Before she opened her eyes, Anya noticed the smell. Sharp and astringent. Medicinal. Like the clear spirits Leech Forster would use to clean wounds back in Weatherell, when someone had cut themself badly. After that came the realization that her back and shoulders felt unaccountably cold and sensitive to the air.
Fighting her way to full consciousness, she opened her eyes and shut them again as the room spun around her. After a moment, she risked another glance, taking stock as the fear in her rose to a fever pitch.
She lay on her stomach on a soft feather bolster, but there were no covers and no pillow. Anya’s hands had been bound above her head, and her robe cut to the waist, leaving her back exposed. She seemed to be in the bedchamber she’d been taken to upon first arriving, or in a room very like it. From the raised platform on which the bed sat, she could see that the room was packed with gray-robed worshipers, kneeling on the floor and softly chanting their hymns. The sheepskin rugs had been pushed away, revealing crimson words in Divinitas script that had been painted onto the floorboards themselves.
Orielle stepped into Anya’s field of view, and the girl grew entirely still. Willem’s warning ran through her mind, echoing in the dim space where Ilva’s ghost had taken up residence.
In Weatherell or beyond the wood, folk will string you up for blasphemy if they learn the truth behind your going. The Elect will kill you, and make your very name a curse.
Had they seen the truth in her so quickly? She’d hardly spoken—how was it possible for the Elect to plumb her soul with such deftness, and see the unholy fire that burned at her heart?
But when Orielle spoke, the words put her first fear to rest, replacing it with another.
“We’re so fortunate to have been blessed with your presence, sweet one,” the woman said. “The third of her line to go for a sacrifice. Surely you will succeed where your own kin failed.”
“Let me go,” Anya said, trying to sound insistent, but her voice faltered. “It’s not right for you to treat me so. I’m going to the god willingly—there’s no need to bind me.”
“It will be easier for you to receive our prayers this way,” Orielle said, her voice gentle. “If you were to struggle overmuch, you might mar them. We intend no disrespect, but this is for the best—for you and for Albion. In a bale year, the god requires more potent pacification than in the ordinary course of things.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Anya protested, giving in to panic and tugging at the ropes that bound her hands. “Just let me go and I’ll bring the god anything you want. I promise.”
“Beloved.” Orielle ran a finger along the line of Anya’s jaw. “You cannot bring our prayers. You can only be them.”
Something stung the place between Anya’s shoulders and she gasped, trying unsuccessfully to wrench herself away.
“What is that?” she choked out. “What are you doing?”
“Preparing our living petition,” Orielle explained. “Setting our words and worship into your skin, so that they will be all the sweeter to the god when joined with your sacrifice. Divinitas script, scribed in ink and mingled with blood, is an offering he cannot resist. You will be comely to the god indeed, when you carry our petitions to him, my love.”
The stinging intensified, until it became a maddening burn. Through a haze of fear and outrage, memory seared across Anya’s mind.
Sylvie, sitting before the fire in the cottage she shared with Philomena, while Philly gently washed her. Philly had sponged water over Sylvie’s hunched form, the old woman’s skin so paper-thin her veins showed through. But an eerie and intricate pattern of dark ink still marked her flesh, marching in orderly and angular rows across every inch of Sylvie’s back. Sylvie would never speak of where it came from, but Anya and Ilva had known—they had no such practice in Weatherell, and so the markings could only have been made during Sylvie’s time beyond the wood.
The pain between Anya’s shoulders returned her to the present. But she could do nothing, bound as she was by ropes and her own deceit, besides lie still with furious tears tracking down her face. It all went on and on, for what seemed like hours—the chanting, the overwhelming scent of spirits and warm beeswax candles, the humiliating pain.
They might have asked, Anya thought wretchedly. Had they asked, she’d have submitted to the request. Not happily. Not in the spirit desired. But of her own accord, to preserve the pretense under which she traveled.
They had not asked, though. They’d given no opportunity for this to be undertaken as an act of will and so, while Anya might have felt distaste for the markings had she chosen them, she found herself filled with choking hatred for the thing being done to her.
I don’t want to be an offering, she thought with a new and sharp urgency. I never have, nor a prayer, either. I will be a knife in the dark or nothing, no matter the cost.
