46

After stitching and bandaging the wound on her forehead, Kel got a small fire started. Lyra knew the flames would be hidden by the valley, but she was worried the scent of smoke might draw the others to them. Erik had lost a hand; there was no way he could be out searching for them, right? But Milo could be. At least there were three of them against him. One versus three was decent odds, right?

She glanced at Luke, who was still seated silently with his hands bound in front of him. What were they going to do with him? He had saved her life, and she was sure the other two wouldn’t be happy with him after he helped her, but she wasn't feeling particularly generous with her trust right now.

"Are you hungry?" Kel asked her. He had filled a travel pot with water from the creek and put it over the fire to boil.

"What? No." Eating was the last thing on her mind, although logically she knew she should be hungry since she hadn't eaten for hours. "What are we going to do now? Are we going to talk about what happened?"

He sat back down on a nearby rock and sighed. "You're injured. We have a captive." His eyes lingered on Luke, dislike clear in his expression. "They won’t find us tonight unless they have god-given abilities we don’t know about. You should rest on think on what you wish to do next."

"I don't think I should be making the decisions," she muttered. "I don't exactly have a great track record of it." She frowned. "Hold on, they had a dog. I saw it when we passed them on the road and at the Northern Path. It wasn't there tonight, but maybe they left it at the inn or something. They could use that to track us, couldn’t they?"

His brows drew together, the lines deepening on his sun-weathered face. "A dog? I do not remember seeing one."

"A big black one, kind of shaggy. I have no idea what breed it was, but you probably have different breeds here than we do at home anyway. You really didn't see it?"

"No. You're certain it was at the Northern Path this morning?"

She nodded. "It was sitting at the table, just sort of watching us. I thought it might be a trained attack dog, considering how big it was and the fact that you said their horses were war horses."

He glanced at the stolen horse. After stitching her up, he had removed its tack too and had hobbled both horses with spare lengths of rope so they could graze on the dry grass and drink from the creek.

"There were no dogs in the inn."

"So... was it a god I saw?"

"It must be."

"That doesn't make any sense though," she said. "They don't like the gods. Why would they travel with one? Can gods even travel? The ones I've met so far seem to stick close to their temples."

"Sometimes they can, or at least, sometimes some of them can. I have not concerned myself with the details, but perhaps when we reach the city we can learn more. In the meantime, we do have a way to get answers." He nodded at Luke, who was watching them talk warily.

"Right." She licked her dry lips, not sure what to say to the boy. Young man? If he had graduated from high school just before he was brought here, then that meant he must be eighteen by now, right? He had been here for eight months, so unless he skipped ahead a grade, he was legally an adult, and there was no reason to act as if he wasn't responsible for his actions. But she remembered those leather cuffs on his wrists and the heavy metal rings on them. They looked a lot like shackles.

"Bring him closer to us," she told Kel.

She felt bad about ordering him around, but her head was still throbbing. The numbing salve took away the surface stinging of her wound, but not the deeper headache, and she wasn't even sure she could stand without getting dizzy. As usual, Kel didn't complain; he simply got up, strode over to Luke, hauled him up by the shoulder, and pushed him closer to the fire before pointing at a clear spot on the ground and commanding him to sit.

Luke obeyed without objection. Kel returned to his seat on the rock to her left, and they both stared at the younger man. He shifted, beginning to look more nervous.

"What?" he said. "If you want to know something, just ask and I’ll tell you."

"Tell me about that dog that was traveling with you three," Lyra said. "I know I wasn't imagining it. Is it a god?"

He nodded, the motion sharp and anxious. "Yeah. They didn't bring it tonight, though."

"Is it able to track us?" Kel asked.

"I don't know," he looked uncomfortable. "Maybe? I wasn't allowed to talk to it. I don't know what it can do. What it's… lιən is. It's supposed to protect them, but I don't know much more than that. They left it at the inn, though, and it will take them a while to get back there, especially with Erik hurt."

"Would Milo have stayed to help him, or would he have cared more about following us?" Lyra asked.

