A Consuming Fire, page 14
At last Emilia walked out into the woods. In the forest’s far reaches, she found herself an isolated clearing. There she built a makeshift dwelling and passed season after season, set apart from others for fear of the damage she might do. The years washed over her, a living sacrifice, as she grew old alone.
Anya watched, and she could not move.
She could not blink.
She could not breathe.
The curtains closed for the last time on a silent Emilia, grown lined and gray. She sat at the center of her clearing and looked out at the watchers. Though she had remained untouched in body, there was agony in her eyes.
Anya sat too. She sat as the audience applauded, as they stood once again and stretched and chatted, as they mingled before the stage and finally, little by little, as they began to drift away. Then abruptly, Anya got to her feet. There was something building inside her—a wild sense of anguish and wrongness, which set her stomach to turning over and her heart to racing. She didn’t know what to do with it, or how to calm it.
“I want a bit of air,” she said distantly to Janie and Ella.
“Hang on,” Ella said, pocketing her leaflet and fussing with her coat. “We can all walk together. Janie and I—well, we brought you here for a reason, and there’s something you ought to be told. We might get a scolding for saying it, but you should know if you’re planning to stay with the wanderers.”
“That’s very kind, but is it all right if I meet you back at camp?” Anya answered, using every scrap of willpower she had left to keep her voice from trembling. “I need a minute to clear my head.”
And before either of the sisters could protest, she was gone. She hurried up the stairs and through the city’s brilliant streets, and beneath every streetlamp, Anya saw Weatherell girls.
Emilia with her anguished eyes.
Willem with her handless wrists.
Philomena, doubled over with pain.
Sylvie, sightless and withered.
Frida with a bloody hole where her mouth had been, Gabrielle with her ruined face, Leya with one leg torn away, Florien blank-eyed and forgetful, Moriah with her thumbless hands.
Ilva, dying in the shadows.
Don’t go, Ilva breathed, her voice coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Don’t let anyone else go.
Abruptly, Anya stopped. She’d come out into the open square with its domed building and smell of old parchment. Though it was late, there were still people walking about, and some sat on nearby lawns in the summer night air.
Before her stood Orielle of the Elect, gray-robed and severe in the silvery moonlight.
“Anya Astraea,” Orielle said sharply. “Where is your band?”
Anya’s gaze skittered to the right and left. There were half a dozen more gray-robed figures, waiting in the shadows around the square. Fear and rebellion pooled in her belly as slowly, she approached Orielle. Silently, Anya took the crimson band from her pocket and held it out.
“Disappointing,” Orielle said, and the single word cut Anya to the quick.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, because it was required of her. Ilva and a dozen other Weatherell girls who’d been more righteous, more faithful, shimmered at the edges of her vision. “I’m so sorry, I know I’ve done wrong but I swear I’ll do better. I swear I’ll be better.”
Orielle was implacable, and would not meet her eyes. “All your pretty words. All your show of righteousness. And you could not be faithful even in this, the least of things.”
“I can be,” Anya lied desperately. “If you’ll only give me another chance.”
Orielle turned aside, making a small, dismissive sound. “We will find another girl. One without your family’s manifold flaws.”
Anya’s fear turned to abject panic, even as the slight to Ilva stung. It must be her. It would break her irrevocably, to fail at her task. To see another girl go to the mountain, as Ilva had done.
Don’t go. Don’t let anyone else go.
The cobblestones bit hard as Anya dropped to her knees.
“I’ll do penance,” she pleaded. “I’ll humble myself, here and now, as I’ve always done after straying into error. I know I’ve acted shamefully, Mater, but let me return to the path laid out for me. Let me make right my wrongs, and regain my worthiness as an offering.”
Whether it was her obvious desperation, or the calculated use of the Divinitas word for a mother of the faithful that swayed Orielle, Anya could not say. But the gray-robed woman stilled and turned back to Anya, who knelt, already penitent, before her.
