Chapter Text
"Priestess, I beg to know what I should do with her?"
In a room above a barn in the Midlands, a bead of myrrh dripped from Haradel Heia's bowed head onto the paper floor of this Ilykari Temple. It reeked of linseed oil and sacred resins, and she worried that her hair might retain the smell of her anointing for weeks. Would her handmaiden know where the soon-Duchess had been, begging for illicit and ritual guidance? Would she be reported for the savagery of religion? No, if she hadn't been punished by the Falcresti yet, then all her misdeeds were being saved for leverage.
"Why come to me, sweet child, and not a Priestess of Wydd?"
"I have seen a vision of Himu, borne witness to her stag" the Old Iolynic felt like beef-fat on her tongue and Heia hated to be in a position of supplication, bent down like a cow on her hands and knees, but for a High Priestess of the Ilykari, she submitted. Heia dared not look upon her without permission, "I must know what it means. I need guidance and assurance of my future."
"You seek clarity, but Wydd has already found you, Ri daughter," the voice came from the left. Then the right, "so you wish for the conviction to act?"
"I must know what will come if I doom my father, my uncles, the rebel Dukes of Aurdwynn. If such is the way, I beg Himu for the power to do what is necessary." Heia could feel eyes on her from all around, hear the crunching of footsteps on temple floors circling her like catamounts, "I will do it all for Aurdwynn, for her future."
"Ah, well," the Priestess knelt before her. Burning fingers touched Heia's cheek, turning her head to the altar of carved totems and animal parts to her left, "Divination requires sacrifice. What do you offer?"
She could feel the heat all around her, from the Priestess's lingering touch, from the carefully tended lanterns, from the altar which radiated a volatile power.
Can you feel it, A voice like a memory grated her mind, which God?
Heia felt the cumulation of her anointing run down the side of her neck. It raised her hackles, but she resisted rubbing it away, it was disrespectful to disrupt the path of myrrh. Her own memory echoed, Himu?
The irritation made her aware of her entire body. She removed a ring from her left hand, fine silver and topaz.
Which face, the two-mouthed specter asked, Love or Wrath?
Heia leaned back on her heels, holding her offering to Priestess in both hands. It was one of the rings she had won from Bel over a year ago and the only one small enough to fit her. He'd worn it on his pinky finger. He was her's now, quietly betrothed. Her eyes, still turned downward, she whispered, Both are the same.
"Give something that matters, Ri daughter," the hot breath of the High Priestess said against Heia's ear. The lamps cast dozens of shadows across the floor that crawled around her in synchrony, "it must hurt to be Sacrifice."
Seekers of divination and spells often gave away their anonymity in the form of scarification, their strength in the form of a finger, their beauty in a variety of ways that were specific to their vanity. They might bring food, if the spell was minor or if hunger truly was their only form of surrender. Secrets were especially tasteful, but Heia knew that was a ruse for the spymaster twins. Himu had no taste for secrets.
Yet, a guilt crept up Heia's throat as she tried to imagine adequate sacrifice. She had not been to an Ilykari temple since she was a grieving child, not for lack of faith or ability to find their transient temples, but out of an unspecified fear. Perhaps she'd felt unworthy, being an agent in their oppression, that she no longer had anything of substance to surrender for the Priestess. She was Belthic, and so perhaps she feared the Ilykari's grasp on her, as if the Ykari might call to a truer and deeper version of herself buried in her Heredity, that she secretly wanted to be drawn in by the Old Ways. She feared perhaps most of all that the price would be too high and the reward too low. After all, hadn't the Ilykari been subjugated over and over? What have all their Virtues and sacrifice done for them?
Heia set the ring down and held out her empty hands. She thought of what she wished they could take away, what virtuous and good thing held her back from her desires, and what would hurt to lose. If this were an accountant's story, she might think 'this is how economics works: everyone gets what they want at a price deemed fair— I sell them the barrier to her desires, they sell me a map, so each party feels they have come away in profit.' But of course, this is a politician's story, so Heia is measuring the way an exchange may be used against her future, and she thinks she is coming away the winner of this trade. She gives away something that cannot be used for evil— a fool's thought.
"Will you accept my love as token, High Priestess?" The Old Iolynic word she used for her love was not a feeling, but a physical thing. There were no words for non-physical things.
"All of it?" If the Priestess were surprised, it did not show in her voice.
"All that I have." That would be enough to do the dirty work of divination, wouldn't it? What harm could a god do with her love? Another fool's thought.
What happened next is veiled like the birth of a two-headed child during an eclipse. It is a split. It is happening, and you are able to witness either phenomena, but you may only lay eyes on one. All the while you know something else monumental and vital is occurring just outside of the peripheral of your awareness, but you do not look away lest you miss the moment of awe. Her head still bowed, Heia heard the grumbling clucking of a hen behind her and the sound of wings rustling.
The Priestess grasped her left hand. It burned.
Look at me.
Heia lifted her deference slowly along the length of her arm to the plump dark fingers and white cotton-concealed body of the Priestess. How could she wear that in this heat?
