Chapter Text
Imogen’s offering would not catch fire.
She hunched over before the altar, willing herself not to react: not to speak up, or draw attention to herself. Certainly she did not dare draw attention to her offering.
Teeth set, the smouldering taper still clutched in her hand, she stared at the crumpled parchment nestled within the sooty copper bowl and wondered if maybe the gods did not care for love poems. If so, somebody really ought to have put that in the holy writ, so that well-meaning maidens would know better than to offend them with the offer.
“What’s that you’re trying to light, dear?”
Lady Ursula leaned over with kindly interest, examining the unlit bowl that sat beside her own, with its accepted offering already industriously burning away. Blue fire, Imogen noted, glumly impressed. Of course the queen’s consort could often enjoy such shows of favour from the gods, but it was still something special to see. For her part, Imogen would have been grateful for even a curl of sooty smoke and a singed edge tactfully obliterating certain key phrases on her crumpled pages, which had been copied so painstakingly out by the light of her midnight candle and were now perilously close to being laid bare for all to see.
“Um.” She made another frantic pass with the taper, praying to lesser and less-likely-to-be-busy gods that the thing might catch, and spare her the public indignity of having her verse not only rejected by the gods, but read aloud for the edification of the temple to an overly-interested audience that would include not only priestesses and her temple schoolmates, but grand ladies of the high court and women like Lady Ursula, who had actually lain with the queen. “Poetry. To the great goddess.”
“Oh!” Lady Ursula looked properly impressed. “What a lovely thought. Verse is a very elevated offering. I am sure she will be happy to receive it.” She flapped a dimpled little hand at the smoke which curled piously up from her own vessel, wafting the favour upon her. “I suppose your prayer is for your father?”
Imogen’s face heated, though not, sadly, from the force of sudden godfire. She made yet another, even more agonised attempt, and the taper smouldered mutinously upon contact. The parchment did not catch.
Imogen, belatedly realising she had made no response to Lady Ursula’s friendly enquiry, managed a nod. Then, because the implicit deception seemed too great, she rushed to amend it with further, though still partial, truth.
“And for her majesty, of course. I always make a prayer for the queen.”
“My goodness,” said Lady Ursula with evident pleasure. “What a very dear girl you are. I am sure Queen Gerda would be honoured to know you include her in your father’s prayers, and I will be sure to tell her so. It’s a generous sentiment, and most becoming. Now, I wonder . . .”
She was not so indelicate as to look directly at the poem, but Imogen sensed the menace of her friendly attention and curiosity. Even more frightened by the threat of discovery by mortal acquaintance than the ignominy of divine disfavour, Imogen shoved back her temple visiting veil, bent protectively over the bowl as if guarding it from draft, and positively babbled.
“Papa’s latest word is that they are victorious in their endeavours and the campaign is supplied and victualled for the return, which of course I am glad to hear, but he reports they are some days’ journey from us yet and though I do long to see him again, of course I should not expect—” This attempt, too, failed to light. The taper was now more than halfway burned. “—that is, the road home is cruelly longer than the one which takes him away from me. Papa always says so.”
Lady Ursula’s hand, descending to settle on Imogen’s shoulder, was pure, plump kindness itself. Imogen felt it like a brand, scorching her unworthy flesh. Her lower lip trembled, and the backs of her eyes began to sting.
“You miss him so much,” Lady Ursula sympathised. “General Agris is naturally known to us for his war record, and revered accordingly, but to you he must first and foremost be simply your own papa. What a sacrifice you have already made to us all, with your dutiful acceptance of his loyal service.”
She did not ask why a girl who made such a noble sacrifice in the form of her father’s loyal service should have her offering so coldly rejected by the great goddess. Lady Ursula was too refined in feeling for that. But if the taper burnt down, and the poem remained intact for the acolyte to collect and add to the archives of offerings which displeased the gods . . .
Oh, mercy.
