A Consuming Fire, page 26
Or perhaps it was blood—Anya supposed either was just as likely. She kept her hands at her sides, not daring to reach for her bone knife until the last possible moment, for she could not afford to fail again. Above her, the god bowed low, hunger written across his brutal face.
“Are you ready at last, little moon?” he asked, his voice a flame. “It is for me to name my requirement now, and for you to give.”
Inside, Anya writhed with fury at the sound of Ilva’s nickname coming from the god of the mountain’s abominable mouth. Outside, she only nodded.
The god’s hunger grew sharper, thicker, a palpable cloud. It was written all through him—in his posture, in the flames that licked faster and hotter across his ashen skin. For a moment, he said nothing, and Anya realized with a pang of horror that he was warring with himself, overcome with his wretched lust for the piece of her he would require. He was utterly abhorrent to her, not because of his shape or his fire, but because of his nature, his temperament, his repellent appetites.
“I would have your heart,” the god said finally. “I would have the devotion you have thus far denied me. Not taken from you by my touch or my word, but freely given.”
“What will you do with it?” Anya could not help asking. She had no intention of giving what he desired, but she wanted to know what he would have made of her, had she done her duty and no more. Had she been the offering she was meant for.
“I will make you the greatest of the devout,” the god said. “A voice crying in the wilderness. A reformer, who returns Albion to its old righteousness. Offertory villages will mark this land like stars, and you will oversee them all, shepherding the purest and most perfect of their offspring along the path to my altar. I will feast and sleep, and for as long as you live Albion will prosper, in a golden age brought about by my benevolence and the gift of your heart. You will be seen as a saint, and your fire joined with mine will cleanse all this land we dwell upon.”
This time, Anya could not fully suppress the shudder that ran through her. But she fixed her gaze on the baleful god of the mountain and inclined her head.
“Do with me as you will.”
He was an inferno now, the heat of him scorching Anya’s skin. As he began to bow still lower over her, she let her hand creep, inch by inch, to the hidden sheath on her thigh. To the last piece of Ilva.
Bones are for protection.
She could not help the way her gaze cut to the god’s stained and long-broken shackles.
Blood is for ill luck.
Anya’s fingertips closed around the rough cord handle of her knife. She eased it from the sheath as the god swam above her, gone hazy and indistinct in the waves of his own cast-off heat.
Bones are for—
“Stop.”
The god’s voice ground out, potent as an earthquake, and Anya found herself pinned to the altar. It was as if the shackles he’d been freed from had wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, as if chains looped around her waist. His word was undeniable—she’d felt his touch before and could no longer avoid a direct command.
Dispassionately, the god took a heavy step back. His gaze raked over Anya, motionless on the altar, the bone knife clearly visible.
“All of Albion in exchange for such a little thing—only your heart. And you, in your rebellion and arrogance and spite, choose death, not for yourself alone but for so many others. Never have I been sent an offering so rotten to her core.”
The god’s hand snaked out and gripped Anya’s throat, and this time, his touch seared her. She cried out as her skin blistered and scorched, and then there was a blinding flash of light, and he drew away.
At the sanctum’s heart stood Tieran.
He’d lost his frail human shape entirely, but even as a living flame he stood with shoulders hunched, head down, looking for all the world as if he were about to be chastised by Matthias or Lee. An attentive watchfulness swept over the god of the mountain, as if he could not make sense of the boy before him.
“Not gonna let you touch her,” Tieran muttered.
The god tilted his dreadful, inhuman head. “But I already have. And so your concern comes too late. Her pain is my pleasure, her will mine to bend or break if she can hear my voice.”
Anya shrank within herself as the god turned his attention to her.
“Is that not so, child?” he asked, his words like the earth itself shifting.
And to her horror, Anya found herself nodding, her lips forming an answer of their own volition even as she fought for silence. “Yes, my lord.”