“The harrowing of Banevale has already begun,” Orielle said pitilessly. “Those who live in the city at the foot of the mountain suffer our god’s wrath because of the shortcomings of your sister. We will not tolerate another failure, and every hour you waste comes at a cost.”
From where she knelt, Anya lowered herself farther still. She lay facedown on the dirty, oft-traveled cobblestones, arms outstretched like the willing offering she was meant to be. And though the posture brought shame with it, it was not the physical aspect of the penance that cut deepest. It was that Orielle saw her sister as a failure and a disgrace, and the god had found her unworthy.
How could they have been so mistaken? How could they have failed to see Ilva as Anya had seen her? As bright and wild and deserving of all good things? The wrongness and injustice of it cut Anya to the quick, even as, prostrate on the cobblestones, she prepared herself for what was to come.
A long silence fell over the square, but no retreating footsteps echoed away. And then at last:
“You see before you our newest lamb,” Orielle said, her voice clear and steady, carrying well on the cool air to anyone watching and waiting, some of them Elect, some no more than curious bystanders. “She is meant for a pure and spotless offering to the god, to halt his wrath and purchase peace for Albion. It is a role the girl sought herself, after her own sister went north and failed us, bringing suffering and judgment upon those who dwell within the shadow of the god.”
Dark murmurs rose up from those gathered. The longer the god went unchecked, the more any mention of Ilva stirred their anger. Anya’s heart ached within her, but she did not move.
“Our current offering has faltered,” Orielle said. “She has not demonstrated the modesty and self-sacrifice necessary for one who would ascend the mountain in the north. But our god is merciful, and worthy repentance is sweet to him. This new lamb has expressed contrition over her wrongs, and a desire to make them right, so we allow her the chance now. We are all instruments in her cleansing, and tools in the restoration of the humility she requires.
“I invite you all forward,” the woman finished, “to remind our lamb of her failings, and that none of us are perfect, no, not one.”
Anya kept very still, even as the cobblestones dug into her. From the corner of her eye she could see Ilva’s ghost, wavering like an uncertain candle flame. The first of the whispers began almost at once, emanating from unseen speakers who stepped eagerly into the square to take part in her chastisement. They rose up around her, a chorus of doubts, her own internal voices made manifest.
“Unworthy.”
She knew herself to be so—she’d been a coward when Ilva was brave.
“Unwise.”
Had she been wise, Ilva would still live.
“Heartless.”
Heartless indeed, for her sister had been her heart.
“Thoughtless.”
She had not weighed the costs, and Ilva had died for it.
“Cruel.”
And wicked, to stay behind when her own heart faced the god.
“Selfish.”
Yes, for she’d let unspoken convictions come before the good of her kin.
“Faithless.”
More than anyone present knew.
“Shameful.”
So filled with shame, sometimes it hurt to draw breath.
“Your sister deserved her fate.”
Never.
“You are no better than she was.”
No better, no. Unfathomably worse.
On and on they went, and it seemed a very long time before the last of the accusations and chastisements faded. Even when they’d finished, Anya stayed as she was, not so much unwilling to move as unable. She could feel the dozens of eyes fixed on her, all of them unkind and unfriendly in the wake of her penance. Humiliation and grief and shame weighed her down, turning her limbs to lead.
Finally Orielle relented. She crouched before Anya and took her by the hands. Trying to get to her feet, Anya nearly stumbled, but Orielle held her up. With one finger, she tilted Anya’s chin, until the girl was forced to look at her.
“Is there anything you wish to say on your own behalf?” Orielle asked.
“Nothing, Mater,” Anya answered, her voice thin as a thread.
“Very good,” said Orielle. “And you still wish to continue on your own? Without our help or support?”
“Yes,” Anya managed.
“Then you may go. But we caution you not to fall into pride or to falter in your role again.”
“I understand,” Anya said.