“You—of course, you are very generous, too,” Imogen stammered, willing herself not to return too soon to the attempt. Striving to appear calm. “Her Majesty rides to the wars, while you and all the ladies must remain—”
“Oh,” Lady Ursula said, lightly dismissive of this praise, “I don’t think it’s at all the same thing. That is to say, the expectations upon us are not exactly—”
“Ursula?” The query from the temple archway made them both look around, to where the three other ladies of the royal harem stood awaiting their sister’s company. All three had layered heavier, city veiling over their temple garments, and all three looked as if they had been standing ready to depart for some time. “It’s nearly dawn.”
Though this notice had not been meant for her, Imogen despaired to hear it. Cloistered women and maidens could not make public offerings in daylight, when the temple opened to the rest of the city occupants. When the sun came up, she would have to leave. If her poem would not light in time . . .
Lady Ursula, rather than rise and depart with her harem sisters and their bodyguard, as summoned, took a continued interest in the agitated little figure so humbled before the altar.
“I don’t suppose,” she mused, “you could have made a spelling error? I do recall that one time, when I was a girl—”
Imogen gave a keening little hiss and all but stabbed her taper at the bowl.
“—only too happy to have the court scribe check it beforehand for any—”
Oh goddess, Imogen thought, her flesh suffused with pinpricks of scorching shame, anything but that. Please, oh please, take it, want it, and I would do anything you asked of—
With a whoosh and a roar of cerulean flame, the contents of the bowl ignited. Godfire scorched the contents of the bowl and blazed skyward in an incendiary pillar, bleaching the golden flambeaux and the red-orange coals of the temple braziers to palest white and yellow. Lady Ursula gave a startled cry and leapt back to protect her veil, nearly upending herself in the process. Imogen would have started back too, except her lower limbs had been numbed by her long genuflection upon the stone floors and so she could only stare into the column of frigid fire with uncomprehending unease, afraid to even think of what it might mean now that it had finally come.
“Oh,” she said faintly, and put a hand up to touch the reflected radiance on her brow. Oh, dear. Her veil had slipped.
There was murmured chatter all around her as she adjusted the coif, from the harem ladies and other temple occupants who gathered likewise to watch her bowl blaze out. The colour had been remarkable, the column even moreso, and their attention was not to be wondered at. Yet Imogen could not help but feel the smoke that scented the air carried whispered recitation of the poem itself, and all its damning secrets.
She stayed kneeling, flushed scarlet and perspiring gently, until a temple acolyte ordinarily appointed to assist the most elderly and decrepit of worshippers in the conclusion of their obeisances scuttled forward to take her arm and help her to her feet. He may have spoken of the time, and the urgency of pending dawn, but Imogen did not hear. She was quite lost to herself until more strident, familiar tones broke in.
“—anything like it!” Lady Ursula enthused. She took the girl by her other arm, levered her up and steered her companionably away from the altar, chattering all the while. “A maiden not even sworn to the temple, and the gods eat that up with a column of fire. Only fancy! You saw it, Hilda? Remarkable! I think they must have been very pleased, to show her such—”
Imogen, heedless of Lady Hilda’s murmured reply, looked down at her hands. They bore no evidence of near immolation, being unmarked by smoke or taper’s tallow, still small and finely-formed.
Empty.
And shaking.
Imogen plunged them into the bib fold of her kirtle, clenching her fists into the soft fabric underneath, and struggled to attend to the breezy chatter of her self-appointed chaperone.
“—need not have kept us all waiting,” Lady Ysador was chiding, but the target of her lecture, patting Imogen’s arm with such open enthusiasm that it made the poor girl fairly writhe inside to bear such unstinting affection, was undaunted.
“Have you some conveyance home, dear?” Lady Ursula wondered. “We could offer you our—oh!” She interrupted her own speech to turn at the approach of a temple priestess. “Hello. Heliotrope, isn’t it?”
