Eyes itchy and red, irritated by motes of powdered bloodstone adrift in the air, I watched it all. I watched how some went to their deaths silent and resolute, while others were dragged, screaming and thrashing. I watched as each met the same fate—rock turned to pebble turned to dust.
Hand still in mine, I watched alongside her. I needed to blink. Gods, how I needed to blink, but I kept my eyes wrenched open until I could stand it no longer, intent on witnessing every one. Hands slick, we inched closer to the tree, clinging to each other. It was a small lip at first, a nip under the sole of my slipper, a stumbled step here, a wobbling ankle there. The soil underfoot was now almost all root, writhing over the ground like serpents. With my thumb, I traced small circles on her wrist, and she squeezed mine, our heads angled up towards the bloodied tree that loomed ever closer.
Another laurel, then another. Another. Each body another foot closer, for me, for her, forDemetri.
A broad, chestnut-haired laurel ascended the dais to stand before Falstaff.
I convulsed. Her gentle thumb caressing my knuckle did nothing to quell the rising tremors, my fingernails embedding into her skin, enough to draw blood. But she held firm through it all, her rod holding mine aloft, though my knees threatened to buckle.
Eyes hazed with tears, Ilooked. I looked at his elbows, his waist, his thighs, then his feet, half-swallowed by the twisting roots. Gone was that playful saunter of his gait, and only a rigidness remained, so unlike Demetri. His head stayed dipped, as if resigned to his fate. The boons in my chest were no longer a gift, but a woe, each pump more wretched than the last.
Falstaff raised the needle.
“Turn,” I whispered, voice lost to the song of the acolytes and the beating in my chest. “Turn.”
He didn’t look back, not even for one fleeting glance. Falstaff pricked the needle to his thumb, a pearl of blood blooming on its tip before falling to the roots at their feet.
The blood plague pooled, as it had done to all those before—as it would do for the acorn laurel, as it would do for me. It grew and grew, crimson tendrils slithering up to his face, still angled away from my gaze. With my free hand, I curled my fingers to reach for his button, pulling and tugging as if it could do something,anything, to stop what was happening.
But the magic of buttons was no match for the Blood God.
“Goodbye,”I breathed, the word little more than a brush of air from my lips. It was not to spare me the belt, because it was only for him. Always for him. I would tell him in the beyond how I had looked, how I had looked at it all, until the very end, and he would be so proud. “Darling,” he’d say. “You were so brave. So, so brave.”
He was silent as it happened—no scream, no cry for mercy, no plea for salvation. Only the rattle of air in my lungs, and the froth of a blood plague bubbling up from the roots.
Demetri was gone, and in his place, a body of bloodstone.
The acolytes raised their hammers, and still, I looked. I looked and looked and looked, as the future we could have shared turned to dust with their swing.
Not a splinter, but a chasm opened inside me, cracking alongside Demetri’s body under their mallets. I would not go to my death as a whole…not after my mother, not after this. From its gaping centre spilled warmth, magma surging through my chest and stealing my breath. I huffed through it, half expecting smoke to plume into the air with every exhale.
The line shortened and shortened, and before long, we were standing at the foot of the stairs, the acorn-haired laurel next to be offered. She trembled like the last leaf of autumn, clingingto its branch—to my hand—desperate to stay despite the cruel winter wind. But that was not the way of things.
The acolytes descended.
As her collar clicked open, her hand slipped from mine, and something stirred within me, a piece fusing rather than breaking. I didn’t wish to let her go. Not yet, perhaps not ever. But with patient fingers, she unpicked them from mine. Hand slickened with sweat, she slid from my grasp.
Foot upon the first of the root-wrought steps, she defied Falstaff’s order and turned. Our eyes met, and her cerulean irises, large and round, glittered with tears that mirrored my own. I had hoped for a promise. An instruction. An oath to pass between us. But in the breath or two that we held each other’s gaze, there was only silence—the words we should have spoken unspeakable, the knowledge we carried heavier than chappellums, templums, and mountains.
A vicious swipe from an acolyte’s belt forced her forward, blood painting the steps in a shower of red. As she rose, she peeked behind once more and smiled, her teeth webbed crimson. I returned it, wide enough to ache.
A smile for her. ForDemetri.
I was still smiling when the hammers fell and her body crumbled alongside all the rest. Unlike the others, her head had not succumbed to the mallets and instead lay decapitated on the dais, hewn from her body. An acolyte scooped up her face, still etched in a smile, and brought her to his nose. My mouth dropped as he sniffed her cheek, inhaling deeply, his chapped lips parted.
“To His Eminence.” The acolytes’ glassy eyes shot open at Falstaff’s demand. Descending the dais, he stashed her head in his robes, the bulk of her jutting from under the cloth like the swollen stomach of a mother heavy with child.
“Bring forth the laurel.”
I returned to Falstaff, to the tree, to theblood. It was time. It was time to make good on my due.
Chapter seventeen
Ashara
The Offering
To Him belongeth vengeance and recompence. -32:35 - The Book of Dendralis