"He and Erik are best friends. He would have helped him if he could." He hesitated, glancing at Kel. "I can't believe you really cut his hand off. Is he going to die? I mean, he's not a good guy, but that's brutal."

"If his friend helped him and they stopped the bleeding, he is likely to survive," Kel said. "It will delay their pursuit of us, at the very least."

"What's going to happen to me?" Luke asked, spitting the words out all at once as if he couldn’t bear not knowing anymore.

Kel frowned and looked at Lyra, as if waiting for her to decide. She shifted, uncomfortable with the weight of the decision, and immediately regretted it when her head throbbed. She was a glad none of them had a mirror; she didn’t think she was a particularly vain person, but she hated knowing she was going to have a scar right across her forehead.

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"You really think they would kill you if they found you?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Erik gets… angry, and you heard them threaten to cut off my legs."

"No, I didn't," she said. "When did that happen? If they said it in German, I was just a little too freaked out to try to translate."

"Right, sorry," he muttered. "Sometimes I forget people are speaking different languages. It all sounds like English to me. He said, and I quote, 'You don't need both legs to be useful.' They need me to translate for them, since they only know a handful of Moldaran phrases. Beyond keeping me healthy enough to talk, they can do anything they want to make my life a living hell. They already don't like me, and after what I did to Milo, there’s no way they’re going to go back to treating me halfway decently."

"You're a priest, correct?" Kel asked, eyeing him. "It's not just those other two?"

"Yeah. We all are. They wouldn't like me telling you this, but there's no way I'm going back to them, so who cares what they think, right?" He laughed nervously. "I'm sure Lyra will tell you anyway. Everyone who was taken from Earth is a priest or a priestess." He frowned. "I guess it's possible some of them might be non-binary, but you get what I mean. They all have holy blood."

"How many of you are there?" he asked.

"Hundreds," Lyra chimed in. "Unless they were lying. I suppose I don't know if they were telling the truth about anything."

"They were being honest," Luke said. "Some of the more powerful gods can sort of get a feeling for how many clergy are around, and one of the first things King Nicholas did when he got here was send out his followers to gather information about the world at large. The Northern Kingdom used to be pretty isolated, from what I heard, but he changed that."

"The Northern King, he’s one of you?" Kel asked, his brows creasing.

"Yeah," Luke said. "King Nicholas... well, he’s very charismatic. I know how crazy it sounds, that he took over a whole country in twenty years, but if you met him, you'd understand. People just want to follow him."

It took Kel a long moment to process this. Lyra couldn't blame him; she couldn't imagine how shaken she would be to learn that a leader of a major country from Earth was from a different world. After a few seconds, he shook his head. "That is a subject I can dwell on later. There are hundreds of you, all bearers of the holy blood?"

"Yep. With more coming pretty often."

"Does that mean something to you?" Lyra asked Kel. "Do you have any idea why someone’s bringing us here?"

He frowned. "Fewer and fewer people are being born with holy blood every year. The numbers have been declining for a long time, though it seems as if something has changed this past decade. The decline of holy blood is steeper than it ever has been. Some people believe it's a sign the world is coming to an end. I don't believe that, but everyone is struggling with fewer clergy to speak to the gods on their behalf.”

“Couldn’t people do arranged marriages or something, to make sure more kids with holy blood are born?” Lyra asked.

He shook his head. “There's no way to ensure someone is born with holy blood. It does not breed true – even if a priest and priestess have a child together, their child is no more likely than any other to be born with the holy blood. The gods cannot bless a woman's womb so she gives birth to children with holy blood, and they cannot grant it to anyone as a blessing or a boon. If someone has discovered a way to bring more priests and priestesses to this world, it would change everything.”

"Wait, so it's not hereditary?" Lyra asked.

“It’s not,” Luke confirmed. “There’s this whole sort of onboarding thing they do in the Northern Kingdom when they get someone new from Earth, where they share everything they’ve learned since King Nicholas arrived twenty years ago. It’s not genetic. We aren’t sure what it is, exactly, but our bodies and blood and even our souls are different from everyone else’s. We literally have holy blood, it’s not a euphemism. To the gods, even a single drop of our blood glows like sunlight. I’ve seen it myself. We’re like shining beacons of light to them.”

