The Rising Scythe

by S G Dunster

  Thessaly felt the needles bite her cheek as she fell. Then all went black.

  Chapter 17

  D

  irt. In her mouth, covering her. Blackness. Thessaly woke up, thinking, for a moment, that she was buried, but she could move, and the loose crumble of soil slid off her limbs and trunk. She sat up and gasped—a pain speared her chest. She reached up and found a matt of dried blood on her chemise.

  She wore only her chemise. She’d been stripped.

  “We’re back in the tunnel,” Guzal said quietly, startling Thessaly so she gasped again.

  “Are you all right?” Thessaly asked, crawling toward the sound of her voice.

  “No,” Guzal replied, her voice carrying an edge of scorn. “Nor more will you be. We’re stuck, Thessaly. I’ve already tried digging up. There’s some kind of barrier. A stone.”

  Thessaly reached up and immediately found it—a dirt ceiling that scattered more soil over her as she stood and hit it with the top of her head.

  She closed her eyes and looked inside—floes.

  They were gone.

  Bound, loose . . . gone completely.

  As if she’d never chosen.

  She could feel the crackle in the air, the buzz of energy, just as she’d felt it before she’d chosen. She could feel the warmth and itch in the earth around them. But the feeling she’d had, flooded with a mass of connection, a sight into everything that drew on her so badly it hurt and felt like being frozen, like being burned—

  Gone.

  For a moment, it was a huge relief, like taking a deep breath after being bound in a bodice all day. But then, horror . . . despair. A feeling like nakedness.

  She’d been stripped. Not just of her underdress and outerdress, but of her magicks.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Thessaly said hollowly, falling back on her haunches, digging her fingers into the dirt as if it might bring it back—the fire.

  “I don’t know.” The words came out in a sob. “I’m sorry, Guzal. I’m so, so sorry.”

  She cried for a while, tears mingling with earth to make a salty mud that caked on her face and itched.

  Guzal was just quiet. Thessaly felt, even without magicks, how she had given up. She was waiting to die.

  They waited in the dark for an uncharitable time. Thessaly felt hollow, not hungry. Not thirsty. She had no need to relieve herself. Her stomach and throat had folded in on themselves like they didn’t expect to ever be filled again.

  She knew she was weak, but the weakness felt, in its twangy, scattering pain, like a sort of strength. A raw edge to keep her going. She sat and buzzed with it. Closed her eyes and felt it.

  Her father would never know what had happened. He’d mourn her. Loredan would mourn her.

  One face came to mind, but Thessaly knew there wouldn’t be much mourning there. A sadness, perhaps. Vague and guilty, but not hard, raw, hurting, like she wished it could be.

  Cut off young, Thessaly thought. That’s when things are saddest, is when they’re cut off young, before blooming.

  Thessaly finally slept. Guzal came up next to her and they dozed together, backs pressed to a wall of dirt, waiting. Thessaly wasn’t sure what they waited for; a visitor, a death of thirst. In either case, she could not do much to either stave it off or meet it sooner. She reached out with what little sight she had, but all was a vague drift of feelings. Above was fresh air, here was stale. Above, wind dusted the tree tops. Here, there was dirt and roots and tiny growing things. She tried, a time or two, to reach up and press, or dig, but only succeeded at pulling a pile of dirt down on top of herself. There was a sort of roof up above; Guzal was right. When she reached as high as she could, pulling away handfuls, she met cold, unyielding stone everywhere.

  They were swallowed in darkness. Darkness tasted like dirt. Thessaly lay on the ground in the corner and just waited. Like Guzal.

  They came with what seemed like blinding suddenness: a mass shifted above, light stabbed painfully, and the earth flowed down, forming a sort of ramp.

  Their bare feet descended in pairs; pale, naked. Lady DuCarne’s lovely delicate arched feet, painted at the nails with a dye that gleamed like blood on flesh, came last.

  They were naked, utterly. In the dim light, their skin glowed. The great, lovely curve of the Lady’s belly was like a swelling white rosebud. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, fine features and limbs glowing in contrast. “Come, sisters,” one of them said, her voice hushed like she was in chapel. “Let us partake of you.” She gestured to Guzal and Thessaly.

