Sin Eater's Daughter 2 - The Sleeping Prince (24 page)

I’m woken by the sound of footsteps pounding past our room. I can hear voices, too loud for the night, and though I can’t make out the words, I can hear the shrill pitch, the panic, in them. I sit up, turning to Twylla.

“What’s happening?” she asks, rubbing her eyes, and I shake my head, my heart racing.

There is a grating, rumbling sound above us, echoing down through the rock.

“What’s that?” she gasps.

I throw my covers back, reaching for my breeches and forcing my feet into my boots. “Get up,” I say. “Something’s wrong.”

As she pulls on her boots, Silas throws the curtain open. He looks from me to Twylla and then back. “We’re under attack,” he says. “I don’t know if they saw us coming back here, or if they figured it out, but they’re trying to force the main doors.”

“What do we do?”

“You both need to find Amara. She arrived an hour ago. She’s in the ossuary. Listen to her. Then meet me in the hall; I’ll wait there for you. We may need to evacuate, so be ready.”

I look at Twylla, pale and determined in the light from the hallway. “We’ll see you in the hall.”

“Silas!” someone calls from outside the room.

He turns towards the voice, then back to us, speaking quickly. “When you leave here, turn right and place your left hand on the wall to your left. Keep your hand on it and follow it. You’ll know it when you see it. Don’t take your hand off the wall until you do.”

Then he’s gone, leaving Twylla and me staring at each other.

Outside our room, everyone is running in the opposite direction from the one Silas told us to follow. Staying close together, we place our left hands on the wall and begin to walk. Alchemists and their partners, people of all ages and sexes run past us, some armed, some holding children, all ignoring us. Above us there is another boom, and I see a trail of dust fall from the ceiling.

“Hurry,” Twylla says from behind me. Without taking our hands from the wall we start to run. The ground begins to slope gently, then more steeply, the turns becoming sharper, the path narrower. The grating sounds far away now; I can hear nothing but our breathing and the occasional drip. As the air gets colder, the sconces are spread further apart, leaving patches of shadow. Each one makes my heart skip. Eventually we come to a door – not a curtain but a door, made of dark, grainy wood. Burned into it are two circles, one overlapping the other. In the centre is a small silver crescent moon.

“This must be it,” Twylla says, taking a deep breath as she pushes it open and enters. I follow her, pulling the door closed behind me.

And then I stop. And stare.

I’d expected another small cave, possibly a meeting hall of sorts. But the chamber I’ve walked into is the size of a cathedral, the ceiling a hundred feet above me and studded with white, glittering stalactites, twice my height, pointing down like a thousand swords over my head. The walls, though, are studded with bones. Hundreds, possibly thousands of skulls stare out of the walls at me, stacked neatly on top of one another. Some of them have symbols on them, the symbols for salt, for fire, for air etched in gold on their foreheads.

More bones, perhaps from arms and legs, are arranged into intricate patterns, hearts, circles and stars, embedded in the walls. On the far left wall a rose has been constructed from a group of pelvises; on the right a chalice is made from ribs.

Above my head a chandelier made out of human bones hangs from the impossibly high ceiling: skulls clutched in whole, clenched skeletal fists, candles inside the eye sockets, lighting the room and simultaneously casting eerie shadows. Long, sturdy leg bones make up the joints between the skulls and hands. Entire spinal columns weave in and out, holding the structure together, and below them, small bones hold up strings of tiny ones, threaded like beads.

It’s beautiful and macabre and I shiver. An underground temple. And a crypt, all at once.

I know, without being told, that every single bone in here belonged to an alchemist. And I know that this temple, this ossuary, was built long before the Conclave hid down here; perhaps is the reason it is underground. This is the work of centuries, young bones and old bones all combined to make this place. It’s awful but beautiful, and every time I feel disgust rising, appreciation beats it down as I spot some new, impossible pattern.

I wonder whom the marked graves in the graveyard belong to, but the answer comes to me immediately. Silas said the alchemists married non-alchemists. They can’t be part of this place, but their place in the alchemic world is marked, subtly, on their graves.