Tieran glanced back at her, every line of him speaking of anguish. Anya knew what he must be thinking of—things he’d done at the goading of the Elect, times he’d subsumed others’ will beneath his own, just as the god did now.
“You don’t have to listen to him,” Tieran told Anya desperately. “Don’t have to do nothing he tells you. He’s not greater than you, Anya. He’s not anything, compared to who you are.”
But Tieran, with the rigid control he exercised over his inmost self, had no power to order or free Anya. He had never touched her as a flame—had always held her will sacred. And so the god of the mountain’s hold over her remained complete.
“Stay silent, wayward lamb, and wait as you are,” the god commanded.
The invisible bonds that held Anya tightened, but she kept her eyes fixed on Tieran. He seemed unbearably small, standing before the towering god, but still her thief shone like a defiant star.
He is beautiful, Anya thought, a splintering sensation rising within her. He is always beautiful to me.
Amid the fierce gleam of Tieran’s unleashed fire, another light arose. Something sharp, and cold, and steely. His blade glittered in the air, casting off light and arcing toward the god of the mountain. The moment it reached its target, Tieran threw himself forward, giving no quarter, all fury and flame. The brightness of them grew intolerable, and Anya was forced to glance away. She could not call out to warn Tieran that steel held no power to harm the monster he’d pitted himself against—the god had bound her to silence, and she could not make a single sound.
When she looked back again, the god of the mountain still stood at the cavern’s heart, seemingly untouched. Tieran had drawn back ten paces, breathing heavily, and the light in him was dimmer than it had been at first. He held himself awkwardly, and the god tilted his head to one side.
“One of mine,” he said, as if to himself, not to either of the intruders in his sanctum. “One of mine raised up for a challenge. And a callow, upstart thing at that. Do the grayrobes mock me?”
“Leave him be,” Anya managed to get out, now that the god’s attention was wholly absorbed by Tieran. She sat at the very edge of the altar, forced by his injunction to keep contact with it, but fulfilling only the bare letter of the command. “He’s hardly worth your notice, like you said. But I’ve come back to you—a prodigal and a heretic of the worst sort. Come and claim me.”
She could not keep her voice from shaking as she made the invitation, and the god of the mountain shot her a look of fathomless disdain.
“Did I not order you to silence and stillness?” he rumbled. “I grow weary of your interruptions. Do not speak again, until the business of your betters is done.”
Anya’s insides twisted and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth as the god turned back to Tieran.
“You want this lamb for your own, little godling?” he said. “Then prove yourself divine. Wrest her from me.”
Pleading with her eyes, Anya shook her head. But Tieran blazed, steel glinting in his hand, and once more the gods were met. Their coming together was a terrible thing that shook the earth and set loose stones crashing from the cavern roof in a deafening rockfall.
When the dust cleared, the god of the mountain stood triumphant. He was an avenging inferno with Tieran at his feet, the thief looking small and broken, all his lesser light gone to shadow. As a last defiance, Tieran dragged himself back into his human form and set his jaw. Anya could see where the god had wounded him, though not how—a terrible, rust-red slick was spreading across his ragged shirt, plastering it to his skin.
“You come against me with steel and flame,” the god of the mountain scoffed. “I am greater than you can fathom. Ageless as stone. No blade forged by men can wound me, and fire is my domain. But you are less and fragile and weak where I am strong, and I will wipe even your memory from the face of the earth. Then there will be a reckoning for the grayrobes, for only fools believe they can raise up a power to rival me, and I do not suffer fools.”
Anya could not look away from Tieran. She scrabbled helplessly at the stone of the altar, tearing the skin from her fingertips and splintering her fingernails in an effort to break the god’s command. But his word held her fast and after a moment she grew quieter, her breath coming in great, desperate gasps.
Still, her fingers probed the crevices and fissures of the altar, which had seen so much of sacrifice and blood. At last, as the god bent slowly over Tieran, she touched something strange and cold and smooth.
A hint of metal.
