Forged Absolution (Fates of the Bound Book 4)

by Wren Weston

  No placard explained its existence, but Lila knew exactly what it would say.

  Oracle Stone. Carved twelve to sixteen hundred years ago.

  Once upon a time, every oracle on the islands of Britannia and Hibernia owned an oracle stone. Now they were spread all over the commonwealth, just like the stones later crafted in France and Spain and Portugal. Many had been lost, stolen as spoils of war, burgled by private collectors, or broken into pieces and destroyed. Only a few hundred still survived.

  Superstition always followed the stones. Before modern medicine “discovered” oracle’s disease and catalogued its symptoms, people believed that the stones afflicted a chosen girl in their village with the seizures, granting her the sight, giving her the ability to share the thoughts of the gods as she thrashed upon the ground. Now people knew better, recognizing that the women merely possessed a faulty gene. Most believed their visions to be false, and the stories of their deeds had been eschewed as nothing more than perversions of history or myths, similar to the gods themselves.

  The second display case held more gruesome artifacts from the old country and the new. Polished swords, maces, bows and arrows, an entire row of guns and rifles. A worn saddle settled in the middle, a deep red stain covering half the leather.

  Dixon stood transfixed before it. It’s over four hundred years old.

  “Whose was it?”

  He pointed at the placard, his eyes wide.

  “Lilliard. The Lilliard?” She read the placard, shaking her head. The Maid Lilliard had been the oracle queen of Ancrum Moor hundreds of years ago. She’d slain an English commander who had come to take over her village, a man leading an army that fought without an oracle. His people had slunk home after their defeat, rudderless, their will broken.

  That was before the Declaration of Peace, before the Allied Lands had joined together as one. After signing that small piece of parchment, they’d agreed to stop the infighting and fortify themselves against the Holy Roman Empire, a chunk of land that would one day become Italy and Germany. The oracles had pushed the union on behalf of the gods, and the people had believed them, for the women had rarely cooperated or given up power over their tribes.

  Perhaps they’d been wrong to do it. Here it was, hundreds of years later, and they had little power left. The commonwealth fed them like pets, giving them government handouts to keep their compounds in repair.

  “I guess we know which line the oracle comes from.”

  “I guess you do.” Kenna padded softly into the room. Lila and Dixon both stepped away from the display cases like naughty children caught near a jar of sweets. “I believe we can trust you to keep our origin to yourselves.”

  “Why keep it a secret at all?”

  “History teaches us that people flock to those oracles who can trace their lines back the farthest. We know it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. It also overburdens some of our oracles unfairly. The truth never leaves an oracle’s compound.”

  “How do you keep others from talking?”

  “The usual. Blood. Pain. Death.”

  Lila and Dixon caught one another’s eye, not sure if Kenna was joking or not.

  Lila jutted her chin toward the obsidian slab. “You have an oracle stone.”

  “Yes, we do. It’s the only one for five hundred kilometers in any direction, and before you ask, that’s not why Mòr is the state representative for Saxony.” The corners of her mouth crooked upward, but it was obvious Kenna would keep that secret.

  “I never realized her seizures were like that.”

  “Not many do. Usually it’s much gentler than that.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “She touched me before she fell.”

  “Sometimes when my sister touches someone, it triggers a vision. It’s why no one touches her here, why we isolate her at the temple. If she touches you, it’s her choice, and she accepts the consequences.”

  “Why’d she touch me, then?”

  “Because my sister is not some mystical ball of energy?” Kenna said. “She’s a woman, Lila, just like you and I. Sometimes she gets lonely. Sometimes she forgets. She’s dozing now, though. She’ll be better tomorrow after she rests.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? You did nothing wrong. Seizures happen, and there’s little Mòr can do to stop them. She’s not going to live her life in a bubble.” Kenna led them to the vestibule and snatched up her fur coat. “My sister is frustrated that she cannot spend the afternoon with you. She’s asked me to give you a tour of the compound in her place, and procure anything you might need for your stay and your investigation. If you give me a list, I can send it out to the right people. You too, Dixon. I don’t mind reading, you know.”

  Dixon snorted and buttoned up his coat.

  “He’s so damn quiet. What does it take to make him chatty?”

  “Talking to him, rather than near him. It seems that Mòr feels the same way after a seizure.”

  Kenna bowed slightly to Dixon. “My apologies.”

  I haven’t had anything worthwhile to write down, anyway, he scribbled before slipping his notepad back into his pocket.

  “Will she be okay alone?” Lila asked.

  “Connell is with her. He takes good care of her, and he’s the only one she listens to, the besotted little fool.”

  Lila’s mouth hung open.

  “Yes, the oracle has a lover.” Kenna rolled her eyes as she tugged on her fur-lined boots. “She’s a person, Lila. Don’t start thinking of her as something instead someone. Things like that get on her nerves, and she likes you. It’ll hurt her feelings.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You should. My sister likes it when people don’t treat her like an oracle. You treated her like a con-woman when you first met her. That doesn’t happen often.” Kenna studied Lila from her head to her boots. “She might like you as a person, but you terrify her, you know. If half of what she’s seen comes to pass, you’d terrify me too.”

