As I watched the fire dancers crumble one after another I was reminded of the time Fellen and I saw shamble men create a translucent dome to protect the Statue Garden from the goddess’s storm. They hadn’t danced, but they had made awful keening sounds, almost like they were trying to sing and were even more awful at it than the most dry throated elder after a year without practice. Then every single shamble man had crumbled, all at once.
This had more similarities than I’d like to admit, but there was one key difference. Ressia, the black handed healer, had said that the shamble men had acted on the goddess’s orders while this group had no such thing. If anything they were acting under the influence of a beast and a spirit that had no love lost for our goddess. If the Dawn Crawler hadn’t just gotten it into its head to jump start a ritual that had been building in increments over the years with every new group of fire dancers that joined the old in the audience chamber.
Why now?
Was it really the stone I had given to the entity? Or the fact that we had discovered the throne? Or simply that there were two more whisper women in the Dawn Crawler’s territory than it wanted?
I didn’t have any answers and I didn’t like it.
Another fire dancer crumbled to dust.
Mishtaw gripped my shoulder and forced me to turn and face her, breaking my trance. “Find the boys. Make sure they’re safe so we have one less thing to worry about.”
I gestured to the dancers. “But—”
“Wishing ceremonies cannot be stopped. Not by us. If you’re willing to pay the price then the wish is granted—and if those things are anything like shamblers then they are always willing to pay the price.” Mishtaw repeated her order, “Find the boys. Be safe. We’ll deal with the throne.”
I didn’t ask if that fighting or negotiating with the lizard that was currently curled up around it. Prevna took my hand in hers while Mishtaw and Creed, Nine Claws and Malady strode around the edge of the audience chamber as if something possibly disastrous wasn’t happening mere feet away.
“Where do you think they would go?” I asked Prevna.
She would have paid better attention to the others than I had. There had been too many things on my mind to observe out of boredom, but Prevna always seemed to have tidbit of knowledge about the people around us that I missed.
This time, though, she didn’t much more insight than I did. “If they’re in the audience chamber then they’re on the other side of the dancers, near the throne, where we can’t see them. Or they fled, but we didn’t explore this part of the valley so I don’t know where they’d go other than the path we took up here.”
We both turned to look at Logar. He had always been the more levelheaded of the village’s leaders even if he hadn’t liked our last exploration of the Night Cave. Out of the three of us he had the best knowledge of the valley as well as Deamar and Tike.
Prevna stepped closer to him. “Where would they go?”
He swallowed, unable to tear his gaze away from the dancers. “I…they knew to get somewhere safe.”
My ears pricked at his choice of words. Of course, when faced with a beast breathing lava everywhere and dancers that were known for burning down everything around them were moving every which way it made sense to get to safety. But Logar’s choice of words implied that the boys would have known to escape before those antics even started happening. And how could they have known that if it was due to the stone I had given the spirit, when even I didn’t know what the stone meant?
He wouldn’t answer if he didn’t feel vulnerable. He’d pretend like he didn’t have any idea what was going on like he had when we were on the lake.
So I elbowed him in the gut, hooked my foot around his ankle, and hauled him to the ground. Leverage and shocked surprise more than anything was what actually landed the large man on his butt, but I’d use what I could get even if it meant I wouldn’t be able to keep him there.
“What did you do?” I accused.
He stared up at me blankly for a moment before anger began to set in. “What are—”
“Prevna, Black Root.”
To her credit, she didn’t question me in that moment despite admonishing me for being difficult with Logar the day before. She knew I had noticed something, if she hadn’t caught the slip herself. Instead, Prevna pressed one of her fingers, full of Black Root poison, to his exposed skin on his neck. I noticed the near immediate change in his demeanor as his eyes lost their focus and he flinched away from the sudden stabbing headache throbbing through his skull.
I was glad for it. He could reap some of the consequences that came with crossing with whisper women, even seedlings like us. I was tired of people pretending to be one thing when they were something else entirely and then having to pay of their deception myself. Like with the healer and her supposed helpers.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He tried to punch me, but even without poison coursing through his veins I doubted he had trained in combat like we had. I slipped easily past his fist. Then I elbowed him in the side again, right where I had before, to show him how it was done. Logar immediately switched to trying to protect his side from another blow which left him open to Prevna. Hunched over like he was, he was at the perfect height for her to cup her hands and slap them over both his ears at the same time which certainly didn’t help his headache any. Then she kneed him in the back and used the momentum to shove him back onto the ground.
We pinned him there. If he hadn’t been reeling in pain and able to think clearly, he could have put up more of a fight and work his way out from under us. As it was though, all he had was size and weight on his side that he didn’t know how to use, while we had experience, numbers, and the ability to debilitate him further if we needed to. Prevna had gotten better at portion control for her poisons over the years.