Grasping for it, Anya drew something from the rock she had never expected to see again. Ilva’s little sufferer—the pendant she had worn to the god’s mountain and returned home without. Every line of it was familiar—a reminder of who Ilva had been, bright and brave and beautiful, unshakeable in her choices, unrepentant in her boldness. A shining image rose up in Anya’s mind, of the last time she and Ilva had stood together in Weatherell’s final clearing. Before the god of the mountain tore out Anya’s beating heart.
Inside Anya Astraea, the flame that had plagued her all her life grew into a towering inferno. It sent rage scorching through every inch of her, and perhaps the god of the mountain and Tieran the thief burned visibly, but Anya was no less a living fire because her fury burned unseen.
With a wrenching effort, she broke free of the altar and of the god’s command, and flew across the cavern to stand between Tieran and the god.
“He never wanted to come to you,” Anya said, her voice ringing with defiant truth. “It was his intention to stay clear of you forever—to haunt the edges of Albion in his human form and never set himself against the greater power that began him. I brought him here. I crossed this whole land intent on harming you. I defied the grayrobes and drew the offspring they raised for you into my schemes. If you have any enemy in this world, it is me. It will always be me, for as long as I live.”
The god bent low over Anya to peer into her face. Flames filled her field of vision.
“Who are you,” the god said wonderingly, “that you come against me again and again?”
Anya glanced back at Tieran. He was pale as weathered bones now, eyes shut, chest barely rising and falling, and blood pooled on the cavern floor beneath him. Everything in Anya hurt at the sight and recoiled from the thought of facing another heartbreak.
It had been like dying herself, losing Ilva. It was still like dying, piece by piece, one fragment at a time. But she had grown strong on the road—flames were consuming Anya despite her worry, roaring through her blood and bones. Despair and fury, sorrow and rage, all tangled up within her. She loved Tieran, loved Ilva, loved Willem and Philomena and Sylvie and the memory of every girl who’d gone before. She loved her own life. Loved the intolerable force of her anger. Loved the brief and tantalizing glimpse she’d had of freedom.
Don’t go, Ilva whispered, from somewhere and nowhere and everywhere at once, her voice so soft the god could not overhear. Don’t let anyone else go.
Anya envisioned Ilva, lying on the god’s fearful altar, denying him his first request. She had refused him when asked for the memories of her sister, though doing so led to her own destruction. She had not shied away from hurt. She’d held fast to what she knew was good and right. Even now, the recollection of Ilva’s courage and conviction robbed Anya of her breath. Into death and beyond, Ilva had kept her fire and refused to falter.
Bone of my bone, Anya thought. Flesh of my flesh. I can do no more or less. Can be no more or less than she was.
With her left hand, Anya clutched the little sufferer. With her right, she reached for her other relic—the final remnant of Ilva Astraea, which she’d carried from Weatherell to the mountain.
“I am the last offering,” Anya answered softly, so quiet and meek that the god was forced to stoop lower still. “The one that burns so fiercely, it will sate you forever. My sister was the spark that kindled me, but I am a consuming fire.”
And with all that burned in her, all the anger and conviction and heartache and grief, she took her bone knife and drove it into the god of the mountain’s throat. Wrenching forward with every muscle, Anya felt whatever fiber the god was made from give way and rend. Steel was not enough to mar him, but Ilva was. Anya was. And together, they left a killing wound.
Molten blood fountained over Anya and she darted away with a cry, frantically wiping at it before it could burn too deep. The god clutched at his throat and the sound he made was a nightmare, a whole world ending. His death rattle shook the cavern, and when he fell back upon the altar, the massive stone of it split in two.
The heat in Anya was an inferno, an incandescent storm. She stood above the god of the mountain and stared down at his ruin, as he must surely have stared down at her sister. At her mother. At scores of other girls.
“I was never a lamb,” she said furiously as Ilva’s ghostly hand settled on her shoulder, a benediction made manifest. “I was never an offering. And no one else will be made so ever again.”