The priestess looked discomfited by this easy familiarity, but admitted that she was. Imogen, her arm still caught fast in companionable imprisonment, supposed that priestesses didn’t often like to be reminded they had regular sorts of names, and still less liked hearing them used so casually, even by such an august person as the queen’s own consort.
“We were just saying,” said Lady Ursula, generously attributing equal credit for conversation to all parties, “what a marvel it was to see such acceptance of a maiden’s gift! One with no temple connection either, which I think makes it all the more—”
“Yes,” agreed Heliotrope, “quite.”
She had all of the height Lady Ursula lacked, and none of her softening flesh. She was a gaunt and grey-eyed lady, shrouded in mist-coloured robes and wimple, and though her countenance was forbidding, Imogen gravitated toward the threat of the priestess’s open disinterest in a way that she could not hope to be drawn to the searing indictment of Lady Ursula’s unearned, overgenerous praise. Lady Ursula was so kind, and Imogen did not deserve her kindness, though she could never tell her why. So she knelt to kiss the wizened knuckles of the priestess, and welcomed even the sting of her knees when they returned to the flagstones.
“Mother,” she said, barely conscious of the ritual reply of child given in return.
“Your offering has found favour with the gods. This will need to be recorded, and its nature described in as much detail as you are capable.”
At once even cold reserve seemed as much a threat as innocent warmth. Imogen started to her feet in fresh alarm.
“Oh! Must I, really?”
The priestess frowned.
“The edification of all people is obtained in this manner. The gods teach us how to please them, and we are privileged to learn from their approval. It is a far greater mercy than their disfavour, as well we know. Who in your temple education has so neglected your instruction that you do not know this yet?”
Imogen might here have broken down weeping, as much from lack of sleep as anything else, if Lady Ursula had not reclaimed her arm to give it a bracing squeeze.
“Of course Imogen will trot right along and tell you everything you want to know! But you must see how tired she is, Heliotrope. I think you might get more out of her if you gave her a little rest first. I could take her home with me to nap, or—”
“We have space for that here,” the priestess said coolly, and Lady Ursula beamed up at her fellow conspirator, heedless of any implicit rebuke.
“Of course you do! I thought you must. You’re all so well equipped. Well, now, Imogen,” she steered the trembling girl forward, into the far less welcoming embrace of the priestess, “you go along, now, and have a little nap. Then when you’re rested you can tell them all about that poem you wrote, and what was in it, and why the gods were so happy to get it. And when that’s done,” she beamed in triumphant conclusion, “you can come along to visit me in the palace until the army returns to us both! What do you say to that?”
Imogen found she could say nothing at all. She only stared with naked guilt into the kindly, dimpled face of Lady Ursula, who continued to defy her harem sisters’ increasingly pointed efforts to remove her from the temple into the coming dawn just long enough to lean forward and confide, in a loud whisper,
“With such a clear marker of their favour, you may be confident the gods have ordained you will see your dear papa again very soon.” She beamed into Imogen’s pinched, pale face. “That fire had all the signs of an answered prayer.”
“Oh,” said Imogen faintly. And then, inwardly, as she followed the priestess away into the depths of the temple, oh no.
She’d been afraid of that.
~*~
Gerda leaned forward in the saddle, and imperfectly suppressed a groan.
The groan itself, of course, was natural enough: the carnal urge was rising fast and fierce again within her at last, and Gerda knew she had none to blame for it but herself. Six months she had gone, keeping her truest self at bay by dint of potions and sacrificial prayer, but no herbcraft or honest petition were forever equal to the blasphemy of such suppression. Not even her most gifted apothecary nor pious priest could equip her to deny the will of the very gods who had thus crafted her, and the humbling moment having come upon her in such ill-suited circumstances, on the road home from wartime, was proof enough of that.