  “What does that even mean? What has she seen?”

  “Blood. Lots of it. Some caused by you, much of it stopped by you. Mòr’s not lying when she says that you are important to the oracles. You’ve already stopped things.”

  “The kidnappings?”

  “She said you were deadly that afternoon, that you had the blessing of Frigg upon you, that you’ve had it since you were an infant.”

  “No, I had a gun,” Lila grumbled. “Why won’t she tell me what she sees before it comes to pass?”

  “Tradition. Rules.”

  “Mòr breaks the rules all the time.”

  “Yes, she breaks silly rules for very good reasons, just as you do. You might dig into a government database if it helps you catch a criminal, but you’d never torture someone, would you?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “You have no idea what is the same thing and what is not. Know the limitations of your own experience, and listen when you should not talk.”

  Lila buttoned up her coat. “Fine. This is me shutting up.”

  “She said.”

  Lila stuck out her tongue.

  Kenna snickered and escorted them from the cabin. Dixon trundled along behind, his eyes absorbing every color he saw. They detoured through a large garden behind the administration building, leafless, thigh-high hedges grown into a labyrinth. Marble statues stood at the center, carved on short pedestals. Bouquets of purple pansies lay at their feet. The six frozen women danced in a ring around a seventh, Sileas, the Blind Oracle, the first of her kind.

  She hadn’t been born blind, though. The teenaged Sileas had been the first to spot ships off the shore near her family’s village. Raiders had landed, camping and entrenching themselves, their weapons of war not far from the beach. They’d come to take the
farms and the land, ready for a long and bloody siege.

  Even Sileas knew that her people could not handle it. Her people had only lived in the area for a generation, and it had been a particularly brutal winter. Food stores had already dwindled, and they wouldn’t survive if the enemy soldiers ruined the fields. After she told the elder men what she had found, the tribal leaders told her to get into the village hall with the rest of the women and children, for none of them were fit to hold a bow or wield a mace. She, just like her mothers and grandmothers, were too weak, good for nothing but one last defense for the children, good for nothing more than desperate pleas against rape.

  Sileas disobeyed the tribal leaders. She ran to the temple instead and asked the gods how she might save her people.

  Frigg answered her call. She’d grown frustrated over the centuries, frustrated that the people had nearly forgotten her and her sisters in favor of her brother-gods, frustrated the people had demoted her from a goddess of war and sex to a scavenger of battlefields, who only pointed to those who had earned an honored place in the halls. She appeared before Sileas in animal skins, her bow slung against her back, asking the teen to make a sacrifice.

  Sileas did as the goddess bid.

  She cut out her own eyes with a stolen dagger.

  Frigg fashioned a necklace from the girl’s eyes, wearing them like pearls on a cord around her neck. In return, she healed the teen’s wounds, filling the holes with orbs of white. Then she handed Sileas a bow and led her to the beach, whispering where the girl should aim.

  The raiders saw the bloody teen on the shore of hill, shooting arrows straight into the hearts of her enemies, a blue light glowing at her side. Sileas pulled her bow without rest, and none of the men could hit her. Their arrows fell at her feet as though they’d struck an invisible barrier.

  Frigg had shot down their arrowheads before they reached their mark.

  The army soon fled back to their ships.

  Tribal elders watched from the outskirts of the village, muttering in fear and awe.

  Sileas never became the beloved of her village. Instead, she became its battle queen, for the first who spoke against her, the first who admonished her for her actions, received an arrow to the heart.

  The blue light then laughed and faded away.

  Sileas spent hours with her sisters after that, puzzling out the images in her mind, for even though she was blind to the human world, she still saw plenty.

  She had a great many visions. She also had a great many daughters. Only daughters, as a matter of fact, all trained to hunt and kill and war and bed any man they wanted, all given the sight in a scattered form. Like their mother, they sacrificed to Frigg. Each vision came with a price.

  The seizures had begun with them.

  Tribal elders never told any woman she could not fight again. They never neglected the goddesses, either, worshipping them and their brothers equally thereafter.

  But they all paid special attention to Frigg.

  Sileas’s daughters took over nearby villages, as ordered by the gods. Those daughters had daughters of their own, which spread to the next villages, ballooning throughout the islands and what would eventually become the Old Country.

  As least, that was what the legends said.

  Lila lifted a finger to brush the sculpture, the deep grooves marring Sileas’ face and her doe eyes. Lila had always imagined her to be soulful and gentle and fragile, but this woman looked anything but that. Her stout frame could have filled out battle armor. Her biceps could have lifted a mace with ease, sight be damned.

  “She reminds me of you,” Lila told Dixon.

  Sileas sacrificed her sight by choice. I’m nothing like her.

  “You both see more. You both hear more.”

  Kenna’s gaze dropped to Dixon’s notepad, the dawn of understanding finally breaking in her eyes. “This statue is almost two hundred years old. The first New Bristol oracle commissioned it for the garden. This was the original site of Waterloo. Of course, when the president of Saxony chose the city as the capital, he renamed it. Did you know that the walls of our compound were once the original walls of the town?”