Orielle gestured to her to carry on her way, and Anya did so, carefully wiping any trace of dirt from her face and shaking out her hair as she went.
Ilva kept pace beside her, an agonizing reminder of Anya’s unworthiness. The ghost’s lips were blue, her skin deathly pale, and hanks of her honey-brown curls sloughed off, falling to the ground like autumn leaves. A sob escaped Anya, though her eyes were dry.
Don’t go, Ilva whispered, in a voice like wind over an open grave. Don’t let anyone else go.
“I won’t,” Anya swore, though the words caught in her throat. “I promise you, Ilva. I promise. No one else will go.”
FIFTEEN The Touch of Wrath
Anya had become nothing in life if not a master of avoiding conversations that might sting. Even in Weatherell, isolated and cut off from the world, she’d been able to drift from clearing to clearing and cottage to cottage, nearly invisible when she didn’t wish to be seen.
Now, she did not wish to be seen.
The cautionary play and her penance before Orielle and Ilva’s dying were all tangled up within her, and it felt as if nothing lay beneath her skin but a network of bruises. Janie and Ella’s implication that the wanderers were in some way connected with Weatherell and its girls might once have sparked curiosity in Anya, but with her heart a pained knot in her chest, any new revelation seemed like danger. Better to keep her secrets close, tucked away with the monumental weight of her guilt, and let no one past her mild and untouchable exterior.
So she made herself a ghost, still traveling with the wanderers but always where she would not be looked for, deflecting any questions or attempts to draw her out with steely self-composure. For over a week, she managed to keep herself isolated while in company, until she’d finished half her journey north. And though Matthias cast her worried, sidelong looks and Tieran seemed at a loss, though Janie and Ella attempted to draw her out with good-natured chatter when they managed to find her, she would not allow herself to bend.
After Anya’s tenth night camped on the low road, followed by a day spent on foot, the wanderers left the hollow way. They stopped at a place even ghostlier than the old Roman settlement where Anya had met them—the woodland they’d been traveling through grew into a damp, hushed green forest, entirely unlike the one surrounding Weatherell.
In Anya’s familiar New Forest, the trees were tall and the spaces between them relatively open, filled with shifting light and flowers. This wood was still and close, the trees’ crowns clustered thickly overhead, their trunks knotted and twisted and overgrown with moss. Waist-high ferns grew close together, forming a sea of vegetation to be waded through, and everywhere there were strange noises and shadows.
A stand of small wooden huts, all gone weathered gray, dotted a section of the forest not far from the road. The wanderers moved among them with practiced ease and to Anya’s surprise, the place looked as though it had been inhabited a week or so ago. Before each hut the ground had been cleared for a small cookfire, and ashes still sat there, not yet scattered, the open spaces not yet grown over. Matthias and Lee went about carefully from one hut to the next, scanning the doorframe of each and coming together to confer when they’d finished.
“The Beltayne group was here last,” Lee announced shortly, her voice loud enough to reach every wanderer, yet still muffled and softened by the wood. “They’ve gone east, to Londin, to help with anyone fleeing from the northlands around Bane Nevis. There’ll be a good deal more unhoused folk in Albion come winter, even if the god’s sated soon. It’ll be the job of those of us who’ve come before to ensure they’re safe, and that they go unnoticed by the Elect or Lord Nevis.”
“We’ve left signs for whoever camps here next,” Matthias added, “letting them know we’re headed north, to lend a hand to anyone who needs to find the low roads and places to stay, if they’ve not been on the move before.”
A murmur of approval rippled among the wanderers, and Anya turned to Tieran. He was crouched nearby, rifling through her pack for reasons known only to him. His initial bewilderment over her new reserve had turned to spikiness, but Anya did not have it in her to be first to reach out. She might have, were it not for what had transpired between her and Orielle. The encounter had left her raw and aching, feeling lower than dirt and unworthy of anyone’s attention or goodwill.