But the suppression of her groan, proof as it was of her gods-given form, was still crucial to her station. For one thing, it wasn’t seemly. Groaning was all well and good, but you had to do that kind of thing in private. You couldn’t give way in public, or you were done for. You could never hope to strike fear into the hearts of opposing forces and inspire awe in the hearts of your followers if you were forever moaning and groaning the moment your rut set in; that was kid stuff, undisciplined and immature, nature in the raw, and Gerda was nearly three times the age she’d been the first time the urge had come upon her. She knew how to take herself in hand by now, or at least she would have known, if she hadn’t unwisely choked it all back for so long.
Secondly, of course, you had to think of the comfort of others. Groaning in public was the kind of thing that unnerved folks, and Gerda disdained to scare anybody she didn’t actually have to. Campaign or no campaign, cracked skulls and bloodied fields notwithstanding, six months of strategy and slaughter set safely to the side, she still had an army to lead home and what soul of even slightest sense could trust a queen to lead them if she was forever falling prey to her basest mortal urges like that? They’d be frightened out of their wits if they heard her give way, and she could not permit they succumb to fear. So Gerda suppressed a groan, and made a kind of grimace that might in bad lighting have passed for a kind of war-wearied smile, along with a comment about the trials of campaign fare being a poor substitute for the feast that awaited at home.
It was a respectable performance in its way, but only in the sense that the face paint of a performer can persuade those seated in the gallery. At her left hand rode one who as good as trod the boards with her, and with him there could be no pretence. Gerda read the failure of her performance in the aggressively neutral countenance of General Agris, who was too loyal to accuse her and too integrous to pretend at his own deception, and so she quietly gave up the indignity of the fiction with a bitter, honest laugh.
“Very well,” she said, “so it’s that time again, and we’re still three day’s hard riding from hearth, home and heart’s—and heat’s—ease.” She struggled against the impulse to shift in her saddle once more, knowing that her need was not yet so great it would warrant miscuing her already road-weary mount in such a way. “What is there for it now, but to endure?”
General Agris managed to convey, even through the gloom of the coming dusk, his own opinion of this misplaced martyrdom. Gerda’s mouth pulled down at the corner.
“Whore?” she suggested, in tones of one recommending cannon over cutlass. Agris, wooden-faced, gave a nod.
“The next town is large enough to supply one of your type,” he predicted. “I will have a party ride ahead to secure the room.”
And Gerda knew, from the way her body tightened with interest at the offer rather than shrank with habitual revulsion from the distaste of an unknown offering and no preliminary courtship, that the thing could not come soon enough.
~*~
“What do you mean,” said Gerda, “no whores?”
She hadn’t meant to raise her voice as she said it, and she definitely hadn’t meant to squeak in the middle of the query like she did. She hoped the town’s mayor, staring up at her in a quiver of alarm from the midst of his tattered fur collar and much-mended robes of state, put it down to the clink and jingle of her sword belt against breastplate. She trusted he would at least have the good sense to pretend as much, even if his wits told him otherwise.
“We are—we are grieved, your majesty, we—we offer our abject apologies, our most humble—”
“If,” cut in General Agris, his voice cracking like dry tinder, “you have pride enough to describe your humility, it is not yet abject enough.”
His hand rested with ominous intent upon the hilt of his battle axe, and the mayor blanched at the sight. For a moment his humility was so complete as to rob him of speech. Only at great length did he recall the act of drawing breath as one necessary to his own endurance, and paired this restorative act with the softest of explanations, faintly given.
“Our beloved queen’s return restores the safety of this land. Yet in her absence, there is always the risk of encroachment and unrest. We accept our lot as fringe-dwellers, though loyal ones and true, whose unworthiness is seen as enticement to bandits and roaming forces. Until this night and its happy news of your arrival, for the sake of their preservation I could not permit the women to remain in our town. We took up arms, as is our custom, and sent the women and children into the hills to await happier days.”
“Leaving me in turn to await the same,” Gerda snapped, pheromonally peevish. “Tongues of the great goddess, man, if there are no women in this town then where have you been sticking it all these months?”
