The final strike.
Could I endure? A darkness, hovering since the fifth or so strike, crept in ever further from the edges of my vision, lulling me to follow it into an abyss—to close my eyes, tosleep, to slide down the post and curl around its base like a cat next to a hearth.
Nothing would feel so much better than everything.
For I was burning.
“Final strike, laurel. Then your due is rendered,” the acolyte declared, tightening my binds further up the post so I straightened, my knees having buckled.
“Move, acolyte,” Capriche grunted from behind, his feet squelching in the blood. “And let us be done with this.”
I leaned into that darkness, urging my mind to wilt into its promise.Drift away from here, I told myself.Other, take me.To some place cool. Some place without fire. Some place without the burning agony of parted flesh.
But the warmth came anyway. Though something within it had changed.
For I felt not the blaze of the whip but a gentle heat, like a budding sunflower blooming in my chest.
I gasped at the sensation rippling through me in gentle waves.
From that place in my heart, what felt like tendrils of light reached outward and outward. Wrapping around my exposed back like a menthol leaf, they cooled and ignited all at once. Pain gave way to pleasure, terror to elation, but I was unafraid, basked in a bliss unlike anything I had ever known before. Had the beyond taken me? Had the Other? Had the Blood God bestowed mercy upon me at last?
The whip snapped, and I smiled. Gods, how I smiled. I licked the salt from my tears where they’d dripped like honey into my mouth.Delicious.
When the tail of the whip landed, I felt no thrash upon my back, though my body quaked with the impact. I opened my eyes to a world of colour. The sky above our enclave a sparkling blue, Demetri’s bloodied body a ruby. Swivelling my neck, none of the expected pain flared from between my shoulders, just a warmth, leaking down and saturating my spine until it drenched every vertebra. The Thromarrians gathered to watch our penance seemed almost to glow—all of them, beings of beauty and light. Though some were smiling, I couldn’t understand why so many looked so sad, so ashamed, so ashen. I wanted to cheer alongside them and share this warmth, this glorious exhilaration, till we were all drunk with it. We would make merry after this. Tap the cobbles with our dancing shoes, toast with flagons of ale, sing songs of true love.
Perhaps the gods did have mercy after all. Perhaps they were the benevolent, almighty rulers the druids promised they were. I could stay like this, bound to this post, forever. It felt so—
The warmth dissipated.
The numbness, the elation, the joy…gone in the space of a blink.
I screamed.
Oh gods, how I screamed.
In its wake came an agony that made the prior lashings seem like mere scratches.
“Ashara?” a voice croaked.
I didn’t look, Icouldn’t look, blinded by the searing marks that crisscrossed my back.
“Ashara!” The voice, still hoarse, sounded louder this time.
Demetri.
It was not he who was to blame for this; it was the acolyte, the druid, the Dendralis. The Blood God.
“Ashara.” His voice warbled as it broke, the defeat in his tone as telling as my silence.
Veering my head away, the movement sent a wave of roiling torture through the muscles of my back. I sealed my eyes shut, panting.
His whimpers danced with my own as we waited to be unbound, the minutes dragging like turns. A hand, slender and scarred, thumbs hardened from the eyeing of needles, brushed over my wrists, unpicking the knot.
Mother. My mother was here.
Untying me, I wept into the pressed pleats of her skirts, losing myself in the folds of her gown. She helped me to my feet.
Limping across the scaffold, every jeer became a grain of salt in my wounds. We passed Capriche, who surveyed me with cold disinterest, his large hands stroking the length of his whip with a cloth, raining droplets of our blood onto the wood. Rather than blood rising from the ground, like a plague, the Dendralis now made it pour from the sky.