  Thessaly felt a tingle as Lady DuCarne approached, then a flash of heat, and a wave of cold. She turned to look, and the Lady smiled. “I carry such magick now.” She stroked her belly. “It is a great deal to contain. It was painful to watch you try to contain it, and in the end, it’s best such things are spent wisely, don’t you think?”

  A burst of fury flooded Thessaly’s body. She walked up the dirt ramp under the energy of that fury, and for a moment, just a bare moment, she caught the edge of a floe—fire, flesh, bound magick—snaking out of one of the women. She drew on it carefully. It came willingly into her, filling her core with a warm, pulsing energy. It wasn’t near as bright and tempestuous as the floes she’d had, but it was something.

  They built their fire. To the side was a shape made of woven reeds containing great quantities of sage, cloves, and cinnamon. They set it afire, chanting, breathing in the smoke. Floes reared up high, roiling, pouring out among the group. Quietly, Thessaly unwound a thread here, a thread there, and balled them up inside, carefully containing them. Somehow, the women didn’t notice. Lady DuCarne laughed, a moan at the back of the laugh, as she drank the trickle that came from the hand of the woman next to her. They all took of each other, and then turned to Thessaly and Guzal.

  “The moslem first,” Lady DuCarne said. “The other stinks of Brigittine.”

  The women laughed, and two approached Guzal. She shivered and shrank, crawling back on her hands and feet like a crab, but they hoisted her up, and brought her to the fire.

  Lady DuCarne raised her hand. The scythe gleamed there—the same that Thessaly had been given. “You do not know the true beauty of magicks,” she said, turning it, watching the shimmer of moon’s light catch the edge. “Not until you’ve taken. What you choose, what chooses you—that’s the ocean you rest upon. What you take?” She swung her arm up, and two of the women shoved Guzal to her knees, bending her back so her breast was exposed. “That is the storm.”

  Thessaly chose that moment—as the scythe arced down to slash open Guzal’s chest—to let loose.

  She’d gathered ends from all of them. Ends of fire, of flesh. Ends, and the fire crackled there in the center, full of cloves and cinnamon, full of sage. Dirt. Flesh, burning in fire.

  Thessaly took all of them at once, the ends, and flung them to the fire.

  Lady DuCarne flinched and lost the knife. It clattered to the dirt. The other women gasped, shrieked.

  In that moment, they were open, and in that moment, Thessaly took back her floes—the mass there, writhing within Lady DuCarne. Loose floes, bristling at the edges; bound floes, snaking in flames. She called them to her.

  They came. And came. And came. Waves of fire. Needles of ice. She stood tall and set her teeth and took them: waves, burning, freezing.

  They flowed into her, a blinding, killing pain. Too much.

  Too much.

  Too much.

  I choose you, Breath and Blood. I choose you, Fire and Flesh.

  Her own stolen floes, and all the others’ with them, flooded her, burst her, singed her. Her body steamed, and haloed, and refracted the moonlight in a terrible burst of colors, too bright.

  They were gasping, lying on the ground. Lady DuCarne was shivering, and her face went slack. Blood seeped from between her legs. Her stomach roiled with movement.

  Thessaly was shaking.

  She couldn’t. It was too much, all at once, the feeling. She
fell to the ground and vomited, shook. The world spun. Guzal shook her, and she felt it.

  Her heart faltered, and she felt it.

  Her lungs seized, her body broke, and she felt it. The world spun and fizzled out.

  And then she was sitting up, gasping, tasting blood and bile. There was a whine of sound that pierced, then broadened to a terrible roar.

  Guzal was screaming.

  No, they were all screaming—the women. They burned. The fire had found all of them, and burned their bare limbs, caught fire to their hair. They danced around it, shrieking, burning, then crawling, and then they fell still, one by one.

  Thessaly stood, clutching her shift to her. Her eyes wouldn’t see it. The burning. The bodies.

  Lady DuCarne’s swollen belly still moved.

  Blood. Breath.

  Thessaly took the scythe and cut it open. Water and blood gushed out. Thessaly pulled out the baby by one tiny, warm arm. It trembled, choked, and was silent. Then the air split with its cry.