The mayor thus challenged to describe his habits of release in the absence of wife or likewise willing women could not, in words, manage so to do. Instead he communicated, by the most feeble and mortified of gestures, the answer to his queen’s query, and on determining that the mayor’s release was not sought in the company of another soul, least of all one whose nature was complementary to her own, Gerda turned from him in an agony of teeth-gnashing unmet need, leaving the poor man to find his own way out of his own mansion’s meeting hall, the better to leave his liege to that chamber’s exclusive use.
“What can be done?” Gerda charged Agris, who said that was for her to decide.
“Whatever your majesty demands of me shall be done. Is the retrieval of the women in the hills your order? It can be accomplished, I think, by dint of hard marching and the appropriation of fresh mounts, but it will be a task of some days’ duration—more, if the women must be induced to cycle first—and I do not know that it can be accomplished in less time than it would take to deliver you safely home.”
Gerda fell back into a chair with a groan, and set her palm, still gauntleted, to that portion of herself which gave greatest discomfort. General Agris stood by in mute commiseration.
“Another town?” suggested Gerda, with little hope. “We’ve hamlets aplenty to pass through on the way, surely some soul would consent—”
“I doubt any would refuse your Majesty, were the circumstances known. Even in these little borderlands, backward as they may be, there is a type of loyalty to the crown which should inspire only our greatest respect. But what creature are we likely to find who so meets your needs? The gift of the gods is not lavishly sown, even in richest soil. These are fallow grounds, unholy and little favoured. The women likewise, I think, are wont to be under-cultivated. A properly-natured whore, two at most, kept to serve the better favoured wayfarer . . . this was my hope, your Majesty, and I sorrow to have misled you in it.”
“Bah,” said Gerda, even her own affliction unfit to mask her fondness. “You owe no apology, Agris, and I gladly receive your reminder that these lands are under my protection. The women should not need to be driven off in my absence. We must charge our forces to see that it is not necessary in the future. Agreed?”
General Agris promised at once to see that forces sufficient to defend against bandits roaming the border lands would be posted to this and all other towns of its type, and departed to see it done.
Gerda, in the general’s absence, fell again into an uneasy funk, twisting herself out of the more restrictive parts of her armour and fisting herself with mournful futility, seeking not the torment of full arousal but rather the comfort of mere acknowledgement, guarding in this smallest way against the swiftly-onward rush of her greatest, inevitable need.
Gods be merciful, but this would be hell.
~*~
General Agris, at last abed at the end of the day, slept soundly. His conscience was clear, his soul kept ready at any hour to be called to stand before the pantheon which must judge all they have created for their purpose, unknowable though that might be, and none could disturb his comfort.
Until.
The low cry that rang out down the corridor was known to him even in that half-death which restores us nightly to fullest morning life. It was surely not his will or lack thereof which made him slow to wake, but he was conscious in the moment of some nameless panic, a feeling of such dread that he might for one moment have lain heedless of the summons. Even so, he was at the queen’s borrowed door mere moments thereafter, the delay so slight as to be nearly unmarked.
“Your majesty.” He let himself into the chamber beyond, presuming not on familiarity but the necessity of his service. “You—”
But here he stopped, struck by the nameless something that filled the room. He could not mark it as one of Gerda’s own kind must do, but the queen’s need was such that even one unmoved by the changes in her must still take their measure, and startle, uncertain, in its presence.
“My lady,” he said at last, when the miasma which had swirled around and sucked at his senses at last determined he was not its target. “My queen, should I summon . . .” He faltered, uncharacteristically confused. “A priest?”
The dry, choking laugh that emanated from the wet tangle of sweat-soaked bed linen was so near a copy of the ordinary kind that it was made eerie by the slimmest shadow of its own perversion. The General stood uneasily as the queen marshalled sense enough to speak.
“What earthly fucking good—” A blank space of yearning here yawned. “Gods. Will it kill me? I blaspheme them by my very delay. I cannot claim crown’s privilege for so long and not anger those who grace me with this favoured form. If they strike me down, it is justly deserved, though I would cleanse my soul before the hour of my death.”
