The way he said it made Seraphina suspect that he, in fact, had not heard about it.
“I’ll start from the beginning, then. Have you heard of Saint Sarum?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I’ll tell you the legend like my Nanny Margaret used to tell it.”
“Are you telling the Passion of Sarum, miss?” the old man from before asked.
Seraphina focused on where his voice was coming from, and it seemed like the man was in the cell next to Rune’s.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do speak louder. I haven’t heard it since I was a boy.”
She smiled because she, too, hadn’t heard it since she was a little girl refusing to go to bed when all the adults were allowed to stay up late, and Nanny Margaret had to persuade her with a story. It was always a saint’s story because those were the best ones, and normal people never did anything worthy of tales, not even kings and queens. She’d studied the Passion of Sarum later, at the academy, but that was a dry, hermeneutical endeavor that had stripped the legend of its wonder.
“In a time before cities had walls, when humanity lived in small villages by the great rivers, a wasting sickness fell upon the people of Kish. The reeds by the river grew black, the water tasted of salt, and the children began to fade, their life-breath growing shallow. The priests declared it a curse from the river god as punishment for taking too many fish. The god demanded the purest among them to be given to the restless waves.
The elders, weeping, chose a young child, known for her cheerful laughter. But as they led the child to the riverbank, ayoung man named Sarum stepped forward. He was a gardener who usually kept to himself because he was a malformed thing, thin as a twig with a hunch upon his back that made one arm seem longer than the other. The villagers regarded him with a mix of pity and compassion but thought him dim and mostly kept their distance. Sarum was untouched, having given his heart only to his work.
He offered himself in the child’s place. Before the entire village, Sarum walked into the river until the dark water took him, the fast current dragging him under and crushing him against sharp rocks, until the water turned red with his blood. Sarum didn’t make a sound, didn’t scream, nor did he beg for mercy.
In the morning, the sickness had lifted. The air was clean, and the children’s breath was restored. Months passed. One day, the same child Sarum had saved was playing by the riverbank and found a cluster of bones washed ashore, covered in a strange, softly glowing moss. The child’s grandfather, an old man with white hair and one foot in the grave, came to collect the bones. As he picked up a rib bone, he became young again. His bent back straightened, his wrinkles vanished, and his white hair turned black.
The villagers had discovered the first relics.”
Seraphina made a pause for effect. The story of misshapen, gullible Sarum, with one arm longer than the other, and his weak mind barely understanding the world around him, stepping up to save another soul just as innocent as his, always got to her. Goosebumps prickled her skin, and she wrapped herself tighter in the blanket. There was a knot in her throat that she had to swallow around.
“The story of Sarum’s sacrifice and the power of his remains spread from village to village,” she continued. “While many showed fear, the wise saw a great mystery. Scholarsand philosophers from across the land came together, not to worship, but to study. They dedicated themselves to understanding the great gift Sarum had given to the world, and called themselves The Sarumite Order.”
“Beautiful, miss. Thank you,” the old man said, then fell silent.
Seraphina let out a harsh sigh, which helped clear her head.
“Anyway, the Sarumite Order has been around for millennia, and as the theologians, philosophers, astronomers, and alchemists studied the relics that turned up across the known world, four currents eventually emerged. So many members, men and women from different cultures... Of course they didn’t agree on a lot of things. Most of all, they didn’t agree on one of the three conditions that preceded the creation of a relic.”
She paused again, listening for Rune’s reaction. So far, he’d been silent as a crypt. She could hear him breathing behind the wall, but not in the soft, regular fashion she was used to. His breaths came in short bursts, as if he held them in as she spoke, and released the air at the last moment, before his lungs burned.
“Are you still with me, Rune?”
“Yes, yes. It’s fascinating. You’re a good storyteller. What are the three conditions?”
“Well, the creation of a relic is a process that remains largely a mystery to this day. But there are three conditions the Sarumites have pinned down.” In the growing darkness, she counted on her fingers. “The first one is the willing sacrifice. A person must voluntarily choose to die to save the life of another. The second one is the public act. The sacrifice must be a public event, witnessed by others, and it must be a violent death. A private or quiet death will not work. And the third condition is the state of innocence. The person must be untouched, or in other words, a virgin at the time of the sacrifice.”
A sharp intake of breath from Rune. Seraphina smiled. Was that how her Nanny had felt when she told these stories over andover to a small, wide-eyed Seraphina who was just discovering the world and loving every minute of it? Indeed, explaining these things to the man behind the wall felt like peeling off the layers of the universe for a child to marvel at.
“Can you guess which of these three conditions caused heated debates among the members of the order?”
“I don’t know,” Rune said.
“The third one, of course. Men and women alike love a good wrangle over all matters of innocence and virginity. The purists, especially, insisted – and still do – that the person must be a virgin before they volunteer for a violent, public death to save another. They call the sacrificed consecrated, while the doctrinists, a later current, call them saints, and sustain that it’s not about the purity of body, but the purity of soul. A sinner could defy every moral under the sun, but if in the moment of the selfless act they accept God into their soul, their bones would be made relics. The other two currents came even later, as the world turned to science and reason. The naturalists believe the process has nothing to do with purity or faith. They trust there’s something in the person’s bones, a sort of inherited trait, which combined with a chemical released by the body under the stress of imminent death, results in a few of their bones becoming infused with properties as random as they are magical. The naturalists call the sacrificed catalysts. And the fourth current doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how relics come to be.”
Seraphina laughed, but it was bitter. As much as she still believed in the current she’d adopted herself, after three years of war, she could see its downsides.
“The pragmatists. Secular, amoral, results-based. We don’t care about how the magic bones are made, we only care about what they can do. We call the sacrifices yields. Because once the person dies, they are put in the ground, and their flesh and bones seep into the earth, and sometimes, a few bones, maybethree or four, rarely five, grow this soft, glowing moss, and when you remove it and pick up the bone, you discover it does something. So, you say, ‘The yield was good’. But... no, I don’t call them yields anymore. I call them consecrated, because it makes sense, doesn’t it? These were once common people, like you and me, and by a process that no one truly understands, they were made sacred. And now we wear their bones and weave them into lattices that heal us, protect us, make us stronger.”
“Lattices,” Rune said.
“Yes. Bone shards woven into geometrical patterns.”
“I know what a lattice is.”
