cloak, only his nose showing, like he did at the slightest hint of rain.
Jaeme trailed several paces behind, watching his feet while he climbed with his usual hunched posture and a sour look on his face. Farther up the trail, Sayvil felt Arkista calling to her, like a faint ray of light slicing through the unending gloom.
They’d had the sense to camp for the night at the base of the mountain, though she wasn’t sure any of them had gotten any rest, what with Jaeme’s complaining and Nikaenor’s constant chattering about the myriad ways in which the cold both failed and exceeded his expectations.
By Arkista’s light, if she heard one more exclamation of “I can see my breath!” she was going to leave them both on the trail and climb up to find the goddess alone. She probably should have, instead of waiting until morning as they’d agreed.
“Ooh, snowflakes!” Nikeanor said, his voice filled with child-like wonder. “Did you see those snowflakes, Jaeme?”
“I wouldn’t be too excited,” Jaeme said. “If they melt on your skin won’t they turn you into a fish?”
“Maybe,” Nikaenor said. “Maybe if I were a fish the feeling in my fingers would come back.”
Sayvil eyed Nikaenor’s hands, which were covered only by ordinary riding gloves, and thought with regret—not for the first time—that if she’d known they’d be taking this road she would have insisted that they load up on proper provisions—fur coats, lined shoes, and the woolen scarves the locals knit from the beards of the one-horned mountain goats.
But after all the whining it had taken to get them this far, she wasn’t about to suggest that they climb down again. Not without Arkista.
Sayvil tucked her hand inside the leather pouch at her belt. She and Nikaenor had fashioned four of them from supplies they’d bought as they passed through Jenaium—thick sacks with firm latches that required both hands to unloose. Jaeme’s and Nikaenor’s hung lower on their hips, each containing one of the four godstones.
Sayvil’s, as of yet, remained empty.
Sayvil knew where they were going—had guessed when they’d taken the thin path that diverged from the road toward Unlath, the one that ran by the village where she was born. Kenton had been right about the pattern—the gods chose bearers who were physically close to them. Sayvil had assumed that meant hers would be in Drepaine, where she’d lived since she was young.
But, apparently, she’d been chosen not recently, but at birth.
“Well, Sayvil,” Jaeme said, slumping down on a fallen log, his feet resting in a patch of snow. “I don’t suppose Arkista is inspiring you to find her somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Or better yet, somewhere down the mountain. An inn perhaps, with warm beds and cheap ale and—”
“No,” Sayvil said, pointing up the trail as it grew steep and twisted around a bend. “It’s up there. Probably a couple miles yet.”
Nikaenor blinked at her. “She’s that close?”
Jaeme sighed. “That’s not the message I took from that, kid. Besides, how would you know the distance? None of the other three were so useful. Is Arkista also the goddess of units and measures?”
Nikaenor shot an annoyed look at Jaeme, which Sayvil understood all too well—Sayvil herself had been ready to kill Jaeme by their second day on the road from Grisham. After nearly three weeks since then—taking horses from Grisham to Andronim, and then a long, arduous trek through the mountains to avoid the border crossing at the soldier-heavy city of Jekti—even Nikaenor’s patience had been long since worn through.
“There’s a shrine up this way,” Sayvil said. “Our Matron of the Waxing Moon. When we’d return from Drepaine in the summers, my aunt would always insist we pay a visit.”
“It’s summer now,” Jaeme said. “Why does it have to be so damned cold?”
“We’re far north and on a mountain,” Sayvil said. “If it were winter, we’d be wading through ten feet of snow, so count your blessings.”
“I wonder if I’d be abl
e to breathe under the snow,” Nikaenor said. “Like I can under the sea. If there was an avalanche and . . .”
Sayvil lengthened her stride, walking ahead of Jaeme and Nikaenor, out of range of the whining and the chatter, though not out of sight, lest Jaeme decide to test Nikaenor’s theory and bury him beneath one of the piles of slush. Sayvil recited to herself the things she was going to do once she had the jewel. Catch a boat home to her husband, Quinn, and insist he continue with them to Peldenar so she wouldn’t have to be without him one more day. Find Kenton and Saara and see Kenton’s face when he had all four of his bearers together with all four of their stones. Threaten that if Jaeme wouldn’t stop sniveling, she’d turn him into a moonbeam or whatever it was that happened when non-bearers came into contact with the Moonstone.
She tried not to think about the miracles that had accompanied the claiming of the other three jewels. After seeing the chasm that surrounded Grisham, she was afraid of what Arkista might have in store.