Anya still had no concept of who the wanderers were, or why they felt it their duty to assist those who moved across Albion without the approval of those who governed it. She shifted anxiously as Matthias and Lee continued to detail their plans, to help those fleeing for fear of the god of the mountain. It seemed to her that the whole encampment was full of secrets. The wanderers had theirs, Tieran had his, and she had hers—some of which the thief knew, but the fire of vengeance that burned low at her core, the resolve that drove her, the full weight of her grief, he’d never even be able to guess at. For the first time, Anya wondered what secrets had taken root and flourished in the soil of Weatherell besides her own. Surely every community housed its silent dissenters, its private heretics, and there had been others in Anya’s acquaintance, even if she was chief among them.
Dusk turned the wanderers’ camp into a constellation of gold and crimson stars, as little cookfires were lit and the soft sounds of conversation and song drifted between the ancient trees. Tieran made himself busy, and Anya felt a dull pang of surprise when he cobbled together a more-than-palatable stew out of items scrounged from her pack and Matthias’s. The thief himself appeared to possess nothing, besides the array of short-bladed knives he pulled out of hidden sheaths while chopping vegetables and bits of dried meat.
Matthias was already dozing on his bedroll by the time Anya set her bowl aside, and Tieran was washing up the light tin dishes and spoons in a water bucket. Midge sat at the boy’s side, happily wolfing down what was left in the cooking pot before he put that into the wash water as well.
Wrapping her arms about her knees, Anya stayed just as she was, feeling small and sad and quiet. Beyond the cast-off glow of their small fire, Ilva glimmered into being. A pale and ghastly light emanated from her, and bone showed intermittently through the fraying web of her skin as she beckoned to Anya and moved insistently back toward the wood. Ilva repeated the motion several times, and at last Anya scrambled to her feet, unsettled by the vision.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said to Tieran. “Don’t wait up on my account.”
“At least take Midge with you,” he called after her, sounding more irritable than ever. “There’s brigands in these parts!”
But Anya was already among the trees and did not stop. Ilva gleamed before her like a muted star, weaving through the ferns and between low-hanging branches. Anya had never yet seen her sister so. Until now, the manifestations of Ilva had been unsettling, and even gruesome. But this ethereal, urgent version of her was something else entirely. It opened up an agonizing hollowness at Anya’s core, for the other visions of her sister, upsetting as they were, had at least been of Ilva decidedly in the flesh. This was her beginning to dissipate into spirit, the semblance of her physical form starting to fade.
Anya glanced over one shoulder uncertainly as Ilva led her on, to the twisting length of the hollow way. Between the muffling effect of the damp green woods and the earthen walls, no one from the wanderers’ camp would be able to hear her, no matter how loudly she called.
But Ilva was insistent. She descended into the sunken lane and disappeared around a bend. After a brief hesitation, Anya let herself down onto the lane and followed. The pale, unearthly light shed by Ilva led her on until gradually, a sound of voices grew audible up ahead. Ilva continued toward them and then, quite suddenly, vanished into nothing, leaving Anya alone in shadows with strangers around the bend. Taking an anxious step forward, Anya peered around the solid curve of the low road’s earthen wall.
A group of people sat huddled together around a poor, smoking fire. There were perhaps a dozen of them—less than half the wanderers’ number. They had an unkempt and bone-weary look, as if they’d been traveling for days but were not accustomed to it. Where the wanderers wore muted colors, and the women practical trousers and shirts, like Anya’s own, these strangers were in town dwellers’ garb—heavy work boots for the men, skirts and aprons for the women, and colors or prints that might catch the eye.
All that, Anya noticed in a moment and forgot, because at the center of their dispirited group lay a makeshift litter, of canvas and sapling poles. On it rested a girl, perhaps five years younger than Anya herself—little more than a child. The girl’s face was a ruin. Most of it was raw and charred with terrible burns, her hair seared away in large patches. As far as Anya could tell from her hands and arms and ankles, the damage extended to the rest of her as well.