I hissed in Logar’s ear, “Tell us what you did or I swear to the goddess Herself that I will hunt down your son and make him wander the shadow paths as a ghost for the rest of eternity.”
I had no desire for another possible ghost ruining my ability to use the shadow paths, but Logar didn’t need to know that. Just like he didn’t need to know that if Mishtaw or Nine Claws noticed what we were doing in the chaos we would have been the ones in trouble for immediately doing something stupid. Not that the whisper women wouldn’t drag the truth out of him immediately after that.
He gasped out an answer and I could tell he was having trouble speaking around his swollen tongue. “Three days, three offerings, three people. Once Master heard the village’s collective wish, he answered.”
“What offerings? What does the dance do?”
He glared up at me through squinted eyes. “Morn gave the first. Here.”
I had to restrain the urge to punch the village leader. Morn had offered something here at the audience chamber but the only time he had been here recently was when they had first showed us the audience chamber. We would have noticed him if he had come again during our watches, but he hadn’t done anything notable…the creature.
The burned one he had carried all the way up from the village, only to dump it into one of the lines of lava crossing the audience chamber. At the time I had thought nothing of it. Assuming that it was something they always did to show their respect for this place they considered sacred or as a way to appease or show their appreciation for the fire dancers and the fertile ash they made. But if it wasn’t something they did every time, if it was the start of ritual…then Deamar and Tike would have had plenty of opportunity to offer up their own animals while they here on watch with us.
We hadn’t known to look for it. To be wary of it.
Prevna pressed Logar, “Why? What does it do?”
He groaned in pain and closed his eyes, but Prevna didn’t take the bait. She didn’t remove the poison and we didn’t relax our stances. He tried to shove up from underneath us, but I clipped him in the temple and kept my weight on his dominant arm while Prevna made sure he didn’t gain any ground with his feet. He flopped back onto his belly after a handful of moments struggling.
He coughed and then spat out, “We don’t know. But the Master always left us with an impression of fire.”
Such a surprise.
“You always pushed for tolerance. Why change your mind now?”
“Before you learned about the throne. We would never be left in peace now.” His face was utterly resolute as he forced out his next words as clearly as he could past his thick tongue. “We will have a future.”
Such stupidity.
If they had let us examine the throne further then likely all they would have been subjected to was a visit from Mishtaw every few months to a year or so based on how she handled the other relics. Now? With the wishing ceremony and admitted guilt for defying whisper women?
Now they’d be lucky to keep their village.
This might be a vestige of Her sister’s territory but surely the goddess couldn’t tolerate this. Not if what the spirit had said about wishes was true. Not if what was playing out right outside these valleys with the death bringers and Peacekeepers was as much a lesson about defiance as it was about keeping to the goddess’s tenets.
More dancers turned to dust in the audience chamber and I could tell there was more activity near the throne than before out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t risk the distraction to look.
We still had a job to do, though I doubted it had the same significance it had before we learned what the villagers had done. “Where are Tike and Deamar?”
If nothing else they could be leverage to bring the village to heel. Better that than the village razed, perhaps even their Master dead. That might have been feat impossible for regular tribesfolk in the past, but I wouldn’t put it past whisper women and our blessings.
“Safe.”
Logar refused to say anything else but I immediately knew he was wrong. In that moment I felt something uncannily familiar and wholly different from anything I had experienced before. When I was near death it was like I was constantly on the edge of drowning under it, even if it wasn’t a true facet of Her attention. Now I knew how much a facsimile that experience really was for the true thing.
The goddess’s gaze.
When I had stood along the Calling Road She hadn’t looked at us, not truly. Perhaps we might as well have been statues lining Her path. But now, even though I couldn’t see Her, it was undeniable that She could see us. From the way Prevna and Logar stiffened I knew they felt it too.
I wanted to curl into a ball, to run away, to do anything but focus that attention on me. Nothing good could come of it.
She walked out of the fog like it was nothing more than normal air. Hair like a sky full of stars at midnight, deep blue skin, dress woven of silver and ash colored pine needles. In this heat filled place, her steps left behind footprints of frozen ground.
I wanted to pull my prayer needle free and prick my mark as I had been taught to do, but terror at the thought of any movement drawing Her attention kept me frozen. Other than the Calling Road, you were never supposed to lay eyes on the goddess in person. Her presence was supposed to be filtered through the Beloved, the Chosen, the whisper women. If She arrived somewhere in person, something had gone very, very wrong.
And yet now the goddess walked among us while only the fire dancers continued their insane dance and turned to dust. One by one.