She glanced at Kel. "But your sister, Lora, had it, and your niece does too."

"Nira simply wishes to emulate her aunt," Kil muttered. "She doesn't have holy blood."

"I saw her talking to Towr," Lyra said. "She does have it."

He crossed his arms and muttered something under his breath but said, "If she is telling the truth about it, then having two people with holy blood in one family, so close together in generation, is rare, but not unheard of. There is no pattern to who is born with it, and she was no more or less likely to have holy blood because Lora had it."

"Yeah, it's kind of like how when you flip a coin, you're not any more likely to land on tails just because the last three flips have been heads," Luke chimed in.

"This is getting too mathy for me," she said, pressing a hand to her temple. “Can we talk about statistics later, when my head doesn’t feel like a giant bruise?”

"Right, we got off topic," Luke said. "You were talking about what you’re going to do with me.” He turned to Kel. “Look, I'd be happy to travel with you. You two seem like decent people, and I can translate for you or just help with chores and taking care of the horses or whatever you need. I didn't like traveling with Erik and Milo, but I didn't exactly have a choice. You two seem way nicer than them."

"I won't kill you unless you present an immediate threat to the priestess," Kel said. "Beyond that, it's up to her what happens."

Lyra grimaced. It was too much pressure, though at least it made more sense why he kept deferring to her. He had been raised in a culture where people like her had near absolute power.

"I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe you could head back to Ersgath in the morning and find somewhere else to go from there?"

Luke winced. "I get that you probably don't trust me very much, but please, give me a chance. I don't even know where I'd go by myself. And aren't you lonely? Wouldn't it be nice to have someone else from Earth around? Look, you forgot English, right? I could teach it to you. My translation abilities only work for speech. so I can write English words and you can learn them like that. You're from America too, so we could talk about home, and brainstorm more about why we're here and how to get back.” He paused. “Erik and Milo didn’t care about getting home, so they never put any effort into figuring out a way back. Maybe we can come up with something they didn’t think of.”

"I don't know," she groaned, running a hand through her hair. There was still blood matted in it. She felt a sudden urge to cry, though it left again as quickly as it had come. She was too exhausted for tears. "I just... I don't know what to do."

"You can tie me up at night," he said, desperation creeping into his voice. "I don't mind. I won't carry any weapons. I'll do anything you want. I just don't want to be alone." His voice broke on the last word. "I was only seventeen when I was brought here. I'm just trying to stay alive, you know? I'm not a bad guy."

"You can stay with us until we get to the next," she decided. "We can figure out what happens after that later. I'm not going to decide anything else tonight. Please, I'm tired and everything hurts and I just want this day to be done."

"You won't regret it," he said as Kel got up and began unpacking their hammocks. "I'm really good at being a prisoner. You'll see. I won't complain at all."

As little as she trusted Luke, she wasn't a monster, so she made Kel spread their saddle pads out for him to sleep on and give him some clean water and some of their traveling rations. His bed might smell like horses but at least it would be softer than sleeping on the rocks with no padding, though she didn't know how comfortable he could possibly be with his wrists still bound and another rope tying him to a tree.

True to his word, he didn't complain. And Kel, though he clearly didn't trust Luke, didn't say anything about Lyra's choice either. She was too tired to dwell on how weird it was that people just listened to her, but despite all the unfairness of this world, as she snuggled into her hammock and closed her eyes, she couldn't help but be at least a little glad that she was a priestess. Would Kel even have helped her if she was just a normal person? Maybe, but would he have protected her from Erik and Milo, who he knew were priests?

Her eyes snapped wide open in the darkness. Erik was a priest, and it was a sin to hurt a priest, wasn't it? But Kel had cut off his hand.

Did that mean Kel had committed a sin? Was he going to suffer some sort of horrible divine retribution, all because of her?