My body flinched as he turned limp with the twentieth strike. Thetear, the audible rip of flesh burrowed into my ears, scratching and tearing until it clawed its way into my skull. Slumped against the post, Demetri’s face was shielded from me, angled towards the opposite end of the scaffold. A part of me flared with guilt—guilt that I was grateful for it. Better to witness the ruins of his back than whatever would lurk in his eyes.
“Twenty lashes, the due is rendered,” an acolyte confirmed, leering over Demetri’s weeping flesh, his dull eyes momentarily lightened. “The female next, Your Holiness. Twenty, also.”
I shook with violent, full-body tremors. Like in the cell, I begged my body to calm—be still, be still, be still—but it remained defiant, rattling the post like a mast in high winds. They would think me possessed if I couldn’t tame the tremors, and then the lashings would only be the beginning.
“You scald the demons out,”the druids preached. “Cleanse the skin in boiling waters to purge the evil from within.”
Those who didn’t die spent their lives in agony, skin mottled and deformed with burns.
I shook harder.
“Cease this needless shaking, laurel. You will only incite more of His wrath.” The acolyte’s rancid breath washed over my neck, standing its hairs on end. “Heed the lessons of Druid Capriche through his expertise in pain.” Spindly fingers accompanied his commands as they closed around my cheeks, squeezing them, the tips of them almost as red as his robes. “Put an end to this foolishness and remain still for his teaching.”
He yanked my head back, forcing me to meet his glassy eyes. The stench of blood clung to him, so potent it watered my eyes, almost acidic in the way it singed. “It is a lie on thou’s tongue to claim a penance is greater than thee can bear.” The words I’d recited transformed in his mouth from a comfort to a threat. “Have we not been clear in our teachings? Are the druids not thorough in their reasonings? You must show penance to appease the Blood God, unless you wish Him to release another plague upon these lands. Is that what you want, laurel?”
As if full of stones, my mouth struggled to move.
“N-no,” I finally managed, near-choking on the sound, or thesmell.
I chanced a glance to my left, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. Demetri was red, sored.
All of him: red, red, red.
“Brace.” The acolyte’s benevolent advice was the only warning afforded before Capriche raised his whip.
I did brace—for the sting, or the stab, or the ache. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to expect. What I didn’t consider wasfire. An inhuman sound, between a groan and a scream, forced its way through gritted teeth as my body moulded to the post, attempting to distance itself from another hit.
If the first burnt like hearth flames, then the second was an inferno, a bonfire licking my back.
By the fifth, I reasoned this was no post but a pyre. I, its offering, broiling in unseen flames.
I thought of Demetri with the sixth lash. Five cycles old when he knocked out my milk tooth as we wrestled in his mother’s kitchen; how I had spat tomato seeds at him through the gap in my smile all summer.
The seventh.Once, I thought him dead after falling from a tree. I’d prodded him with a stick until he’d lurched for it, swatting me over the head.
The eighth.Nights spent round the hearth fire, counting the small, dark patches on Adelaide’s face that he’d insisted were buttons. Her face of brown buttons.
The ninth.I nearly chuckled through the agony, remembering the olive pit he’d crammed up his nose and how it had made a home there for a week.
The tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth.Dancing to the sound of crickets in the moonlight. Trips to the market to buy spiced sausage. Making daisy chains in the meadows to the north.
The thirteenth.When we were forbidden to meet alone. The threats, the worry, the panic of our mothers.
The fourteenth.His hand around my wrist as he dragged me to an old smith’s yard, captured on my walk home from the sewing guild.
The fifteenth. The stolen turns spent there. The laughter, the talking, thequarrelling. Kisses and touches, bruised lips and smiles.
Had all of that been worth all ofthis? This agony? I was ashamed to think it, but I couldn’t say yes. Not when I would do just about anything to escape another lash.
By the nineteenth, I was pain. Just pain. It had no beginning nor end, it justwas;woven within me as much as the sinew or muscle that clung to my bones. By the Other, I wanted someone to take pity on me. Whoever was listening,mercy. Have mercy.
But I knew better.
The owl knew better.
Thromarra knew better.
Through streaming eyes, I spied the tail of the whip slithering over the floor, drawing a serpentine line in the blood to my side.
