‘It might. And I do need help. You hear more from the people than I do. You know more than I do. And I didn’t kill you.’ It couldn’t hurt to remind him.
He stood silent for a moment, filling the whole of her vision.
‘I do want you to see what I do,’ he said, voice softer. ‘And I think it will benefit both of us.’
‘And you’ll help me?’ It came out as a plea. He still hadn’t agreed to anything.
He placed a hand on her head, the way priests gave benediction to the small.
‘That very much depends on you.’
10
Csilla
Csilla’s feet stilled as they approached the city gate and she touched her mark of virtues, measuring the distance between her faith and Mihály’s ideas.
‘Why so pale?’ Mihály said, an amused glint in his eyes. ‘The gates of Silgard don’t open directly into oblivion, regardless of what the self-righteous here think.’
She wasn’t naive enough to think so. The land outside the city was still under the banner of the Immaculate Union, bound to the same practices and laws. But people were only there because they weren’t good enough to be here. And surely Mihály would realise what he was asking of her.
‘If I go, they won’t let me back in.’ That was what she’d been told and what the finality in Elder Abe’s eyes had promised. She was no demon, but anyone let into the city had to be proven pure. She was nothing, pure or otherwise.
‘Then it’s very lucky you’ll be travelling with me.’
He gave a smile that would be impossible to argue with, and it lit a flicker of confidence in her, even as the iron gate swung closed behind them with a crash. She should have taken some holy water or dirt from the cathedral grounds, a small physical token of where she belonged.
Csilla turned her head one way and then the other, drinking in the frightening expanse of land unshadowed by walls. There was almost nowhere inside the gates you could run full out and not risk hitting brick or body or both. Even the indulgent gardens kept by those wealthy enough to devote space to nothing more productive than beauty weren’t so large.
‘How far is it?’ she asked, eyeing the dark woods in front of them, breathing deep of the unpolluted scents of dirt and dry grass.
The area directly around the city was cleared to make it easy for farmers and loggers to move in their goods, but the bare trees ahead had stripped silver branches with peeling bark that clawed what light there was out of the sky. It wasn’t all grim, however. On the branches that stretched towards the clouds there were buds that promised spring, same as there were on the weeds that forced their way through cracks in city stone.
It didn’t feel any different, standing on ground that wasn’t blessed.
But the knowledge of it made all the difference in the world.
‘Not far. Maybe an hour?’
An hour? An hour with his long legs was far more with hers. Her feet pre-emptively ached.
She hummed, sang, and answered Mihály’s questions about growing up in the Church to pass the time. She kept her own questions to herself lest he take offence and leave her in the woods. There was no sign of travellers or any bandits, but every twig snap and rustle made her start until she relaxed to the beauty in the winter-ravaged wood. The vast, cool peace was how she had always imagined the eternal to be, and a part of her wanted to step off the road and sink into the quiet tangle of the briars.
If it weren’t for the wheel-rutted road that spoke of pilgrims and trade, it would have been as if they were the only two peopleto exist. She’d always been surrounded by voices and steps; the whispers of the other children in mercy care, the comings and goings of clergy doing both the sacred and mundane work of life, the never-empty streets of Silgard. But here the woods swallowed everything. Even the birds’ calls came and fell away as quickly as a breeze.
She paused to sweep her eyes up a tangle of dried vines, some thicker than her wrist, so entwined around the trunk and branches of a tree it looked to be choking it. Similar vines tried to climb the belltower, only to be pulled down year after year before they could spread past the reach of the gardeners. These had been allowed to embrace their cycle of dormancy and rebirth, and she hadn’t known they could grow so large.
‘You’ll catch flies in your mouth if you keep staring like that,’ Mihály teased, and she scowled, which did at least close her mouth. ‘You really haven’t been outside before? You’ve never seen a tree?’
‘You know we have trees in Silgard.’ But not many, and not tall.
Csilla had always been told how lucky she was to have been born – and given a graced childhood – in the holy city. The words had been a comfort when she was sharing a bed with two other girls and their sharp elbows or when she was last in line for what was left of breakfast. But the forest had its charms, and the unplanned lines and curves of leaves and trunks were softer on the eyes than angled stone. Even the birds seemed happier than the fat crows and ever-moulting pigeons who had thrown their lots in with civilisation, and their rosy breasts and warm brown wings in the bare trees were as pretty as any festival decor. The world hadn’t been made in brick and mortar but wood and earth and flesh. This was as close to paradise as one could visit – nature before the creation of humanity soured it.
She was so busy with her gaping that she nearly walked into the dark slash on the road. A black scorch marked the dirt, angry like bubbling tar.
‘What’s that?’
Mihály walked over it like it wasn’t even there. She blinked for a half-second, wondering if she was hallucinating.
