“Watch your tongue.”
“Tosin the murderer. His hands are stained with innocent blood. His soul is rot. He would be a king, but all he will rule is death.”
“Tosin . . . Tosin will lead us into a new age. A new prosperity. We will be blessed. The Goddess provides. But you would know nothing of that, would you, heshen! Blasphemer!”
A rush of wind swept over the hilltop. It snatched at the cloak around Akanni’s shoulders and batted at the flames in the large basins on either side of the door, nearly snuffing them out.
With a curse, the boy bent to grab a log from the small pile of wood just to the side of the basin nearest him. He only had one hand to work with since he was holding the chain to her shackles, but he managed to toss wood onto one flame and then the other. The fires slowly revived, as if wary to come out into the freezing night air.
“That’s what they call me, isn’t it?” Akanni kept her eyes on the peeking flames, her voice distant in her ears, hollow. “Kazili Heshenae. Princess of Blasphemy.”
The boy fell silent. She could imagine the look he was giving her. Many had given it in the years following her renouncement of the Goddess. It was the kind of look often reserved for those with the white sickness, a look of disgust mingled with a pitiful contempt, but still a healthy dose of fear; for if you get too close you could contract it. Stand too near someone who had angered the Goddess, and Her disdain could afflict you as well, and nothing angered the Goddess more than blasphemers.
Well, almost nothing.
No one could have predicted the heir to the throne, of all people, would turn away from the Goddess. Not when her mother was among the most devout in all of Oramec. So devout, in fact, that as well as her duties as queen she bore the mantle of High One, chief priest of the palace.
Every day of her life, Akanni remembered her mother waking early for prayer and staying up late for the same. If she could not make it to the grand temple for worship, she would go to a little room where candles and incense burned, and offer up praise and reverence. She taught Akanni with patient hands how to make the Goddess’s mark in the earth to bless it before offering thanks and prayer. She showed Akanni with gentle touches how to bring a swift and painless end to sacrifices, then till the blood with the earth and use the clay to mark her body during times of fasting.
“The Goddess visits us in our temples and prayer closets,” her mother had said one time while making the mark. “But those of true devotion can earn Her rhakah, the greatest of Her gifts. That is when Her will inhabits the body as if it were a temple. I seek this blessing for myself, and for you. If it is to be yours, you must be strong, like stone, and steadfast, like the mountain.”
Her mother was strong.
Her mother was steadfast.
Even when the white sickness came on her, Akanni’s mother danced and sacrificed and abstained, ever fervent.
A frail heart and iron guts had finally forced her mother from the temple and into her bed, where she held Akanni’s hands in her now too-thin ones.
“It is not for me to decide which path I take.” Her mother’s fingers like talons, the bones bulging, she was barely able to mix the clay, but she painted Akanni’s face; three lines under each eye, two dots above each brow, and a stroke of her thumb from Akanni’s hairline to the tip of her nose. “The Goddess provides, Akanni. Always.”
Her mother was prayerful.
Her mother was faithful.
Her mother was devout.
The sickness claimed her still.
That was when Akanni stopped believing.
“Kazili Heshenae,” Akanni repeated as the memory of her mother’s final night faded, and the flames in the basin near the boy bearing Tosin’s colors flared. She lifted her eyes to him. “You should run.”
The color fled his face, leaving his brown skin mottled. His throat worked in a thick swallow and his eyes widened all the more, white and frightened.
He parted his lips as if to speak, but the flap to the tent swung open, the other guard holding it to the side. “Bring her.”
The boy nodded and stepped quickly into the tent, drawing the chain with him. Akanni followed.
I am stone.
Inside, an oppressive heat swallowed her. Sweat prickled against her skin almost instantly, and her lungs struggled to take in air for the briefest of moments. The aches in her body intensified, threatening to drag her whimpering to her knees, but she held fast. She bit into her lower lip hard enough to taste blood. The sting struck sharp against her swimming senses.
Laughter sounded from the far side of the tent. Propped against a bed of furs, rugs, and pillows large and small, lay Tosin. His pale skin was red from the heat and pockmarked with scars, most of them his own doing. Before taking on this venture of warlord, Tosin had professed himself a holy man. He was a practitioner at the temple, no one of any true import, but despite that, he’d managed to win over many of the Goddess’s worshipers. He was cunning and manipulative, and when her mother passed and Akanni renounced the Goddess, he saw that as his opportunity for more. He pleaded his case and took up the now-empty role of High One. The mantle would have fallen to Akanni’s shoulders, but she had cast that aside. In that way, her blasphemy had indeed brought this trouble down on her.
“Kazili.” The word poured from his lips like runover from his goblet. “You look well.”
Chained for three days and nights, hauled alongside a horse like little more than cattle, she knew she stank of exhaustion and exertion and, to her furious shame, the bitter odor of how she’d had to relieve herself while walking, given no space or privacy to do so. The cold had helped to mask the smell, but in here, in the heat, it crawled up her nose, along with the cloying, familiar smell of blood and drink. Fresh slices along Tosin’s bare flesh where it was visible past the layers of his robes meant he likely had recently finished letting, to honor the Goddess.
“It has been so long since last I saw you. Three seasons, if memory serves.” His eyes trailed over her faintly trembling frame, and it was all she could do not to lose what little bit was in her stomach.
I am the mountain.
“It was during the High Solstice,” he continued, smiling wide beneath a line of shaggy black hair on his lip. “The day of the festival.”
“The day you murdered my family,” Akanni spat between clenched teeth.
To either side of her, the boy-guard and the soldier both swiveled to look at Tosin.
The bastard continued to smile, though it hardened.
“That is a serious accusation, my dear. Especially coming from a heshen.”
At that word, the boy-guard and the soldier looked back to Akanni, the soldier with disdain on his brown face and the boy with fear.
“Leave us.” Tosin waved a hand.