The anointing oils dripped down her neck and spine as she raised her head to regard the masked face of her Priestess— not masked anonymously like the Empire, but in an intricate birch mask that curved around her head like a crown with two real faces carved diametrically opposite of one another. Though they were distinctly feminine, they looked animal in their fury and fervor. Deep within the mask, emerging from the adjacent eyelets of each opposing face, a pair of bright and ruddy eyes like that of a horse bore into her: knowing, whiteless, inhuman.
Himu.
The High Priestess turned Heia's hand over, and with one carved birch face, looked at the bare curve of her palm. The other face— that face of fervor— held her captive with its slatted eyes. She drew a small knife like a talon from the folds of her quilted sleeve. Heia did not glance at it, she did not regard its polished edge as it slipped into the division of her middle and ring finger, she did not break away when the screeching caw of a hen called out behind her. She did not falter in doubt.
"I will tell you the future, Ri daughter, child of a Stag Hunter and a Khanan," a brassy voice behind the mask rumbled.
The talon blade pushed into the web of Heia's fingers. The sound of ruffling feathers was cut abruptly and lamplight flickered as a gust of southern wind buffeted the building.
The Ykari's knife slipped into Heia's skin, and a sharp ache tore along her veins all the way to her heart. She craved the wind's reprieve from the stale and feverish humidity of the room. Heia muffled a scream behind her clenched jaw, suppressed the urge to pull back her hand. She held fast the penetrating gaze of her Priestess, the vessel of her patron virtue— if she looked away now, bore witness to the phenomenon of her mutilation before her questions were answered, it might end, Himu might disappear. Blood ran hot out of her wound, sweat ran down her cheeks, tarnishing the plain paper floor with an arrhythmic splatter.
In the space between spilling blood, she hears:
It is not your time to invoke me, for I act elsewhere. She is not ready for you, seneschal. Act now to stop the brush fire, you will burn my world down tenfold in the future.
"I want to do your work," Heia admitted. Was she not worthy? Something wet and bitter dripped down her cheekbones and into her mouth as she asked, quietly confessing, "Am I not meant to embody you? Was I mistaken?"
No, fawn. You will feed the garden of Aurdwynn with your blood, stoke the fire with your breath, watch it consume herds with your hungry eyes. In such you are me. That which overgrows like weed in Aurdwynn must be burned to renew me. Come my Spring, you will step into the fertile ash-soil of my land and tend to it like a garden. Now is kin Divina's time. Like a cleaver, she lay at the throat of soon-slaughtered sheep.
Heia's arm ached. The Priestess pulled something out of her wound, deep from the cavern of her chest. It left her the way water leaves a spring. The umbra shifted, as if the eclipse were coming to an end, and woman's voice echoed like the memory of a memory of a dream beneath the Virtue's.
Say what you wish to say, Heia.
"I am a coward," Heia could hardly breathe as the world to come was drawn from her lungs, "I will let my father die, I will let my cousin die, I will let them burn as I alone hide among Falcresti," there was no word for them in Old Iolynic so it sounded like the sizzling of fat in her confession, "I will falter in my faith because of the hold the handmaiden has over me. I fear that I will only further the Empire's agenda, I fear her power over me, I fear my love for her will misguide me. So take it from me, Himu. I want not Wydd to take me into the earth, nor Divina's deference for sympathy, no. Himu give me strength to see this through— if not for love, then for spite. If it is your will, Audwynn will burn and rise."
A drop of myrrh fell from her chin, another down the channel between her shoulder blades, and it felt as if her whole body were covered in oil, boiling oil that might turn her flesh into a sticky and popping mess. The thickness of the air burned her throat as she tried to sob. Her tears of admission were a relief. When had it all become so insufferable?
I am at your mercy.
And then it was as if the northern winds had all stampeded into the room at once through a single, unshuttered window.
"An acceptable exchange to the Virtues," the High Priestess said with sweet serenity. Heia's torment was so immediately displaced and chased away that she wondered if it had ever been there at all. "We will collect your price when it is your time."
Heia looked through the two-faced mask, seeking the ghost of a Virtue, but only the two very warm and very human eyes of the High Priestess met her own. She returned Heia's ring to her middle finger, which, while covered in blood, was not her own. There was no harm, save for the limp and dripping body of a hen held in an alter child's hands. Yifan would insist on preparing the organs in the tradition of his Great Family and have Heia eat the liver and gizzard as sacrament. So it was merely a trick of perception, the blood letting, her pain. Why, then, did she notice a hole in her heart? Why could she feel that a piece of her had been removed so cleanly that she could trace along her left arm all the way to her heart every part that had been— as best she could describe it— spiritually deveined?
An echo crawled beneath her veins as she washed oil and sweat off herself in a basin at the bottom of the barn. A frail horse watched her. Like the lapping of waves on a horizon, it was not a memory of the past, but a memory of the future through which Himu spoke to her in a golden voice:
Spring will come.
When she looked into the eyes of the horse, of her masked carriage driver, Heia could feel the anticipatory severing of her connection to others, a guillotine over her neck. Between every hoofbeat and heartbeat on the ride home from the little border town in Duchy Nehyauru, she heard the future cull:
Spring will come.
Spring will come.