“That’s not …” What I meant. I sigh. How am I supposed to explain myself when they don’t trust a word that comes out of my mouth? Then again, if I’m to believe Sofie, then knowing who I really am is just as dangerous.
“Take this.” She hands me the lantern, and with both hands, yanks on a lever. The ceiling above us shifts to one side with a grating sound—like stone scraping against stone. It opens wide enough to climb through.
Annika collects the lantern and leads me up.
“That’s so cool,” I murmur, taking a moment to appreciate the mahogany pew that shifted over to reveal the secret passage.
“Cool,” she echoes as if testing the word. “Ybarisans are strange.”
I quickly scan our surroundings. Their sanctum is a church, and it appears we’re in the far back corner of it.
“Come, we will find the high priestess. She must be consulted if you are to receive shelter here.”
It’s the middle of the night. “Won’t she be at home, sleeping?”
She scoffs. “On a night like this?”
I pursue Annika as she zigzags along aisles and cross sections of the nave, past stately columns and rows of pews and open areas. Above us, a mosaic of gold shimmers even in the night, but it’s far too dark to make out the illustrations and patterns. The air smells of sweet pine and roses.
She cuts across a midsection to take the main aisle, still lit with open-flame torches.
I gape at the floral arrangements lining the path to the altar, of blush-colored flowers the size of dinner plates, their fragrance as potent as walking into a florist shop. There must be thousands of blooms along this center aisle.
“It would have been a beautiful wedding.” Annika’s gaze drags first over the bouquets and then over my dress, her voice reluctant when she adds, “You would have made a stunning bride, I will give you that.”
Her meaning dawns on me, a numbing realization. “I was supposed to marry him today.” I look down at my dress. Even torn and bloodied and otherwise ruined, it is still remarkable. It must have been my wedding gown. And all these flowers must have been for our ceremony.
But on the day I was to marry Zander, I had his parents killed instead.
Who is this other awful version of me?
“Yes. And you would be in the nymphaeum doing things with my brother that I don’t want to imagine.” Her button nose scrunches. “And who knows? With the blood moon, the fates may have blessed you with offspring on this night.”
The blood moon. Sofie said something about it moments before she stabbed me.
“You might have brought peace to so many lives, if only you could move past your hatred for us.” A sheen coats Annika’s eyes as she picks up the pace toward the altar. “I will secure your asylum and convince my brother to either hold you prisoner or escort you across the rift to your kingdom. I would prefer the second option, so I nor my brothers must look upon your conniving face again. I doubt the war council will support such a plan, but if they should? You shall return to Ybaris, praise Islor for its mercy, and make sure your people know we are not the monsters you paint us to be. We simply do what we must to survive.”
I’m trying to process her rush of words, but my first up close glimpse of the altar distracts all other thoughts.
Or more specifically, the four majestic sculptures that stand at the altar’s corners, carved from stone and buffed until gleaming.
My eyes instantly lock on the one with horns coiling high toward the ceiling. His chest is broad and powerful, as is the rest of his sculpted, unclothed form. He stands as a human would, but on hooved feet. There is no mistaking him. He is the carved creature in Sofie’s vault, the one she named Malachi. She called him a fate. In the corner opposite him is the tall, lithe woman with petite breasts and a broad crown of antlers jutting from her head. Aoife.
Two more statues bank the other corners. I hadn’t noticed such creatures in Sofie’s crypt, though I was suitably distracted. One is a female with generous hourglass curves and butterfly wings protruding from her back; the other is a stocky man with two shorter curved bull-like horns.
These are Sofie’s four fates—four gods—the ones who are responsible for all life, according to her. They must also be the gods of these people of Islor, if they are looming over the altar. I have never heard of anyone worshipping such idols as these.
As we get closer, Annika’s expression turns to one of panic. “Margrethe?” She darts up the five marble steps of the dais. I spot the pair of feet poking out of folds of white cloth a second before Annika rounds the altar. Her blue eyes widen and her downturned mouth opens, and then she lets out an ear-splitting scream that ricochets through the grand space.
I run up the steps, dread seizing my insides as I brace myself for another dead body. What I see is far worse. Half the woman’s neck has been ripped out, and holes stare back at me where eyes have been gouged. She’s in a pool of blood that soaks into her pristine white garb, torn open across her abdomen by deep claw marks to expose her mutilated womb. There’s so much blood. “Who would have done this to her?” I whisper.
Annika stumbles over her feet as she scrambles to back away from the body. “We need to return to the castle. Now.”
“But you said this was the only place I’d be safe from execution?”
“It’s clearly not safe now! Not with a daaknar loose inside our city walls!” She throws a hand toward the maimed body. “Not when it has killed the only person in Cirilea who can send it back to where it came from!”
“A what?”
“We don’t have time for whatever game it is you are playing, Romeria. There hasn’t been one of these in Islor in two thousand years.” She rushes down the center aisle, but then stops and spins around to glare at me. “Of course … This was you, wasn’t it! Did your caster beckon it?”
She must mean Sofie. Did Zander tell her everything?
“Is this Ybaris’s grand finale, to let one of these beasts ravage our people, on a day that you’ve already caused so much harm?”
“No!” At least, I hope not. How could anyone be a part of releasing something that would do that?
She continues backward down the aisle. “Stay here if you wish. It’s your beast, maybe you can tame it. But you will not get sanctuary here, not from a corpse.”
Movement stirs to my left.
“I need to get to my brother before it surprises him—”
“Annika.” A cold wash of fear prickles every inch of my skin as I watch a shadowy form rise from between the pews, climbing to a height far greater than any human. “Stop.”
Either she sees the terror in my face or hears it in my voice, but she follows my gaze and turns to face the figure as it edges forward with slow, stealthy movements along the narrow pew. Firelight from the torches illuminates a creature scarier than anything I’ve ever seen in any horror film. But maybe that’s because this monster is real.
The folded wings of a bat jut out from its hunched back, hanging tattered, as if something with claws had shredded them. Its skin looks charred, like that of blackened chicken, and yellow fluid oozes between the cracks. But it is the two horns that my petrified attention is most riveted to—twisty black horns protruding from a bulbous forehead.