This talk most naturally alarmed the General as no amount of cursing, violence or rough language could have done.
“We must send a summons home at once.”
“What,” gasped Gerda, “a bird? Your wits are more addled than mine, to imagine that even the swiftest—”
“No, my lady.” Agris did not interrupt, exactly, but waited until Gerda’s breath had faltered in such a way that it seemed possible she might not go on. “Not a bird. Even fortified with herbs and prayer, as my Queen well knows, a bird would take too long to summon aid. But I have mercury glass and some grey powder, and the possessions of my slain enemies lie in our carts. I will offer these for their favour, and my own life instead if they are deemed unworthy, so your own life shall not be forfeit.”
A horrified, hollow silence carved out a space behind these words. Naturally Gerda balked at the proposal, but likewise she suffered the turmoil of her own undoing. The gods would be satisfied, one way or another, and the life better taken was never that of the queen. Agris felt sure he could trust in the triumph of Gerda’s perception over even the deepest horror of the rest.
“No,” said Gerda. “I absolutely forbid it.”
“Your Majesty!” Agris cried. “Will you demand I make my offering in disobedience to my queen?”
“Will you threaten your queen with treason?” Gerda retorted, and here she did sit up, slightly, flaming bright with temper and rut-fever alike. “Will you turn your back on what I have built with your hand as though it were castles made of sand? Of what use is my life’s endurance if I must carry on without your service? Gods above, Agris, what would I ever tell your poor child if I return home without you?”
“I trust that my queen would not forsake the legacy of her loyal servant,” said Agris, with a calm that belied his grief. “Not the one we have built together, nor the treasure that enriches my own home. Imogen will want for nothing in the care of her queen, and I would leave her to none other than she who inspires this offering in me.”
“Gods damn you,” gasped Gerda, and Agris saw in the tremor of her limbs and the deepening flush of her face that she would almost surely have set on him, bare-handed, in combat if she had not been already so prey to divine retribution. “If they will not have your miserable soul, come back to me and let me end your life myself for being so stupid as to offer it. It would only serve you right.”
“Madam,” said Agris, bowing from the waist, “I swear it.”
~*~
The town’s priest was understandably skittish about supervising a self-sacrifice at any hour, much less the dark of midnight. Even so, he bore up long enough to provide the rudiments of chamber, altar and chalice before fleshly terror ailed him and he took to his heels, babbling that such sorcery was none of his lookout, he was of the lowest common order, and General Agris must walk his own sainted path from there.
General Agris, who had quite expected that this path would be his to walk alone, took the cowardice in kindly stride and forbore even to invoke the name of the local god in his opening prayer, lest the great ones should deign to search for the servant who had failed in his office. Instead he named his own gods, the priests of his home and childhood, and the acolytes who had trained him in temple service. He made his offering in simple terms, because gods did not like you to adorn what you gave them; it smacked of treachery, and deceit. He described his ancestry, his lineage—the latter being comprised of Imogen alone, her gifts and graces such that they served as his sole temptation to boast, the richness of that legacy increased in his own estimation by the love he bore her, second only in his estimation to that he owed his queen—and made himself the supplementary offering of this sacrifice, if they deemed those trophies won in battle insufficient accolade.
This, he knew, they likely would. You had to be Gerda herself, or of her ancestry, to offer a battle trophy that had even a hope of tempting the pantheon. Even Gerda’s own ancestry held a tale or two of an ancestor whose trophies had been wanting, and their own lives made forfeit in turn. Agris knew of no instance in any holy writ when a lesser person than the monarch had a summoning sacrifice met with favour, so even as he did the gods the expected honour of laying all his best on the altar, he understood, with full righteousness of spirit, that his life would surely be forfeit for the service he sought.