And then Roger appeared at Orielle’s side.
“Lord Nevis’s guards are at the door,” he said tersely. “They’re claiming Lord Selwyn has granted them the right to an inspection. I tried to put them off, but they won’t go.”
A flash of anger crossed Orielle’s face. “Nevis has no right to interfere in our affairs so far south! Turn them away.”
“It would be unwise, given the allies he’s been making across Albion, and the way he’s begun solidifying his power in Londin. At the rate he’s going, he’ll have added the city to his holdings by midwinter. Best to placate him until the god rests again,” Roger said. “We can deal with Nevis once the bale year’s passed. For now, you get everyone to their posts and manage the guard. I’ll see the Weatherell girl stays hidden.”
The pain in Anya’s back subsided a little, and Orielle snapped a few words to the gathered worshipers. Their chanting stopped, and there was a sudden shuffling of bare feet and swishing of robes as the room emptied out.
Anya fought desperately for calm as Roger knelt beside her and severed the ropes around her wrists with a short, double-bladed knife. But the moment the bonds were cut, she scrambled away to the other side of the bed, putting it between them. She wanted space, and to never feel unwanted hands on her again.
Roger sighed. “Don’t have time for your nerves, we got to be on our way. The guard won’t take long looking everything over.”
When Anya made no move to join him, Roger gave her a long-suffering look. “One way or another, you’re going to want to come with me. Don’t make me drag you, is what I’m saying. You won’t like it, I won’t like it, it won’t be good for nobody. But you’ll be glad of it, in the long run.”
“I won’t,” Anya said stubbornly, the first small rebellion she’d permitted herself since waking bound to the bed. She fixed her eyes on the floor and refused to look up.
Frustration laced Roger’s voice. “Fine. Then stay here. Let those grayrobes finish with you when they get back. But best be certain you don’t speak a word out of turn—they got ways of making people pay for wrongdoing, and I don’t think you being high and holy will keep you safe if you get their tempers up.”
“They can’t possibly do anything worse than what’s already been done,” Anya muttered, though the words rang false even as she spoke them.
“Hey,” Roger snapped. “Look at me.”
With reluctance, Anya dragged her gaze up to meet his. She and Ilva had gotten muddled together in her head—hadn’t it always been Ilva who behaved so stubbornly when taken to task for wrongdoing? Anya was the soft and gentle one, quick to apologize, quick to own her sins. It was her sister who met chastisement with a spark.
Anya’s eyes fixed on Roger’s, and it felt as if he were rummaging about in her soul.
“You think you been treated poorly,” he said. “And maybe you have, a bit. But it can always get worse.”
He spoke with such a weight of conviction that Anya’s heart sank. Nodding, she stepped out from behind the bed.
“All right,” she said humbly, pushing Ilva’s borrowed intransigence aside. “I’m sorry. Tell me what I need to do.”
Relief wrote itself across Roger’s weathered face, softening his sharp hazel eyes. Something twisted in Anya at that—a half-formed suspicion, an unfounded thought that all was not right. But nothing was right in this place, or at least not right as Anya understood the word. So she let herself be led out of the bedchamber and into the bewildering web of white corridors.
Roger kept silent as they hurried through the endless hallways. Once, he unceremoniously pushed her into a recessed doorway and stepped before her, shielding her from view. Anya frowned as she glimpsed a mixed group of liveried guards and gray-robed Elect passing them by, in the throes of a heated argument. One of the guards peered narrowly at Roger, who shifted in place and ducked his head. A minute later, as they carried on past a dozen tightly shut doors, Anya began to speak, only to have Roger round on her with a furious gesture for quiet. She resigned herself, finally, to this fraught wandering—it was certainly better than lying facedown, fighting back revulsion as the god’s prayers were inked into her skin.
At last, they tumbled down a narrow back stairway and emerged in an empty storage room, the walls stacked high with crates and the air smelling faintly of turnips. Anya’s pack sat in one corner, and Midge bounded joyously up from where she’d lain on top of it. With a muffled sob, Anya knelt and wrapped her arms around the dog.
“Well, wherever did you come from?” Anya asked as Midge squirmed about and attempted to lick her face.