Down near the altar, Twylla has disappeared behind a screen, and I can hear voices. I follow the sound, walking down an aisle lined with pews. I touch each one as I pass. None of them is the same; all different woods, different sizes. Some are heavily carved and decorated with the symbols of the old Gods, Holly and Oak. Some are simple and plain. All of them are worn, grooved where generations of bottoms have warmed them and worshipped on them; where people have sat and looked up at their ancestors.

The altar is the only space not adorned with bones. Instead a large metal sculpture – two discs, one made of gold, one silver – is mounted above it. The silver disc overlaps the gold, making a crescent, and it reminds me of the moon. The altar is laid with flowers and burning candles. The air smells of incense, and something else, not a scent, precisely, but a weight, a presence. The bones. I can feel them, as surely as if a thousand alchemists were here with me, spying on me.

I find them in an alcove, hidden behind a carved wooden screen. Twylla sits stiffly, facing a large woman dressed entirely in black, like the Sisters, though with none of their eerie elegance. She must be the Sin Eater, Amara. Her eyelids are heavy, giving them the look of being hooded, her face round and waxen in contrast to her daughter’s obvious anger. I can see no resemblance between them.

“I thought you worked alone,” Twylla says as I take a seat beside her. The Sin Eater looks at me and I nod in greeting, feeling oddly relieved when she inclines her head to me, before looking back at Twylla. “I never thought you’d be friendly with nuns.”

“Nuns,” Amara scoffs. “They’re a reformed resurrectionist cult, and no matter what else I tell you, don’t forget this mess is partly their fault, too. We’ve all played our part.”

“I don’t understand. What are they to do with us – you?”

Her mother gives her a long look. “They are the Sisters of Næht. I am the Sin Eater, High Priestess of Næht.”

Chills run through me as she says the words; it sounds as though a hundred woman have spoken them.

“But she doesn’t exist, does she?” Twylla says. “For all your talk of Næht and Dæg, they’re not real. They never were.”

Amara stares at her daughter, who meets her gaze evenly.

“Actually, they were,” I say, my voice too loud in the reverent atmosphere. Amara turns and nods at me to continue, betraying no surprise at my knowing. “Their real names were Aurek and Aurelia.”

“Aurek and Aurelia?” Twylla asks. “The Sleeping Prince and his sister?”

“You know the story?” I ask, and she nods.

Then she turns to her mother. “I know all of them. I can read now.” She sounds both proud and defiant, and painfully young. “Go on,” she says to me.

“Well, the House of Belmis changed it all. Manipulated it to support their rise to power. They renamed Aurek and Aurelia Dæg and Næht to fit their purpose. Eventually they changed from siblings to lovers too.”

“Gods, imagine waking and discovering all of this. That your life has become a legend, and a much embroidered one at that.”

“You would pity him?” Amara stares at her daughter.

“No.” Twylla’s voice is icy. “He’s a murderer. Nothing excuses what he’s done. That’s why I plan to fight him. Lormere has had its fill of corrupt royals.”

“I wondered what it would take to remove the scales from your eyes,” the Sin Eater says softly.

Twylla’s lips curl into a snarl. “If, instead of merely wondering, you’d seen fit to
tell
me what I was walking into, I might have been better able to cope. Instead I swallowed every lie they fed me until it tore me apart.”

“I had no choice, Twylla. I am the Sin Eater—”

“Yes, yes, your precious role. I hope it takes good care of you when you’re old, because Gods know where my brothers are, Maryl is dead, and I will not aid you.”

The Sin Eater sits back, visibly stunned at the venom in her daughter’s voice, and I reel too. I have already seen the Goddess in Twylla, but this is a different kind of awesome. This is vengeance, and cruelty: a war Goddess. Fighting the High Priestess of Næht. I shiver again, caught between these two women who seem to have forgotten I’m here.

“I tried to tell you, many times, that our role was more than it seemed.”