  Chapter 18

  “C

  ome,” Guzal said. Her eyes were wide, horrified. “Come, Thessaly. We cannot be found here.”

  Thessaly walked calmly, burning and freezing, carrying the small baby.

  “Leave it,” Guzal urged as they came to the road. “That will not sit well. You cannot take it.”

  “It’ll freeze,” Thessaly said.

  “They’ll burn you. They’ll call you a wytch. They’ll . . . Thessaly.” She tugged at the bundle Thessaly had made of her blood-soaked shift, wrapping it around the shivering child, her entire lower half exposed.

  “I don’t care,” Thessaly said calmly. “Let them.”

  The power surged and fought inside of her.

  They were met on the road by a company of knights, armored, riding horses as tall as Thessaly.

  “Run!” Guzal shouted.

  Thessaly shifted the babe to one arm and raised a hand. Fire poured out—a great plume that engulfed the first riders.

  “Stop!” A voice called out.

  It felt good. The fire. Hot, so hot, and the way the animal’s flesh broke, singed, sizzled, and burned. The crispness of burnt bones.

  She moved through the center of them, burning as she went, the flame mounting, and mounting, until it was a great pyre.

  She walked through, covered but unscathed. Line after line of armored men with greatswords and axes, maces and longbows, burning. Grass, burning.

  The very earth, burning.

  Breath. And Fire.

  The wind caught the fire and spread it in a great, wide arc. A bite of the land consumed. It tasted of baking bread. Searing flesh.

  “STOP!” The voice was loud, terrible, echoing in Thessaly’s mind.

  Outside, and in. Rattling her bones, shocking her to the core.

  She stumbled and fell flat on her face. The baby squalled under her.

  Gentle hands turned her. Moved her. Took the baby from her.

  “Get her to the abbey,” Henri said. He looked over the ranks of his men—half of them singed, a dozen burning, a few burnt. “She’s taken the wytches. They possessed her. She stopped them, and they possessed her. She’s not in her right mind. Take her to the abbey—she requires a priest’s blessing.”

  The knights parted for him as he pulled her onto his white charger.

  “Take the girl back, too,” he said, pointing to the tiny, faraway, shivering form of Guzal, pale against the dark fur of trees beyond. “And burn the dolmen, burn the wytches. Burn it. I’ll see the devil burnt from this province if I have to use my own torch! Wytchery, medicine. Send a message straightaway to the King’s court. He’ll want to attend to this matter personally.”

  “Aye.” Father Raymund still rode his Dumenon pony. His hair was matted, his robes soiled from the ride he’d taken—two days to Taunton, two days back, and no pause in between.

  “Good man.” Henri Holystoan rode to him, put a hand on his shoulder. “I owe you more than you’ll ever understand.” He turned to his mounted knights. “Take the castle,” he said, “and the Duke and his staff into proper custody.”

  The company parted, the knights flying up the hill toward the mansion. Holystoan rode, with Thessaly unconscious on his saddle, toward the abbey. The priest lifted the frightened Tatar girl to his saddle, gently put an arm to her waist, and rode wearily home.

  There were six in the woods—burnt bodies. And seven more outside the grove—knights, cooked in their armor.

  Father Raymund couldn’t look. Couldn’t think. Holystoan’s orders came easy, like honey to wash down hard bread. He took a deep breath, rode over the corpses toward the abbey, held tight to the girl whose long braids ticked his thighs, and said Hail Marys until they reached the door.

  Smoke.

  Sweet, cloying, sharp. Sage? Lady DuCarne.

  Thessaly gasped, coughed, and sat up, gathering the floes inside, fire tingling at her fingertips. Burn. They had to burn.

  She opened her eyes to the bare, dark-beamed chapel. There was a glow of light—candles, all around her. Someone stood. Father Bernard, the oldest of the priests. Thessaly had not spoken to him, nor noticed him much, but it was he who most often led evening prayers in chapel. His face was at least familiar, and it was a mote of comfort amid disorientation that his pale, calm, silver-haired countenance beamed on her. “You wake, then. Bless our mistress most pure.” He swung the censer a few times more.

  No, not sage. Frankincense. Myrrh.

  Thessaly realized she was lying on the altar. The candles surrounded her. She looked around, sitting awkwardly, clutching her covering—a fine-woven coverlet of silk.