A mile or so later, Sayvil saw the familiar stone arch, carved with the phases in the moon across the top—waning, new, waxing, full. Sayvil could almost feel the rays of light reaching her. She remembered when she was very small, one of the priests of Arkista told her that the goddess didn’t make light, only reflected it. And now, even in the light of day, albeit diffused behind a layer of clouds, Sayvil imagined she could see Arkista’s light reflecting from beyond the trees, filtering through the dusting of snow like a lantern.
She paused, waiting for Nikaenor and Jaeme to catch up. Nikaenor reached her first, breathing into his hands to warm them, which would only serve to make them colder when his breath chilled against his skin. Jaeme arrived long moments later, his boots dragging in the dirt. Both men had bright pink cheeks and noses, and Sayvil didn’t imagine she was faring much better.
Time to get this over with.
Sayvil led them up the path to the arch. Snow had built up around the entrance, so she ducked through the bushes, leading the way into the courtyard in front of the shrine. She remembered the building with its round, domed roof, its row of columns and steep stone steps.
But when she emerged through the brush and into the clearing, instead of the welcoming dome of the temple, Sayvil saw only ruin. The stones that had once been the foundation had been broken and upended, as if a team of men had first destroyed the floor with picks and then used a winch to wrestle the stones from their resting places. The columns that had once framed the front door lay toppled in the dirt, fractured in several places from the fall. Shattered glass sparkled among the drifts of snow. Even the domed roof had been entirely demolished, curved stones lying broken and jagged like fragments of a dropped porcelain dish.
Sayvil stood in silence, staring at the ruins as Nikaenor and Jaeme came up behind her. She supposed she should feel affronted on behalf of her goddess at the destruction, but somehow she only felt sad for her younger self. She’d always complained about the hike up the mountain to the shrine, but she recalled that her uncle had always packed honey drops and almond brittle for the trip. The inside of the temple was always lit with brilliant white light charms, which on her last visit at the age of twenty, Sayvil had complained used Vorgalian magic and not the light of Arkista at all, for which she’d been summarily scolded by her cousin Elda.
Bearer or not, Sayvil was far from devout. And when she and Quinn had proven unable to have children, she had actively resented her daily walk past the temple, a reminder that the so-called goddess of fertility hadn’t seen fit to bless her. By then, Sayvil had decided Arkista didn’t exist.
Still, there was something haunting about coming back to a place and finding it gone.
“What happened here?” Nikaenor asked, his blue lips quivering.
“Diamis,” Sayvil said. “We might have guessed. It stands to reason he’d have searched for the godstones in every available shrine. Maybe that’s why he tore down all the ones in Foroclae—looking for Mirilina.”
“So we hiked up here for nothing?” Jaeme asked.
“No,” Sayvil said. “No, she’s here. I can feel her.” Sayvil strode over the rubble, stepping across fallen columns and overturned stones. She could hear the goddess below her, calling through the layers of dirt and rock, reaching up toward her as if with invisible moonbeams. Sayvil wasn’t about to say that aloud, little sense as it made, but she felt it all the same.
“She’s down there,” Sayvil said.
Jaeme sat down on one of the fractured pieces of granite column. “In the most inconvenient place possible. Who’s surprised?”
They all eyed the pile. Even Nikaenor had stopped his chatter.
Sayvil turned to Jaeme. “I don’t suppose your god would like to move the mountain of rocks for us.”
Jaeme rolled his eyes. “You’d have to ask him yourself. We’re not on speaking terms.”
Nikaenor—for about the fiftieth time that day—looked shocked by Jaeme’s blasphemy, but if Sayvil had to hear one more lecture about proper reverence and respect for the gods, she was going to tie them both to a cornerstone and hike back down the mountain to find a warm bed at an inn, alone and in peace. And unless Jaeme’s powers had changed in the last few weeks, Sayvil doubted Jaeme’s god sign, his ability to mold small pieces of rock, would help much with this task.
Sayvil looked down at the dirt. They hadn’t brought tools for digging, and certainly not the carts and winches and extra hands that would be best suited to this task. Even if they could tell others about their quest, they’d never be able to get all that up this mountain without attracting the attention of soldiers.
Sayvil let out a long sigh. “All right. Let’s get started.”
Jaeme raised an eyebrow at her. “Get started with what?”
“Digging,” Sayvil said. “We’re going to have to dig her out.”
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