Mercury glass was darkened with powder, and the sigils of summoning inscribed thereon. When holy fire struck the altar, the glass would ignite, fuse, and melt. The call for help would be thus borne home, bought with his life, and succour would come. They would send some fit companion for his queen, she would answer the gods’ call upon her flesh, and her blasphemy of self-denial would be forgiven.
He knew not which of her small harem would be sent, and in truth it did not matter. Gerda slaked the hunger of her flesh when appetite arose, but she lived unbonded. Of course, the mercy of this was that she could lie with any whose form was fit for her, and find equal satisfaction in any or all. At least this was how she had explained it to him, as a kind of pragmatic arrangement that made for greater ease of wartime travel, and General Agris did not imagine she would play him false.
So he prepared himself for sacrifice, accepting that such would be the gods’ demand. Yet he prepared likewise, with perfect confidence, the offering he first must make before he would be humbled by their refusal and their claim on his life. There was an order to these things, after all; you couldn’t offer the gods something and imply it was unworthy. You had to let them tell you so, first.
His only moment of weakness, which he hoped the gods would indulge, being as so many of them were parents to a multitude themselves, was a preparatory prayer for the safety and safeguarding of his daughter. Imogen would fall heir to wealth and title, so he had no fear of her worldly provision, but he hoped the great and wholly warranted ire of the queen at having her general’s last living act be one of disobedience would not hamper her willingness to act as Imogen’s guardian and secure her protection in his stead.
So his prayer was first of penance, and next of paternal petition. Then, his soul cleansed, he advanced on the altar and raised his hands in invocation. He cried the gods’ mercy at his presumption, made an offering of his life in chance of their refusal, and begged they would accept the gift of honours won in battle, on field of combat in uncompromising service to their chosen vessel, as price sufficient for the boon he begged.
For one hollow, holy moment he felt them there. The air hung rich and crackling with breath of power past all knowing, raising every hair on his body and nearly driving him to his knees with the weight of his own unworthiness. Then he looked to the dusted glass, the message traced upon it, and took his courage from a summer’s distant memory of a tiny hand tucked trustingly into his, a little face upturned and his child’s simple faith of provision evermore. The weight of that recollected trust stripped all pride from the General’s spine, and anticipation of his failure to fulfill it crushed the blameless offering of his heart.
Godfire lit the temple, searing all vision from his gaze and all knowledge of the pantheon’s presence from his mortal mind. General Agris fell forward on the altar, as he had always known he would, and the blaze that roared around him transformed it to a pyre.
~*~
The hands of the gods were cold, and strangely clammy.
The sacrilege of this observation jolted the General’s heart. He leapt at once to his feet, prepared to swear his eternal allegiance to whatever lowly deity had condescended to accept his unworthy offering into the afterlife, after all.
“Oh!” The village priest started back, blanching even whiter than his grubby robe. “Oh, you’re . . . you’re not . . .”
But even simplest truth failed the man thus confronted with the miraculous. The General frowned, likewise bereft of comprehension, though dissimilarly of speech.
“What can have—” He gave a violent start, swerving round to stare in dazed incredulity upon the altar, only to find his faintest hope snuffed out by the sight of the shield and bloody sword taken from the body of his worthiest enemy. The jewels plundered from that same man’s storehouses sat likewise untouched. The gods, then, had disdained both his offerings—but where, then, was the mercury glass?
General Agris cast about in some confusion for the thing, expecting when he did not find it on the altar to see it shattered in contemptuous fragments upon the flagstone below. But no. There, too, it was in absence. So they had struck it. The summons were sent. Anybody so drawn would reach them in hours’ time, at most; the gods made swift their pleasure known, any half-wit priest could tell you that, but Agris thought even the demigod regents of the Capitol’s exalted Seat of the Pantheon might struggle to explain the unimaginable service they had rendered here.
