Here I am, fed and clothed and housed in a place of strange beauty, while the people I’ve feasted with and cared for and prayed beside are trying to find ways to survive the truth of Lumendei. The blighted gardens. The charred rubble.
I take a deep, shaky breath as Nyatrix walks Agrippina to the door. When she returns, I look at her, my emotions swelling like a sea in my chest.
“I think,” I say, “that I should feel freed by these revelations. Unchained.”
She watches me closely, backlit by the hearth-light, gilded like a goddess. “But?” she wants to know, that single syllable soquiet that the Godwinds billowing over the roof almost devour it whole.
I squeeze my eyes shut. How fervently I want to step into this new world she and Agrippina offer, laid out like a glorious banquet. But I still wear my old skin, with all its weight and pain. If what they say is true—and Saints, that long-forgotten instinct rises in me again, and Iknowit is, just the same way I always knew something was wrong in Lumendei—then I . . . I . . .
“If I not just willingly but happily,” I manage to whisper, my tongue too thick in my mouth, “spent my entire life serving a monster . . .”
Nyatrix’s sharp intake of breath peels my eyelids open. My stomach twists with dread as I raise my chin to meet her gaze.
“. . . what does that makeme?”
Isleep for almost a week. I’m simultaneously ashamed of my sloth and also unable to rouse myself from bed for more than a few bells at a time. I weep. I toss, I turn, I wake screaming from nightmares. And I hate myself all the while for my weakness. For my stupidity. I should have known, shouldn’t I have? I should have seen Lumendei for what it was. Or, at the very least, I should have questioned. Instead, I served my mother’s murderer. I refused to speak her name.
My own mother. They told me she was a heretic, and I believed them. So easy, isn’t it, to swallow a lie—particularly if it’s coated in honey and you’re very, very hungry? The lie was simple, ingested in a single swallow, left to sow further falsehoods in my body. But the truth is larger, more complex. The truth does not fit neatly between my teeth, and it does nottaste of wildflower honey on my tongue. It tastes of blood and soot and horror.
The Lumendei I loved doesn’t exist. There are no beautiful gardens at the end of the world. There is only the hungry God and the Sundering, spreading across the entire continent. Soon, Liminalia will fall. And then where will we go? Onto poorly built ships, only tested a handful of times, out into uncharted waters, all of Sylva’s maritime knowledge lost to war? What if there’s nothing else out there anyway? What if there’s only this horrible, vast blankness that I tumble further into each day?
I await Nyatrix’s judgment, but it never comes. I know she fought hard for the Centuria to permit me a week and a half to recover before the Votum.Shecertainly wasn’t given any time to recover from Lumendei and our journey through the Sundered Lands before she had to protect me again, this time from her own people. When I try to argue with her, though, she just sends me back to bed with a gently stern look. It is hard, I’ve found, to say no to her, so I acquiesce.
She also makes me broth and herbal tea and even braids my hair when I mention that I’d prefer a proper sleeping plait but can’t quite get my arms in the right position with my still-healing flail wounds. She helps me bathe, too—the only time I feel like I’m a living thing and not a corpse, my entire body pulsing with a need I cannot name, my cheeks flushed the entire time.
Nyatrix spent days in my city chained to a moldy pallet, beaten and questioned, while I slept in my own bed. When I mention this to her—in the bath, of all places, fool that I am—she meets my gaze and reminds me that I was tortured in Lumendei, too.
Agrippina visits, often just reading by my bedside without saying a word unless I speak first. I don’t—at least, not for days.
Late one evening, I wake to find her sprinkling dried herbs at the foot of my bed.
“What’s that?” I ask, curious despite myself.
Agrippina doesn’t immediately jump to answer my question, though she looks over at me and smiles. I pull myself up with a groan, wrapping the bed linens around my body. Her lips move as she sprinkles the herbs, like she’s working a Blessing.
“It’s sympaethetica,” she tells me when she finishes, sitting down on the end of my bed—not the chair tucked into the corner. “It’s a form of miracle-working that doesn’t require Mysterium.”
I swallow, one hand curling into the linens. Despite the exhaustion that claws at me, the voice that tells me there is simply no point in continuing any longer, something in me reaches for the knowledge she offers.
“Could you tell me more about it?” I ask, my voice hoarse from disuse.
A shimmer appears in Agrippina’s eyes, and she tries to hide her triumphant smile from me, but I catch it, glinting like pearl in the evening darkness.
Agrippina explains that we can use plants, herbs, animal parts, and more to support the kinds of outcomes we desire in our lives. She cautions me that it’s much different from Mysterium, that there’s no innate talent required, that there’s no calling upon any gods at all. Just a nimble mind, sheer willpower, and a good dose of stubbornness. There, perched on the edge of my bed in the falling city of Liminalia, she explains that if we, for instance, wanted to forget a bad memory, perhaps we could create an effigy to represent that memory.
“And then,” Agrippina says, spreading her hands across my bed, “if we took that effigy and buried it, perhaps we could bury the memory, too. Sympaethetica. Symbolic actions in the hopes of achieving material goals.”
“Is this what the Cult of the Mater Dea teaches?” I ask. I think of my mother, plucking the asphodels, turning a flower into a sword. I think of that flower, associated with Moryx, with death,with the places that await us when our mortal bodies fail us. I think of the petal’s scent—sweet, spiced earth and dark honey, tattooed fawn skin and shimmering hair, thunderstorm eyes and a blackberry mouth.
“Among other things,” Agrippina says, her tone light. “Ophelia, you can ask me, if you want.”
My head snaps up, and I look at her, lips parting. “Did...” I begin, the words crawling up my throat. “Did my mother engage in this practice?”
Agrippina smiles, smoothing her faded blue linen skirts. “Celia was particularly knowledgeable,” she tells me. “She would’ve taught you. It’s often passed down matrilineal lines.”
My heart aches, thrumming so hard against my chest that for a moment I think it may slip between my ribs, reaching and reaching, in search of something I can never quite hold in my hands.
“Is there a . . . Would there be a way to banish something inside you?” I ask, clutching at my chest. “A vast plane, blank and endless, like snowfall but without any snow. Just the cold. Just the emptiness. Would . . . Could sympaethetica do that?”
