“Coming!” I called, stuffing the last piece of cheese into my mouth and tucking wisps of unruly hair under the veil as I went for the door.
It opened before I was even past the bed. Death stood on the threshold, waiting.
I had a feeling I’d been caught too human, too undisciplined, too maiden-in-the-fields when I should have been Persephone, Goddess. I straightened my shoulders guiltily. “Good morning,” I said with a more graceful curtsey than I had offered the night before, though I still felt foolish and awkward.
“Your day will be difficult enough without working so hard to fill in pleasantries of gentility. It is clear they do not come naturally to you,” he replied curtly. “Did you eat?”
I nodded, wanting to curl up in mortification. “Thank you. For all your generosity.” I smoothed the blue wool, biting my lips to keep from peppering him with a dozen questions at once. I had not interacted with many men outside the brothel, and without sex to bargain with, I struggled to find my footing.
Thankfully, he sensed my unease, and his mouth softened just the barest measure. “You’re eager, I understand. Do not worry. You’ll be satisfied soon enough. Are you ready to begin?”
I nodded.
“Let us go then.” And he strode down the corridor.
He did not offer his arm this time and I rushed after him like a dog at his heels.
At first, I tried to keep track of the turns so I could find my way back if I was ever lost, but there were so many, and by the time we went up and down a labyrinth of steps, I was dizzy and breathing hard. My body still ached from my escape, and even after sleep and food, I wasn’t eager for another long walk, even if it was on rich carpets. Was this part of the training? I eyed Death’s back as he swept around another curving, narrow staircase. Probably not.
Finally, he pushed open a set of enormous carved double doors at the end of a long stone corridor, ushering me into a cavernous room.
Dread swallowed me deep into its throat.
I hadn’t been in a church of any kind since I left the nuns, not even for Dacia, and here Death had brought me to a chapel. It was dusty with disuse, but a somber Christ hung on a crucifix overlooking a massive stone altar, and that same kind of oppressive silence that collected under every church bower lingered. It even smelled, somehow, like the nunnery chapel, hints of tallow and terror. I swallowed and tried to hide my discomfort.
“You have one task today,” Lord Death announced as he strode up the altar steps and sat in a mahogany chair clearly dragged from somewhere in the château and placed behind the stone slab. “Use your power again. In any way you see fit. No time limits. No consequences.Nothing good or bad should befall you. I want to better assess your capabilities.”
“Anything?” I asked.
“Anything at all.”
Of all the requests, this was the most complicated, the thing I feared most. I still wasn’t surehowI’d managed to pull the little violet from the ether, let alone do it again. I took a deep breath and tipped my head to the stone arches, trying to avoid looking at any of the crucifixes.
“Begin,” he said with a wave of his gloved hand.
I nodded, as if I hadn’t already. My mind kept racing, unable to settle or focus. It felt like the time I had a patron who had asked me to piss on him and I hadn’t known what to say—it wasn’t that I was opposed, he was paying handsomely, it was just that I didn’t think I could really do it.
“Do you have a pitcher I can break?” I asked. If there was one type of magic I was good at, it was smashing Josef’s clay pitchers under my hands.
“A talent for destruction is not magic,” he said, eyebrow arched in faint contempt.
Despite the chill, sweat beaded on my temple.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees like an emperor waiting for the games to begin. “You have much more in you than a capacity for destruction,” he said.
The altar loomed in front of him and I eyed it nervously. “Isn’t this a blasphemy here?” A house of God was a holy space, a place of sanctification. Part of my shame in childhood was not being able to control my power when I most understood I needed to.
Death followed my gaze over his shoulder, to the cross on the wall. “You mean because this is a chapel? No. Magic is not a contempt. The church is just as much a space for spells and alchemy as any other. What is the transmutation of bread into the body of Christ after all, except magic?”
“The Eucharist is magic?” I asked uneasily. Despite the years that had passed, I felt the familiar cold sweat of childhood that the Mother Superior would overhear. I feared her more than God.
“It is a rite of transmutation,” he repeated. “The bread into the body. The cup into the blood. So, yes.”
Perhaps it was like Hildegard’s visions and my own—the same, except that one was blessed and one was …cursed.But I still did not understand what made it so—only my birth? “The nuns taught that I am the natural foe of the church. As a woman, I mean. It is only through degradation and ascetism that we can be made a useful vessel for God.”
“Those things are required for a sorceress as well.”
It thrilled me to hear him say that word—sorceress—but also dismayed me to hear becoming so would require embracing what I’d run from at the convent. “Why? Why must I deny and degrade myself to become a sorceress?”