  “What?” She frowned, rubbed at her head. “What is all this?”

  “You were exorcized,” Father Bernard replied, smiling beatifically. “After so heroically disposing of those demons up at the mansion, it’s no wonder Our Lady saw fit to bring you through.” He came closer, and Thessaly saw a tear glimmered under his eye. “Bless you, child. Bless you. The evils have dispersed. It took innocence, a womanly soul in all its perfection, to rout out the wytches and bring peace and safety to the purity that was so long despoiled and taken from amongst us.”

  Thessaly frowned at him. She had no idea what he was prattling about. She wanted to get down, and get a proper covering on, but she was surrounded by candles.

  “Here,” Father Bernard said, tucking the white silk mantle tenderly around her shoulders. “Let me help you descend from the altar.”

  There were stairs, between the glowing rows of candles, leading down to the floor. Thessaly accepted Father Bernard’s hand and stepped down.

  And the room faded, then came back into focus. All those pinpricks of flame glared up at her.

  Flame.

  Fire.

  Burning. Men in metal, women in white. Burning.

  The pleasure seared through her, the memory of it, the power as she’d unleashed the fire on the flesh of a dozen knights and fed it with breath, boiled their blood away, singed flesh to ashes.

  The room bleared again, then focused, and Thessaly was suddenly on the floor, retching. There was nothing in her stomach. It was just muscles and air, a sobbing noise. Floes bloomed around her, snaked out of her, filling the chapel with a blinding light. Father Bernard couldn’t see it. He bent over her, holding her head. “There, child,” he said. “There, there. It was a brave thing you did, being in the midst of such wickedness. And a horror, to be possessed at once with so much evil even as you tried to dispel it. Your frame and purity could not take it, and it filled you. But now it’s gone from your body. Now, your spirit in purity possesses your fleshly frame. You’re clean.” He put a thumb to her forehead, crossing her there as he said it.

  Pain seared her brow. She cried out, then choked and retched again, shaking, hands and knees buried in the rushes.

  No, Father.

  I am not clean.

  Nor am I dispossessed.

  The evil sat there, in her mind: the feel of burning bodies.
She had burned them. And wanted more.

  Even now the bound floes—bloated and seasoned by all that she’d swallowed at the wytches’ fire—sought after the fleshy hand that touched her, that helped her back to her feet. They wanted to warm it, boil it, crisp it until it became incense, salty and terrible and furious with power.

  She gritted her teeth. Vinculum, she thought.

  The floes nudged, but stayed inside her, burning, broad rays.

  She’d chosen them.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and, burning just under her skin, she met the eyes of the priest. “What happened to the babe?” A scythe. Blood. Water. A tiny hand grasping, slick tender flesh on her breast. A tiny voice, screaming, like the voice inside her.

  “Your godfather has sponsored him to the abbey as a postulate.” Father Bernard chuckled. “Perhaps the youngest we’ve had. Bright things can come of hard ones, can they not?”

  Thessaly kept the smile tight on her face and nodded.

  “We’ve made a grave for them—the wytches there at the cross. Pulled it down. Exorcized that, too.” He shook his head. “I thought long ago we ought to do so. Such idols and blasphemies should not be left standing. They only attract the dark things of this world.”

  “Aye.”

  “Holystoan’s men were buried in the churchyard. Consecrated soil. They were martyrs.” He touched her cheek, looked deep into her eyes as if he would like to pluck a splinter of hurt out. “It was not your fault.”

  Thessaly blinked. “Aye.”

  Guzal said nothing as Thessaly entered her room, just gave Thessaly a long look, turned her back and began taking out chemises, overdresses, underdresses, slippers, silk, velvet.

  “Thessaly.”

  The broad, rich voice startled her, and Thessaly turned to see Rosalie and Beatrice in the doorway.

  “Are you all right?” Rosalie asked, bringing a finger to her mouth almost as if she’d like to bite it, then quickly tucking it into a fold of her apricot velvet overdress. The innocence of her movement; the normalcy of the question, of seeing them again—innocent, whole women, while Guzal stooped behind her, working, just as lovely and wise and learned; and after all they had been together, after what they’d seen . . . .