Could it be that Gerda was so favoured by the gods, no offering was sufficient save her own humility? Agris considered, seriously, that it might be so. She was thought to be the embodiment of some three or four ancient prophecies, when previously no ruler was known to be the fulfillment of more than two. Mayhap the era she had come to set about was of such import to the will of the gods, they would not permit her flesh to perish, but scorned his offering as unworthy even of destruction, compared to that which he sought to purchase.
This suited perfectly the worldview and understanding of General Agris, so he settled upon it as the most likely explanation of all—which was to say, the only one he could think of which would not in some way insult his queen and defy his gods in concert or by turns. He genuflected in abject mortification, scorning even to offer with his own sword at his throat the blatantly rejected offering of his most unworthy life. He would not denigrate the gods with his blood on their temple floor, though he might spill it later on the field as penance for so presuming on their favour.
Satisfied with this discovery of the great favour they showed his queen, General Agris now desired nothing more than to return to her chamber, mount guard at the door and receive personally into his care whichever lady the gods had sent as succour to her Majesty’s blighted flesh. When the appeasement period had safely passed and Gerda was herself again, he could attend her in the cleansing and offering rituals, accompany her safely home, and explain himself to Imogen. He would appoint Thora in this stead; she was a capable captain and would rise naturally to fill the position he held. She had not his experience, of course, but she was right-headed and loyal, and would be a worthy successor to his post. His affairs in order, he would then determine how best to spare Gerda the ignominy of his continued service.
This was so clearly the right and proper path, General Agris travelled through the empty little town feeling something nearest kin to joy. He was never happier than when he knew his course was clear, and his way made plain. That this course would in all likelihood lead to his own demise was of little consequence, since it was that same demise he had been prepared to make under far less satisfactory conditions; this seemed almost like a gift in contrast. A boon, perhaps, given in trade for his own unworthy service to the queen. He would treasure it as such, when the time came.
General Agris was almost whistling by the time he set his boot upon the doorstep of the mayor’s house. The sky had lightened from middling-grey to something molten, streaked with gold. The dawn was almost on them, and surely, if he had been deprived of his senses for any length of time at all, the gift of rescue for his queen must be likewise. He should wash, at least in part, and send someone to arrange for meals. Her Majesty always suffered great appetite when she was past the greatest rigours of her need, and it would never do to deprive her of—
Here, General Agris forgot the word for food. Forgot, too, the look of food, the purpose of it, and even, for a moment, that he had meant to think of food at all. General Agris was for one unconscionable moment as one whose mind was wiped by the fire of the gods, for in the instant that he pushed in the door of the house he had taken for Gerda’s use, in the moment that he crossed that threshold and into the hall of the thing beyond, he saw something that could not have been real.
Slight and fair, like summer’s earliest meadow grass awash in sunlight, sweet and welcome and ill-matched in every possible way to the muck that clung all ‘round. Something for which one daily longs when without it, until the longing is made so much a part of one’s bones as blood and marrow that even the pleasure at its arrival is eclipsed by a kind of glad surprise, that this thing you so longed for was also one you had almost forgot existed.
Blood and gold and marrow and light. As much a part of him as breathing—though he discovered that in that moment he had forgotten to, and his chest ached, full and tight.
At the sound of his sharp inhalation she turned, smiling, and met him with nothing but gladness, her greeting airy-sweet even in the muddied, sucking morass of his dawning comprehension, horror, and despair.
“Oh, Papa! Good morning. I can’t actually think how I came to be here, but I’m not about to complain.”
Imogen put her hand out, sunny and confident, waiting for Agris to take it in his. When he did not, she faltered at last, and put her head to the side as if trying to read his doorway silhouette in the faint relief of pre-morning light.
“Papa?” she asked, uncertain. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
And this, strangely, proved the one test of courage to which General Agris was unequal. The man whose nerve carried him easily into any battle, whose temper sustained him in the halls of negotiation and whose faith taught him patience in the tedium of peace, was by one simply query wholly undone.
With his mouth stopped up by the hammering of a father’s heart, Agris proved too much a coward to confess to his daughter that no: for the first time in her life, he was not.