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There would be no tea. But I was already distracted.
“Blood magic? What do you mean?”
“Very well, not blood magic precisely,” Caspar conceded. “Blood rites. Help me to understand. Why is your brother fixated on Perun?”
He spoke as if I would have an answer, as if Arthur confided in me more than in my uncle. When in truth I doubted he shared his true thoughts with either of us.
“Perun, the god of thunder, the sky, of storms, and lightning,” I said, trying to sound as if I knew what my uncle was talking about.
“Yes, and of oak and iron. But war, too.”
“Zorya is the goddess of war.” She was often called the Red Maiden because of her warrior-like powers. The temple taught that Zorya lived in the Palace of the Sun and rode her white war-horse across the sky each morning, heralding the dawn of the world. “Perun is subservient to Zorya, to all his sisters.”
“Very good. But, ah, was he always?”
“Always subservient?”
My uncle nodded. “At one time, Perun was honored alongside the Three.”
My eyes widened. “Truly?”
“Admittedly, this was long ago. But it seems Arthur has finally started to take his historical scholarship seriously. He’s been reading old texts that tell stories of Perun and an ancient battle against the old fae gods. In the stories, Vela the foremost fae goddess was beaten back by Perun the god of war. Vela flees Perun and his powerful lightning bolts, taking her people with her and transforming herself from her form of a serpentine dragon into a willow tree.” He snorted. “Unfortunate for the House of Pendragon that the fae goddess was always more associated with dragons than any human deity ever was.”
“But those are just stories,” I said. “Children's tales.” I echoed his words back at him.
“Ah, but even children’s stories have a kernel of truth,” my uncle said, looking excited. “Your brother is smart enough to have caught onto that.”
I was dubious. Arthur was certainly not lacking in intelligence. But I could not imagine him revering the knowledge of old texts unless doing so could get him something in return.
“Vela was real? Perun was real? Is that what you are saying?”
Caspar Starweaver shook his head. “No, no, no. But there was certainly a very real battle between human and fae, hundreds of years ago. We know this, though the scholarship is disappointingly lacking. Much has been destroyed. Little that is true remains. But what we can surmise is this–some human, probably a king or queen, bore a great weapon similar enough to Perun’s lightning or thunder that it was later called such. A weapon powerful enough to destroy Vela–or the fae people themselves or enough of them that weapon lived on in collective memory as a fearsome object. And the weapon was said to have been fueled by the power of blood.”
“By blood?” I was revolted. “What are you saying? Human blood?”
“In a sense,” my uncle said soothingly. “Blood rites. Blood offerings. Animals and so forth. In the past, such things would have been very common.”
I thought of the beautiful shrines at the temple to Zorya, Marzanna, and Devina, covered with flowers and sheaves of wheat and little scrolls. “But not now. The goddesses do not demand blood. You speak of another time. A savage-sounding one.”
“I suppose to a woman, it might seem that way.” My uncle looked amused by my disgust.
I frowned. “I do not know if the gods are real–” In truth, I highly doubted it and knew my uncle did, too, so he would not be offended. “But the rituals of the Three are...”
“Pretty? Peaceful? Are those the words you’re looking for? Yes. And yet when we celebrate Marzanna’s bringing of spring, do we not drown a woman in the river?”
My eyes widened. “Not a woman! A woman made of straw. An effigy.”
“She is dressed in a real woman’s clothes. A woman from each city, each village.”
“For a woman to be asked to give a set of old clothes to the straw woman is an honor!” I said hotly.
“Because the woman is being offered in essence to the goddess,” Caspar explained, looking as if he were trying to be patient. “Marzanna demands it, does she not?”
“No one is dying. There is no blood involved,” I insisted. “It’s a harmless ritual. To banish winter, to welcome spring.”
My uncle shrugged. “If you say so. But I have always wondered about the origins of the tradition. Surely at some point in the past a real woman was used in place of the straw one.”
“Well, we don’t do that anymore,” I said stubbornly. My eyes widened. “Surely you are not suggesting that Arthur...” As I said the words I realized with a chill that it was all too easy to imagine.
