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Now he was stripped to his waist in the basement of the church, shoveling more wood on the fire. It was already sweltering, both of my tormentors soaked with sweat, but for many hours, the heat had ceased to exist for me.
Father Borodin glanced at the crackling flames, wiping sweat off his brow. I hung limp between the posts, the taste of blood lingering in my mouth.
“We know you’re hiding something,” he said grimly. “You’ve been particularly unrepentant as of late, Salem. I wish I could say it surprised me, but of course the blood will out. Like mother, like daughter.”
I was getting tired of being told by everyone that I amounted to nothing.
Beneath the pain, alarm was rising rapidly. The Augur lowered an iron poker into the flames, sending sparks flying.
How much more damage could they possibly inflict on me? If I were working with the Beasts, I would have broken by now under this onslaught.
I thought about telling them yes, I was their whore, I was the one destroying the blessings—but that same voice that hadn’t allowed me to let the Augur die now told me no. They could wound this mortal shell, but I wouldn’t lie to validate their beliefs.
The only respite I had was in defiance, but my tongue felt thick and clumsy. After sweating and bleeding for hours, with nothing to drink, I was on my last legs.
“What was that?” The Father eyed the fire again, his eyes lovingly stroking the poker.
I forced myself to raise my head, just far enough to look at him. “I said, my mother wasn’t a whore.”
My voice came out as a wheeze, but it was better than laying here and taking the beating like a dog.
A cruel smile curved the Father’s lips. “Oh? Did I ever tell you why she burned?”
I stared at him until my neck muscles gave out and my head slumped downwards.
He’d always told me she was a heretic, forsaking the Paths of Purity. I’d grown up assuming she was a bad woman. When I entered my teenage years and understood how women were truly treated here, I’d assumed she’d simply had enough and signed her death warrant by standing up for herself.
The Father tapped the birch rod against my aching back. “She had been arranged into a marriage any good woman would be grateful for, but her soul, like yours, was rotten to the core. She rejected our traditions and defied the church, laying with another man. She slipped out into the Wood, night after night. My predecessor caught her in the act—fornicating with a Beast like an animal.”
My breath caught in my throat. She’d been burned at the stake mere hours after birthing me—and she’d taken my father’s name to the grave.
What if a Beast was my father?
But he put those fears to rest immediately. “She was already pregnant with you,” he added with no small amount of distaste. “Imagine… a woman full with child, who should be tending the hearth and her hymns, and instead she was on her back for a creature. Amonster. Perhaps you could have had a chance at a holy life, but you were corrupted in the womb.”
I was too stunned to try to speak. My own mother had lain with the Beasts of the Wood. Such a thing was unimaginable.
“Now…” He nudged the poker, revealing the tip that was gleaming cherry red. “You must answer truthfully, Salem. Are you working with the Beasts?”
“No.”
“Are you fucking the Beasts? Do you get on your knees for them, like your dog of a mother?”
“No!”
“Have you been destroying the blessings? Helping the Beasts destroy the runestones?”
“For the last time,no,” I sobbed, watching the Augur pull on thick leather gloves to pluck the poker from the fire.
I had taken whippings, I’d taken beatings, but never had they threatened me with this.
“If you will not be truthful under the lash, perhaps a small taste of the pyre that awaits you will loosen your tongue.” Father Borodin put aside the bloodied rod and stepped around me. “Be purified by blood or flame. It’s all the same to me.”
I felt the crust of dried blood break as he peeled layers of cloth away from my back. My nerves were already jumping, the inability to see where they were going to press the hot iron nearly driving me to madness.
When it finally landed near the base of my spine, the first sensation was nearly of ice. Freezing coldness, spreading through my back… followed by agony as my seared nerves caught up with my brain, and the thick stench of my own burning flesh.
I screamed so hard my throat felt like it was bleeding and thrashed against the bonds, my vision gone completely white.