“You fed me riddles in a room like a furnace. I was a child,” Twylla says, in a voice that’s deep and raw and broken. “How could I possibly have understood what you were telling me? How could I have guessed what the queen was truly like? Did you know the maids at the castle wouldn’t bring my meals to me in case I poisoned them? They wouldn’t touch my used plates and knives until they’d seen my guards hold them and not die. Throughout it all, my only friends – my only comfort – were your Gods. I lived like that, every day for four harvests, to find out that everything I believed was a lie.”

Twylla stands as though to leave but the Sin Eater grips her wrist, moving surprisingly fast, and holds her firm.

“Let me give you some truths. Decide after that if you can fight your war without my knowledge. Then if you want to walk away, I will not stop you. But you are the last of us and I have to try.”

“If you hadn’t let Maryl die, you’d have her.” There is an edge to Twylla’s voice, one I recognize. Grief. Tucked away tightly.

“I tried,” the Sin Eater says, letting go of Twylla’s wrist.

Twylla turns and I see her profile in the light, carved and cruel. “Am I supposed to believe you? I remember,
Mother
, a time when she was a baby, burning up in that awful room. And you left her to die. And when I saved her, you killed the goat. So do not tell me that you tried.”

The Sin Eater looks up sharply. “Do you think me so cold? I knew you’d save her. I knew the moment I left that house that you would run to the village and beg for herbs. Why do you think I left you with her? I couldn’t ask the withwoman for the herbs, because I am the Sin Eater – I cannot intervene. But you could. And I hoped in my secret heart that you would.”

Twylla’s eyebrows rise. “Then why kill the goat?”

“A life for a life, that is the rule. The withwoman knew what you’d done. Everyone she told would have known too. So I had to make a sacrifice. I had to obey my own laws.”

Twylla blinks, turning to look out into the ossuary at the bone murals. Without a word she sits back down. The relief on her mother’s face is naked.

“Forgive us, Errin,” she says. “I’ll come to your part in this.” She looks back to her daughter. “You never asked why we were the ones who Ate sin. I thought of anyone you would, yet you never did.”

“You told me why. I was perhaps six; you summoned me and you told me that we existed before Gods and kings, but it wasn’t for them that we did it. That someone had to do it, because there had always been sins.”

“You remember that?”

“I had cause to, recently. When I discovered the Gods were a lie. Now you say they’re not a lie, but a twisting of truth.”

“When we came to Lormere, there were no Gods, no kings or queens.”

“When we came there?”

“From across the sea.”

Twylla leans forward, as though to better hear what her mother has said, and I stare at the Sin Eater of Lormere, a tickling at the back of my neck as the skin there tightens. When the Sin Eater leans forward too, I do the same, three points of a triangle curving in.

“The truth of it is that the poison in the wine that the prince and his family drank, the poison that made him sleep, that killed his father and later his lover … our ancestor made that poison. Our ancestor was betrothed to the rat catcher’s son. When he learned the Sleeping Prince had defiled his daughter, he sent for his son’s bride-to-be to come with her skills, and her draughts, and kill them all for the shame they had wrought. Under the light of the solaris she did, brewing a deadly poison.”

I look at Twylla, who is staring at her mother, open-mouthed. “That’s impossible.”

“She didn’t know there was a child. She laced the food for the feast with her poison. As it was carried up the stairs, she overheard the kitchen maids gossiping about the rat catcher’s daughter and her condition. Her family creed was to harm no innocent. So she went to Aurelia and confessed. By the time Aurelia got to them with the Elixir, the king was dead, Aurek and his lover a breath away from dying too. Aurelia tried to save them. But the poison contained blood – her own blood – and had an alchemy all of its own. The battle between Aurelia’s blood and the witch princess’s raged inside both lovers, until childbirth weakened the rat catcher’s daughter and she died.”

At some point during this tale I’ve covered my face with my hands, desperate to block it out. Alchemy, poison, magic. Lormerian superstition. Yet real. I feel a pang at the base of my spine, a reminder of how real it is.