Page 19 of The Lost Reliquary
“Well, I’ll leave the guesthouses to your vast experience. Any other pointers on playing normal?”
It’s clear he catches the tartness in my words. Still, he replies. “Remember your etiquette lessons… assuming the Dawn Cloister actually had those.”
I snort. “Better than your insult lessons, clearly.”
“Keep an eye on how other people act and mimic it. And try not to draw attention or say anything you don’t have to.” He sighs. “I know that’s going to be the hardest part for you…”
“I’ll manage.” I’m still clutching the gifted bread. I tear a hunk of the end. “Oh… oh, you need to taste this.”
Nolan’s brow furrows in a way that tells me he couldn’t care less, but he accepts the piece I hand him. Then makes a face. “It’s dry. Gritty.”
“Right? Can you imagine them serving this in the Cloisters?”
“Maybe to the pigs.”
I scoff. “Now who is showing their ignorance? This is what the regular folks eat, so better get familiar with it.” I let a beat pass. “Wouldn’t want to seemsuspicious.”
His mouth thins, but he doesn’t have anything to say to that.
We don’t speak again until the sun is almost down and we make camp. We feed the horses, shake out our bedrolls. I build a fire as Nolan starts on a simple, sparse meal. Nolan even serves me first, as humbly as one of the Cloister attendants. In the Cloisters, all this would be done for us. Butthisis what normal people do, when they aren’t bound blood and soul to the Goddess.
The family I was born into is dead. Nolan’s too, most likely. But the difference between us is that he truly sees the Goddess as his mother, the other Chosen and me as siblings. And if we do manage to find the reliquary, if by some unlikely chain of events I am able to use it to kill Tempestra-Innara, I will be taking all of that away.
But Nolan’s devotion isn’t my problem. Neither is anyone else’s. I have seen the cost of divinity’s reign, paid by both heretics and the devoted alike. The Goddess’s world might be destroyed, but another one will rebuild itself eventually. It always does. And maybe, with the last of the gods nothing but memory, it will have the chance to become something better.
And if not, well, I’ll still be free.
Ten
An offering was made of the priests who didn’t flee. Stakes driven into the ground, then into flesh, grisly rows set outside the entrance to the city. The Green Garden, they blithely called it after, when it was clear the offering had been accepted. When it was clear that the Flame Goddess wouldn’t raze the city to stone and ash.
—ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORIAN ADRELLIS, FROMTHE WITHERED CITY
IREMEMBER THE STORM.THEway we’d hear the crash of thunder long before we reached the cliffs, following flashes of light that pierced the towering, ancient trees and their verdant canopies. The growing smell of rain-soaked air and vegetal decay. I remember emerging from the forest to the sight of those never-ending black clouds that clung to the jagged, windswept peaks, and how my mother would make her offering, opening her fists and letting the winds take it.
I remember that we were never supposed to speak of these visits.
I remember that it didn’t matter in the end.
The mother who birthed me had long hair the color of buckwheat honey. Sometimes it would tickle my neck as she wrapped me in a cloak or a coat, or slipped boots on my feet if we were braving the snows of winter. Which it always seemed we were. In the northern mountains, snows came early and left late. But that, we whispered, was a gift from the Storm Goddess, a shield, because it meant the clerics who did theirearnest best to sell the faith of Tempestra-Innara mostly came in the summer. The ones foolish enough to risk the snows we’d find in the spring, frozen where they fell, occasionally gnawed on by a lucky woodland creature.
On the day soldiers arrived instead of clerics, my mother and I were at the overlook committing heresy. Though the Storm Goddess was no longer with us in the way the Flame Goddess was, they still watched over us.At least, my mother said,as long as we make our offerings.We prayed to them as we made the shallow cuts in our palms or fingers, reaching over the cliff’s edge to let the wind take those red drops. Blood to keep Tempestra-Innara far away, blood to make our harvests plentiful and keep our village as strong and healthy as the summer storms. We were blissfully unaware of the devastation we’d find upon our return. Devastation that the Storm Goddess had done exactly fuck all to prevent.
By the time we were close enough to hear the screams, most of the village was burned beyond saving. Smoke choked the air. Corpses littered the streets. If my mother had been a little less simple and a little more familiar with how the Bellators and their legions went about a conversion, she would have picked me up and run. But she wasn’t. Or she panicked. Or, or, or. Whatever her motivation, we somehow made it back to our home unscathed. My father lay in the open doorway, my grandfather a few steps beyond. Both motionless in death. My grandmother, less lucky, was still making her way there, gasping weakly as the wound in her chest leaked. I remember my mother rushing to her side, the older woman’s mouth struggling to form words.
Lannara…I hear the papery hiss of that name in my dreams sometimes.
Sometime after my grandmother’s trickle of red ceased, the soldiers appeared. My mother screamed: not in fear, but with rage—the deep, primal fury reserved for cornered animals. It was enough to make the soldiers take a fearful step back, allowing her the chance to grab the knife someone had been using to chop roots and tubers. It was a stupid move. And I’m pretty certain she realized it when I made my own noise, one of pure fear. I had enough time to see her remember that Iwas there, that she was a mother and still bore a responsibility in this world, before the soldiers cut her down too.
It gets blurry after that, though some memories stand out. Terrified faces, some familiar—other survivors from my village. Being herded like sheep through fields and forests I don’t recognize by a legion that wields the wordhereticas freely as its blades. The bone-deep chill of the early winter storm.
And, most of all, the cracking of the ice.
Most memories of life before Tempestra-Innara become increasingly distant, threadbare, as the years pass. But not that.
Never that.
On a sullen, soggy morning that very nearly has me longing for my Cloister cell, Belspire appears—almost abruptly—in the distance. Right away, I see it’s no Lumeris. There’s no grace to the rising, weather-stained spires that stab at the sky, tattered wisps of fog weaving between them. No welcoming glow of the flame as in the Goddess’s city. Belspire is an aging city—waning in size, wealth, and prestige—but once a place of unparalleled plenty, whose favor from the Green God meant bountiful fields, orchards, and gardens that yielded everything from fine fruits to coveted aromatic oils and tinctures used for the finest incenses and perfumes. After their fall, the city’s main trade endured but was much reduced, its prior fortune never reached again. Now, it is as much known for the bells that gave the city its name, which, according to our lessons, ring with an unparalleled beauty that draws visitors from across the Devoted Lands. A real tourist attraction, for sure.
