Nobody challenged my right to walk through the rooms where priests labored for their goddess, silently taking a census of the number of mortals who might be residents in the City. Perhaps a few thousand if the other Stoneborn were supported by as many priests as Genna.
A tiny number, compared to those at risk in the mortal world if Death could force his way through the Gates, but vulnerable sooner.
“Excuse me,” I finally asked an elderly peace-priest with peppercorn hair in one of the kitchens. “Do you know where I might find the high priestess?”
He did not release the raw duck whose backbone he was laboriously extracting with a cleaver, but he spared me a kindly glance.
“You must be new. Several of us were high priest before we were called here,” he said, with a trace of wry irony.
“I see,” I murmured. This dignified man, whose face had the sweet appeal of all of Genna’s chosen, had once advised our kings and queens before crossing the sea to spend eternity doing kitchen chores.
I didn’t know what Genna’s priests were told before their ordination, but the service I’d anticipated prior to taking my vows was service to my people—and it hadn’t involved spatchcocking any poultry.
“Who are you, then? Oh—Taran’s girl,” the priest said, thinking back only a few weeks.
“Yes,” I agreed after a moment, because if I wasn’t going to lie, I couldn’t come up with a much better descriptor for what I was doing in the Summerlands. “Do you know where I’d find Teuta ter Genna?”
I was directed farther downstairs, to the laundry facilities. It was humid and warmer the deeper I went, the stone on the walls a little damp and smelling strongly of lavender and cleaning solvents. I’d seen a few immortals near the kitchens, coming in for food, but down below, it was all mortals.
Teuta was in a small room with piles of mending. We’d met the day I started my surgical training—I was fourteen, years younger than typical, and very anxious about it. Teuta had come to assist our temple with removing the diseased half of a teenage girl’s colon. She’d healed the incisions so neatly there wasn’t even a scar, and the patient had woken up well enough to walk home with her parents.
Afterwards, I’d bowed to Teuta and smiled nervously as my accomplishments were recited by my mentor, and Teuta had promised to assist on my first surgery, after I was ordained. That hadn’thappened, since I didn’t take my vows and she fled with the other priests.
Instead, my first surgery had been a month after Ereban, when I tried to fix a shoddy battlefield amputation. There had been no older maiden-priests to advise me, and I’d muttered apologies to Wesha and my patient for my incompetence while thirteen-year-old Hiwa ter Genna assisted, doing her best just to stop the bleeding. After a terrible hour, Taran had strolled in and corrected Hiwa when she stumbled with her blessing, and that was how the rest of my life began.
Today, Teuta’s strong, clever fingers were engaged in repairing a line of feathered trim on a decorative cushion, and I felt another sullen burn in my stomach at the use the gods had put us to.
“Iona!” When she noticed me, she did look pleased, at least, though she didn’t stop working. “I wondered how you were adjusting. Well, I hope?”
That was a complicated question, and I’d let her draw her own conclusions.
“Teuta, would it be possible to get all of Genna’s priests together somewhere? Quickly? The ones who don’t know about…Ereban. And what’s happening now. I need to tell them.”
The former high priestess looked down at her mending, smile fading. “Even if I was certain that was a good idea, I’m working right now, and so is everyone else in the building.”
“When are you free?” I asked impatiently.
“Next week.”
“What about—dinnertime, then,” I said, confused. The priests didn’t seem ill-kept, just busy.
“We have meals in the dormitory upstairs,” Teuta said. “Genna bid us stick to a schedule.”
“This is important though. I’m sure she’d understand. Taran’s talking to her right now.”
“Have him get permission from Genna and come back,” Teuta said. When my face said that I still didn’t understand, Teuta sighed and put the pillow aside. “He hasn’t asked you for any vows, then? That’s good.”
I paused until I finally understood. Genna’s priests had been told to do this work, and their vows of obedience wouldn’t permit them to deviate from the schedule even for a good reason.
I hadn’t ever thought of myself in rebellion against the gods, plural, no matter what the mortal queen had said. The other gods were known to us chiefly by what they’d left behind. The Shipwright’s architectural marvels, the secrets of agriculture and weaving and music that we called gifts from our departed deities. And their blessings, of course, the power we saw wielded by mortal priests who gave as much as they took for the gods in offerings. I’d agreed with Taran that we ought to rebuild the temples at the end of the war, pray for the priests to return and finish training our lost generation of surviving acolytes.
It skittered across the surface of my mind though, as Teuta patiently took her mending back up, that perhaps the queen had been right, and we were better off without the gods. Wesha had given me the blessings I used to win the war and save countless lives, but had she ever deserved the whole of mine in exchange? It wasn’t a fair bargain, and I hadn’t even understood that I’d been about to make it.
“Is there somewhere down here that’s big enough to gather in?”
“The laundry?” Teuta said reluctantly when she saw that I wouldn’t abandon the idea. “I could try to convince people to eat their dinner in there.”
In the end, she was able to gather only a couple dozen priests in the steam-filled room where large copper cauldrons boiled the linens for Genna’s court, an enormous furnace at one end supplying hot water to the laundry and the hypocaust underlying her baths.A couple of priests were stripped to the waist, shoveling coal to fuel it and paying me no attention when I stood at the cooler end of the room with sweat sticking my hair to my neck.