“Get your things on,” Roger ordered, pointing to a wrinkled ball of damp clothes lying next to the pack and then turning his back to Anya. “They were drying when I found them, but I wasn’t about to wait till they’d finished. Don’t worry, I won’t steal a look. Hurry it up, though, they’re bound to come after us before long.”
“Who’s going to come after us?” Anya said, voice catching as she pulled her own familiar shirt over her head and wool cloth hit the place where looping, unreadable script had been etched into her skin. “Your people or the guard? I’m not sure who you’re trying to get me away from.”
“Took you long enough to puzzle that out,” Roger grumbled. “Ready yet?”
“Ready.” Anya tugged on her sturdy boots and scrambled to her feet. “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere but here,” Roger answered. Raised voices echoed from behind the door at the head of the stairs and he glanced anxiously over one shoulder. There was something strange and indistinct about his face in profile—a vision-blurring aftereffect of whatever she’d been sedated with, Anya thought. She followed close behind him as he swung open an exterior door leading to an abandoned alleyway, and Midge sprang joyously out before them.
But just as Anya was about to step over the threshold and into freedom, she risked a look back, too. And at the head of the storeroom stairs, peering down into the dim by the light of a lantern, was Roger the selectman, whom she’d spent an afternoon with on the road. He wore his Elect-granted confidence like a second skin, a haughtiness in his bearing that whomever Anya was about to follow—whoever had donned his image so perfectly—had never possessed.
Even now, as Anya’s eyes widened and she glanced back and forth from one Roger to the other, she could see a feral sort of wariness in every line of the figure who waited for her. He could not be a selectman, then. No selectman ever stood so, as if the whole world had set itself against him.
“Who on the god’s mountain are you?” Anya hissed, suspicion sparking fear, which sparked fury in turn.
The false Roger seized her by the hand and pulled her out into the alley, even as the selectman at the head of the stairs caught sight of the door shutting behind her.
“Come on,” whoever had hold of Anya’s hand growled. “Just trying to do you a good turn, aren’t I? Well, I won’t make that mistake again.”
As he pulled her down the alley and out onto a nighttime street, Anya could see his face changing. Flashing disorientingly from shape to shape.
The thief.
Tieran of Stull.
Well, that was all right. She took hold of his hand properly and picked up the pace, and then they were pelting down the dark streets, taking a dozen unexpected turns until Anya could not have found her way back to the way station if she’d tried. Still, it felt like too little distance—as if she could never run far enough to shake the lingering smell of beeswax and spirits and the sting of her back as sweat rose on her broken skin. But the thief let out a stifled groan and stumbled down a narrow, unlit side street, sliding to the ground in the deep shadows beside an enormous straw-stuffed crate.
“What is it?” Anya panted as the thief pulled his knees to his chest and buried his face in his arms, just as he’d done in the village where she’d found him. His hands trembled, shifting from shape to shape with breathtaking speed, but he said nothing—only stayed as he was, folded in on himself. And a new scent rose up to replace the remnants of Anya’s betrayal by the Elect—something dark and fierce, a breath of ashes and incense and sparks.
Tieran the thief’s gray hood had fallen back, showing a tangle of recognizable brown hair, and his hands had slowed a little in their frantic changing. But footsteps were ringing out along the cobblestones on the busier road only steps away, and fear bit at Anya.
“That could be them,” she whispered. “Hurry up, hurry up.”
“Trying to, aren’t I?” Tieran’s voice was barely audible. “Just need another moment.”
The footsteps fell silent just shy of the side street, and Anya’s stomach turned over.
“You haven’t got a moment,” she pressed, her skin beginning to crawl and prick with the remembered touch of the needle. “Change yourself while we go—I don’t care if it looks strange. It was a shock at first, but you don’t need to hide from me.”
“Not hiding from you. Hiding from myself, mostly. I just need—no, there. There it is.”
When he raised his head, Tieran was himself again—the boy she’d seen struggling like a demon at his trial for theft. The same bleary, pained look he’d worn after the thieves’ block had etched itself across his now-familiar face.
Tieran got to his feet unsteadily, but without a sound. He held a hand out to Anya and she took it unhesitatingly. Together, they slipped away into the dark, just as a pair of gray-robed figures bearing lanterns rounded the corner from the main road.