TWENTY-SEVEN The Ones Who Went
Thought I was the frightening one,” a weak voice said from behind Anya. “But that’s not true. You’re much more frightening than I am.”
Anya whirled, the burning within her dimming at once, and found Tieran pushing himself upright with a pained look on his face. He was a disaster in his human form, all blood and soot and alarmingly pale skin, but a bit of his color was returning, and for Anya he managed a rueful smile.
“What are you doing?” she asked, unable to hide her shock. “I thought he’d killed you.”
Tieran stifled a groan and attempted, unsuccessfully, to stand. Anya was at his side in a moment, keeping him seated with gentle hands.
“Ridiculous boy. Don’t get up.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted. “Or I will be in a minute. Don’t you know it takes some doing to kill a god, Anya Astraea?”
“You’re not a god,” she scoffed, though tears were blurring her vision. “And killing one was straightforward enough, once I really got down to it.”
She fixed her eyes on Tieran, and he must have seen the fear still lingering in her—that she would suffer one more loss, and it would be him, and she would not be able to bear up under it.
“Don’t look so,” Tieran said softly, brushing the tears from her face with his thumb. “We’re gonna be just fine, you and me.”
Anya nodded, but despite her resolve, she’d never really expected to succeed in the task she’d set for herself—it wasn’t for Weatherell girls to triumph. They broke, or sometimes died. They did not emerge from the cavern of the god whole and victorious. It would all take a great deal of getting used to.
“Do you have another knife?” she asked.
Tieran’s smile widened. “Course I do.”
“A big one?”
Fidgeting, Tieran procured a blade that was halfway to a short sword.
Anya frowned. “Where did you—no. Never mind.”
Squaring her shoulders, she returned to the remains of the god and stared down at them dispassionately for a moment. He had only been a monster, after all. Only a twisted thing made of malice and lust for power, without anything truly divine at his core. He had not been enough to stand against her, and had never deserved the pure-hearted sacrifices of all the Weatherell girls who came before. Had not deserved Willem, or Ilva, or any of the others, or the piece of Anya’s heart she’d never regain in the absence of her sister.
Stooping, Anya gripped Tieran’s keen blade tight and cut the god of the mountain’s head from his shoulders.
“I’m not finished yet,” she said to the thief, heaving the god’s head up by one curling horn. It was ponderous and awkward and would be a burden to drag down the mountain, but the god weighed less on Anya in death than he had in life. “There’s still something left for me to do.”
“Frightening,” Tieran muttered. But there was devotion in his eyes when he looked at Anya, encumbered by the weight of the god, and she knew there was boundless affection in hers when she looked back at him.
* * *
At the center of Banevale, as in most cities or towns across Albion, there lay an open square. It served for a market and a meeting place, where the Elect taught or dealt out judgments and itinerant preachers spoke of wrath and fire. Lackeys of Lord Astraea levied taxes there or enlisted new youths for his private guard. People learned their news in the square; they conducted business and gossiped and bickered and wooed one another within its busy confines.
At the edge of that square, Anya hesitated. Though they’d passed a day and a night on the mountain and it was only a little after dawn, a crowd milled about already. A motley assortment of hawkers and the working poor and girls with half-healed burns, of well-clad merchants and gray-robed Elect, of liveried guards and, on horseback, tending to some unknown business, Anya’s father himself. The moment she stepped out of the shadows, Anya knew every gaze would be trained on her. Every listening soul would hang upon her words.
Her hands began to tremble and her stomach to turn over.
“Tieran, I’m afraid,” she breathed.
“I know,” he said reassuringly. “I know, but you can do this. You got to do this—if you don’t get up there and say something, Lord Nevis or the Elect’ll do it for you. They’ll twist what you done, and find a way to use it to their own ends. But I’m right here. Be waiting for you and watching you, all the time.”