  “Then he tried to kick the oracles out,” Lila recalled, “claiming they should have a special place to call their own downriver. He almost sold it to the people.”

  “Lamar was a highborn ass. He quickly relearned a lesson that afternoon. The oracles are battle queens—always have been, always will be. Lamar convinced the matrons to move outside these walls soon after. He was too worried the people might return to the old ways if they got too close to Morag. Houston believed the same. It was the only thing those two ever agreed on.”

  Lila looked at the sculpture of Morag Ancrum, a mischievous dimple denting her cheek. She too could have held a mace. “She chose the site of New Bristol, didn’t she?”

  Kenna smiled the smile of her great-great-grandmother, then turned on her heel, her white robe swishing as she led them away. “I’ll take you to the library now.”

  Kenna led them back to the smooth asphalt lane that ran through the center of the compound. They marched toward another structure several stories high, occupying a place across from the admin building. “We tore down six cabins to build it about ten years ago. Half of it is a computer lab. Mòr said you’d need a computer while you stayed here.”

  “I’ll also need access to your network, specifically your logs.”

  “We anticipated that. Mòr has cleared it.” Kenna stifled a grin. “Do try not to copy our data and sell it to the empire.”

  “I’ll endeavor to restrain myself.”

  Kenna climbed up a few stairs and crossed the covered veranda, which wrapped around the entire building. A dozen children reclined on swings and benches, hunching over books and small tables. Some studied separately. Others argued in small groups, their voices hushed as they bent over a page. Whenever any of them looked up, they bowed their heads politely in greeting, eyed the outsiders curiously, then returned quickly to their texts and discussions.

  Lila and Dixon raked their boots upon a mat while Kenna opened the library’s doors. Exposed beams ran along the ceiling, and the entire cabin opened into a large room filled with books and shelves. More young people sat inside, crowded upon couches in little nooks and corners of the library, rugs underneath their feet, pillows behind their backs, and paintings above their heads.

  “First dibs gets you a nook until the library closes,” Kenna explained as she led them down the center aisle. “They’re all getting a jump on next semester’s reading list. Our children work hard.”

  Lila eyed their books as she passed. “They’re all reading different texts.”

  “Of course. Why would they read and study the same things? We educate our children in the old ways. They pick their own reading lists and give reports to their fellow students, teaching them the things they learned. Children learn better and faster when they are interested in the subjects, when they aren’t learning from some stuffy adult with an agenda. Not everyone needs to know calculus and philosophy.”

  “They must know something of the world.”

  Kenna turned. “Oh, please. How much do you remember from science class, Ms. Fancy Pants? Have you drawn any organic molecules lately?”

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  “That’s exactly the point. I’m amazed by what children outside the compound are taught, what they’re tested over, and what they forget a month later. I’m sure you’d be equally amazed at what captures a child’s attention when it’s a friend who’s pointing it out, at what these kids can produce if given the right tools and the right direction. The point of education is learning how to learn, learning what makes a good argument and a good research study. It’s about creating a drive against ignorance and untruths. We are very good at teaching that.”

  Lila narrowed her eyes, unsure.
r />   “Ah, you’re so very highborn and so very like us at the same time.” Kenna approached the checkout counter. She pointed to a row of shelves behind the attendant. “Adults here don’t often have time to wander throughout the library, but our librarians know everyone and their interests. They slip books in with whatever we check out. Everyone still learns here, no matter their age. Everyone reads. Everyone studies. How long has it been since you read something new?”

  “I read up.”

  “On what? Programming languages? What else?”

  “I don’t have time for much else. I’m too busy getting dragged into other people’s emergencies.”

  “Tetchy, aren’t we?” Kenna tapped a little bell, so quiet its sound didn’t travel much beyond the circulation desk. A young man in jeans and a neon-green sweater turned from the bookshelf along the wall and scratched his sideburns, both of which nearly reached his chin.

  “Dixon, what should we get Lila to read while she’s here?”

  Dixon scribbled on his notepad. Gambling.

  “Liam, could you pull a book on gambling and check it out under my account? Add one on the history of the oracles and one on the gods as well. Have them sent to cabin seventy-two, please. A computer will be en route. Just put them on the cart.”

  “That’s all?” Liam scratched his forehead and fixed his gaze upon Lila. “I’ll find a few more to send along. Maybe you’ll like the look of them.”

  He turned to Dixon. “That book you requested about Freyr came in this morning. Would you like anything else to go with it?”

  Dixon shook his head.

  “Freyr?” Lila had seen Dixon reading about the oracles and the gods before she left New Bristol, a consequence of his near death almost two months before. She’d had no idea he’d continued, though. It worried her. “No more books about the gods and the oracles today. Give him a book about the stars.”

  “Stars it is,” the librarian replied.

  Dixon cut her a look.

  “You taught Tristan everything he knows about them, didn’t you?”

  Dixon shrugged.

  Kenna led them away from the circulation desk and toward the back of the library. “It’s too bad the spring term hasn’t yet begun. I could show you the kids’ workshops and studios. Unfortunately, everything’s locked right now, forcing them to take a much-needed rest. Or at least try.”