Page 44 of The Lost Reliquary
“Looks like something a heretic would have,” spat one of the others.
“I’m… I’m not.” Jeziah tried to sound brave. “The river nomads—”
“Only practically a heretic then,” Galilea cut in. “You know what else is up there, hiding out in the wilds? Renderers. Oh, I bet they’d like to get their hands on you. Nice and young and plump for the cutting.”
Jeziah blanched.
“They’ll have him soon enough.” One of the others smirked. “I’ve seen him in the training yard.”
“No they won’t!” Jeziah wasn’t crying. But his composure was crumbling.
Galilea sneered, releasing him. “They really dug you out of the mud, didn’t they? Go ’round the kitchens when they’ve got a pig hung and gutted.” She leaned in so that they were only inches apart. “That’ll be you soon enough.” Then, she shoved him into the wall, so hard I heard the crack of his skull from where I hid.
I waited until their laughter had faded away to approach. I didn’t have a reason to, could have waited until Jeziah was gone too, but I found my feet carrying me over to where he was crouched, rubbing the back of his head. I knew him, of course. I’d watched him toss and turn, lashed to a bed in our dormitory, suffering the effects of our blood mother’s blessings, certain this pale, scrawny boy wouldn’t be one of the ones who survived. Later, I’d trained with him. Studied with him. But our relationship began and ended at the boundaries of those lessons.
He barely moved once he noticed me, but those bright, vulpine eyes of his tracked my approach.
“What’d you do?” I told myself I was asking in order to learn. Find out what he did to piss off the older Potentiates. Not do that.
He didn’t answer right away, suspicious. Then: “I accidentally fell into her yesterday. During a drill.”
I remembered. It was torturous, weakened as we were, to keep up the same intensity of training. But watching my footing around Galilea wasn’t the only information to be gleaned here. “What’s a Renderer?”
“You don’t know?”
“Wouldn’t have asked if I did.” Sour tone. A little threatening. To make him think maybe I’d make him tell me instead of asking. He still had the hint of frailty he’d brought with him to the Cloisters, and had yet to hit the growth patch that would leave him with four inches and twenty pounds on me. At that point in time, I still had the advantage.
But I didn’t need to resort to fists. “Thieves of divinity,” he said. “The older Potentiates say they hunt Chosen, flay them alive, snap their finger bones off one by one, pull their teeth and grind them into—”
“They made it up!” I snapped it with a child’s defensiveness. Jeziah flinched, and a feeling of superior pride rose in me. This was weakness, this fear, exactly what we were training to leave behind. He’d been caught in it, he knew, and was probably picturing how quickly I would run to Prior Petronilla and the disciplining that would follow. And I was picturing the same, knowing it was what any other Potentiate would do, and that maybe I’d be rewarded somehow, maybe with a meal. “The Goddess wouldn’t—”
“The Goddess’s Chosen can’t be weak.”
That shut me up. The truth was, we’d both been there long enough to know that there were consequences to not performing up to expectation. And that sometimes a Potentiate simply… disappeared. They’d be a fixture in training, a familiar face during studies, and then… one day their bunk or their room would be empty. One of our earliest lessons was to never ask where they’d gone. Another blessed body would take their place soon enough, anyway.
Who was to say they weren’t given to monsters?
Still, it seemed unbelievable. “Our blood mother would never allow—”
“What if she didn’t know?” It was the closest thing to blasphemy I ever heard Jeziah say. “I’m not afraid to die,” he continued, and I was never sure if it was a defensive statement to make himself appear less fragile, or the truth, “but I don’t want to die likethat.”
He didn’t. He died doing his duty to the Goddess, broken and sprawled across the bloodied floor of the Cathedral. But that day we stole bread. And stewed apples and fresh cheese. The punishment was bad enough that it was nearly a year before Jeziah and I exchanged more than a few obligatory words again. By then, we both understood that Galilea’s tale was only a cruelty played out by the older Potentiates and, more importantly, that we hadn’t been punished for our crime, but rather for being caught.
We learned not to get caught.
Maybe Nolan needed more lessons in that.
I’ve gone only a few leagues before I tug at the reins of my newly acquired mount, pulling it to a stop without a full thought as to why, as if I’d reached the end of some road. Carsaire was ahead, and the heretic on his way there had a strong head start. There was the chance to catch up, if I didn’t waste time. And yet, here I was, doing exactly that. And thinking of Jeziah. His sharp-edged laugh… his dead stare. Rotting away now, in his nook in Cineris. The Renderers were as real and present as he feared, but they would never get him. They’d never melt down his fat, bottle his fluids, or carve those bright, playful eyes from his skull.
Not like they would Nolan.
A groan escapes, never mind that I haven’t made it far enough away from the farm to feel safe. And yet, I can’t bring myself to urge the horse any farther.
Because if there are Renderers about, there’s no such thing as safe. Especially if their “hounds” can pick me out with a glance.
“It’s a good thing you’re dead,” I mutter, not caring whether Jeziah can hear me in the beyond. “You would have run crying back to Lumeris the minute these freaks showed up.”
I pull the horse around and retrace my path. It’s stupid. I know it. Nolan deserves nothing less than to be left to the fate he made. But it’s the fate itself that I can’t ignore, the abhorrent, rotten gnaw of it. I know what the Chosen have done in the name of Tempestra-Innara. Been party to it more times than I can count. But none of us deserve what the Renderers have in store.
