“And you wish to join us, my dear?”
“Just for a little while,” I said. “I heard you were going towards Quell, and I …”
“Do not want to travel alone,” they finished for me. “Of course. You may walk with us as long as you need.”
“Thank you,” I managed to say through my swell of relief. I hoped that I would get used to speaking to people soon, and that the simplest conversations would cease to exhaust me.
“And do let me know if you decide to convert and spend the rest of your life a wanderer.”
It took me a moment to realize they were joking. “Oh,” I laughed, and then hesitated before saying, “Do you need to know anything else about me?”
“Not unless you wish to share it.”
“I don’t … I don’t think so.”
“Very well,” they said. They turned the full force of their long-lashed brown eyes on me, very bright in their dark face, and smiled.
Chapter Four
The Hands Raised in Prayer
‘A V-shaped stitch, simple to execute and pleasing to the eye. Of particular use in forming letters.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
To understand Virelith—at least, the Virelith of my birth—you need to understand the Plague. The Plague shaped everything about us. Mother had told me the story for years, as if it was a line dividing us into Before and After.
Before, or so I was told, bone mages existed harmoniously among those who had to sacrifice other parts of their bodies for potent magic—hair, teeth, or nails. The replaceable parts of the body. Bone mages alone used something that could not be so easily replaced. This meant that their spells were by far the most powerful—earthshakingly powerful—but each casting crumbled a little away from their spine or hollowed out a spoonful of their marrow. Where a tooth mage could spit out a molar and almost immediately grow another in its place, a bone mage had to live with their loss. They chose their spellscarefully, therefore, and cast only seldom—but when they did, their enchantments reshaped the world.
This way of things seemed to work well enough for a long while. The few bone mages that existed were revered and pitied at once, seen almost as saints. Their bodies shrank and hunched over the years, until finally they walked with canes or crutches and had to abandon the practice of magic altogether.
And then, almost two hundred years ago—or so the story went—a bone mage went rogue. This person, whose name was lost to history, discovered that they didn’t need to fuel bone magic with their own body, but could use the bones of others. This upset the balance of things, Mother told me, as the magic-wielder must pay the price for power themselves. Otherwise, what’s to stop a mage from running amok? Which is, supposedly, exactly what happened.
The story is that one of the bone mages, carried away with the possibilities of limitless power, broke the agreements forged between all magicians and started to use the long-buried bones of the dead. The soil was crowded with them, thousands of years of graves. They ran wild with their castings, until bone magic itself, overfed and made bloodthirsty, broke free from its vessel and swept through the kingdom, killing the living and raising the long-dead from their graves to walk again. There followed a time of horror … But the Temple saved us all.That was their story, anyway,Mother would say, rolling her eyes.
The Temple had existed for a long time before the Plague, gradually gathering converts to the way of the One-Eyed God—but as their religion was fairly austere and joyless, they had never spread as far across the kingdom as they wished to. Then, faced with the imminent destruction of Virelith by rogue, uncontrolled magic, they called on the power of their god (apparently) and banished bone magic for good. The people—those who had survived—gratefully converted to the Temple’s religion.
The cult of the One-Eyed God went from a fringe belief toan institution as powerful as the monarchy, and to prevent bone magic from rising again, they ordered all graves to be opened and the bones within to be burned. From that point onward, no one was buried—every corpse had to be burned and ground to dust in Temple crematoriums, which sprung up everywhere. I suppose there must be some who adhered to the old ways across the kingdom, but the only named group—and the only one afforded any kind of protection—was the Followers.
What had happened to the bone mage who started the Plague—well, no one knew.
This particular Follower Priest—Herlind—had a placid, calming presence, and chatted with me gently as we walked, seeming to sense my nerves. They were strong and energetic despite their peacefulness, however, and I found myself having to almost break into a run to keep up with their easy strides.
Over the next two days, I grew used to their face, and to the faces of the others in the group, but I was startled anew by everyone we passed on the road—the infinite variation there was among human faces. The unending shuffling and reshaping of various eyes, noses, mouths. I was probably looking at them very strangely, and they looked at me strangely in return. Of course, that might have been because of the giant bird on my shoulder and the red Hair that fell to my knees, in contrast to the neatly braided styles that I saw were the fashion among other women we passed (although the Hair behaved itself on the road and stayed still for the most part). All fellow travelers were unfailingly respectful to the Followers, however, murmuring greetings and bowing as they passed—particularly to the Priest.
I tried awkwardly to make conversation with Herlind now and then, although of course I was unpracticed. “Why did you join the Followers?” I asked them.
“Because I wanted to follow my own path,” they said. “Allof us here chose to wander rather than live a life sanctioned by the Temple.”
“I suppose I find it hard to imagine always moving—never settling anywhere.” As someone who had lived in the same small space her whole life and never left it until now, the idea was terrifying to me. “Never having a home.”
“The people who have settled under Temple rule are burdened by tithes and royal taxes. They follow a cheerless religion that tells them death is something to be feared.”
“Is it not?”
They shrugged. “Before the Temple, a death was a celebration—an offering of yourself back to the earth. The family would walk their loved one down the Corpse Roads to their final resting place with music and ceremony.”
