Goodbye.
Goodbye.
***
Awakening to the low cluck of chatter, my first thought was that I should have already been on my feet, hands cupped, neck stretched for the kiss of a blade like a good little offering.
But dying women care not for the rulebooks of men.
So, I stayed there, splayed on the floor, ears attuning to the noise as I waited for them to drag me out by my ankles.
“Perverse, those in whom is no faith.”
“The unbelieving, the vile…their place will be in the pit that burns hottest with fire and brimstone.”
“Such obstinacy. For shame, for shame.”
Cracking one eye, I lifted my head, surprised to find the sun was still yet to rise and Dendra was shrouded in night.
The murmurings swelled.
“Nay, Paxiam,” came the high lilt of a woman, her voice louder than the rest. “This is un-Blood-Godly…heathensin the templum.”
“Blood is blood, heathen or no. Where did you think they were offered?” a man, most likely a paxiam, replied. I searched for thesource, neck twisting to the far left, below the tapestry of a tree laden with olives.
“This is sacred ground,” the woman protested, hair the colour of a rooster’s comb and a piercing voice to match.
“It’s a holding pen,” someone said from behind, their eye roll almost audible.
“It’s an affront, is what it is, an insult,” the woman insisted, thrusting a finger at the doors.
They’d opened. Huddled before them were a handful of women, with pin-straight, dark hair hanging long past their waists, every one of them thin and bedraggled with wrists bound in rope.
Heathens.
“Captured from the east,” Capriche had taught us. “Deniers of the Blood God; wild, depraved, little better than beasts.”
Laurels pressed themselves against the circular walls, their faces pinched and lips downturned.
I rose to a kneel. It would have been far better to stay asleep, where the absence of Demetri didn’t feel like a knife to the liver.
The small gaggle of them settled onto the emptiest stretch of floor, next to the archway to the latrines. Falling to their knees in a loose circle, they did their best to lower themselves with tied hands, facing one another.
All but one.
Breaking from the huddle, she padded over the cushions, barely dipping under her weight, towards the central window framing Mount Garnet. Where Demetri’s lips had moulded to mine. Laurels parted in her wake, huffing and complaining about the smell whilst gathering their skirts with all the pettiness of those with a full life yet to live.
Pressing her bound wrists to the pane, she flattened her nose against the glass, gazing out into the dark.
I returned to my nest, scrunching my eyes and begging for sleep to claim me once more. They snapped open not a heartbeat later. From the window came a sound that set every hair on end, something borne from the chest, like a wolf’s howl, its raw note looping around the circular walls and rattling my bones.
Rising, my gaze locked onto the heathen whose face was smushed to the glass. Her mouth widened in the midst of a guttural scream, the type that hollowed you out from within: a warbling, deep undulation reverberating off the pane.
She slid to the floor and buckled at the waist, black hair cascading over her back.
“Bind its mouth, not its wrists!”
“Paxiam, stick a spear in its throat.”
