On the roof, none of them would have noticed had it not caught the sunlight as he drew it, flashing a danger-signal to them even before it was fully out of its hidden place in his sleeve. Philos shouted, and Venli cried out a warning, but neither of them reacted as fast as Coram.
Coram flung himself off the roof. For an endless moment he plummeted horribly downwards, then his wings jerked out with a crash and boom as the air hit them. He landed so hard the courtyard floor around him cracked with a noise like a thunderclap. His wing swept round, scooping Aera off her feet and out of the way of the knife before it had even begun to descend.
And then, as Philos’s eyes adjusted, as what he was looking at resolved out of a blur of speed, he realised Coram was not the only one who had moved. Maya was there too, her feet trailing blood from her leap off the roof onto the hard stone, her forearm against the priest’s throat, her free hand clamped around his wrist. The priest screamed, a sound of abject pain, and the knife clinked onto the ground.
The watchers left on the roof turned as one and fled down the stairs to the ground. Iraus, in front of Philos, moved clumsily, fatigue making him stumble on the stairs, and for a shameful instant Philos wanted to push him out of the way and not care about where he fell. Maya, Maya had hurt herself. And she’d pitted herself against the priests who such a short while ago had been her masters. If they told her to submit to them, she would. No one can overturn their training that quickly—damn it, Iraus, move out of the way.
He came out into sunlight, dazzling him, making his eyes water so for a moment he couldn’t see, out into a tumult of shouts.
“—take your hand down, maenad! How dare you turn on the very priests who made you? Take your hand down.”
A snarl, a sound that raised the hairs on Philos’s skin even as he recognised who it came from. “Never tell me what to do. Never tell me what to do again.”
Then a snap like the snap of a twig, nearly drowned by another scream, a scuffle, a harsh gasp. One priest staggered backward. The other was a huddle on the ground.
She broke his neck. She killed him.
Horror came over Philos in a cold wave as Maya turned, slowly, her feet leaving bloody footprints on the stone, her eyes huge and dark. The face of the maenad who’d tried to kill him. The face of a maenad giving in to madness.
We should never have brought her here. No matter how much we needed her. She was too much a monster, and what had they expected, forcing her face to face with the priests who’d stolen her free will, stolen half her life?
Then as Philos’s eyes cleared, he saw the priest on the ground move. His arm lay with his wrist at an angle that showed it, not his neck, was broken.
Maya’s gaze swept the courtyard. It wasn’t madness in her face. It was anger—and determination. Not the face of a maenad, but the face of a warrior who’d chosen her side, and would stay on it.
Her mouth opened over the unnaturally sharp white teeth. “The priests may have made me,” she said. “But only the god made the fire-priestess. She does not kill, she does not need to. She has me to do it for her.”
Philos felt the shiver that ran through the crowd, felt it shudder over his flesh too. Those bloody feet, the gleam of sharp teeth. If he hadn’t known she had just chosen not to kill the priest, he, like the crowd, would find it easy to believe that she would kill with neither thought nor pity.
“There will be no killing,” came Aera’s voice. She had picked herself up from where Coram had thrown her. A bruise was already darkening on her bare arm. She pointed at the two priests. “Take them away.” Her voice and face were calm, the deliberate, detached calm of a priestess. But for a moment her gaze fell on Maya, and a tiny smile touched her lips. Not only had the fire-priestess returned to her temple, she had returned with the most feared bodyguard imaginable.
And it was at that moment that Philos knew they had won.
Chapter Nineteen
Two days later, it was over. The city seemed already a new place, full of the flowering of gifts that had never before seen the light of day. The priests were gone, and in the temple Aera, her bracelets once more winking silver at her wrists, was gathering her new followers about her. Young women who had been taught never to expect anything but a lifetime of service—or failure and death. Guards threatened with having their tongues cut out if they revealed the priests’ secrets. Novice priests, more fortunate than the priestesses but for whom, still, Aera’s return brought more freedom than they could ever have hoped for.
Wherever Aera went, Maya went with her, a shadow at her heels, as intimidating as if Aera held a hunting-cat on a loosely held leash, silent and menacing—and in her maenad form.
It had initially left her some hours after that confrontation in the courtyard. The aftermath of the change from maenad to human had not been as violent as the first time Philos had seen her go through it, many days ago by the ocean, but it had not been easy, either. And she’d come out of it furious that the power had left her—not, this time, that it had left her at all, but that it had left her so soon.
“Aera can never win their trust if she has to stay shifted,” she’d said, her teeth chattering in the aftermath. “She has to have bodyguards, she has to.”
“We’re all here,” Coram had said. The group of them had retreated temporarily to the chambers set aside for the fire-priestess, and were, for the moment, alone. “She’ll not lack for bodyguards, Maya—”
A spasm of sickness shook Maya. Philos saw her fight it, breathing hard through her teeth. She was white, and her lips were swollen and bloody where she’d bitten them as the change took her. “It’s not enough. You think anyone is as feared as a maenad? It wasn’t you they shrank from today, Coram.”
Coram laughed. “I have no illusions here, Maya, I know it was you. But they shrank from Aera too. You’re frightening, but even you aren’t as frightening as she can be.”
“But she can’t—”
“But I don’t want to be frightening.” Aera’s voice overrode Maya’s. “I don’t want to rule as the priests did, through fear. Maya’s right—I can shift when I need to, but I don’t want to live—to rule—that way.”
Philos stood silent, listening, watching Maya’s face, knowing that, of all of them, he was the one whose interference she would welcome the least. He knew, also, what she was going to say, and that he had no right to try to persuade her otherwise.
The next bout of sickness came upon her before she could fight it. She doubled over, retching. But when it was over and she could speak, she said it, said the thing he’d been dreading.
“Give me the volcano’s blood again. Let me shift back.”
“Into that madness?” Venli’s voice was shrill. “I don’t think so. You could have killed Philos last time—and us, for all I know. Aera, Coram, you won’t let her—?”
Maya flung her a razor-edged look. “You, keep quiet. You have nothing to say to this.”
“I have as much to say as anyone—”
Aera cut across her. “No, Venli, you don’t. But Maya, her question is a fair one. Last time—”
“Yes.” Maya’s fingers were white on the cup of water she’d taken up after the sickness eased. “But I controlled it. I didn’t know I could—if you’d asked me, I would have said I couldn’t, that when it took over it wiped everything else out. But I did. I controlled it, and I made it work for us.” Her eyes came up to Aera’s. “I can do it again. Tie me up, chain me, until you’re sure I’m safe. I don’t care. And I won’t ask for it when things are over, when you need no longer fear the hand of an assassin in everyone who comes near you. I know my power is more dangerous than anyone else’s, I know the priests created it for evil only. I know—” For a moment her voice faltered. “I can’t keep it forever. I don’t ask to. I just ask—gods, look, we’re fighting a war here. I only have one weapon, let me use it. Let me fight too.”
There was more talk, of course, but it ended with them doing as she asked, keeping her chained till they w
ere sure she was, as she’d said, controlling her power. Then, fully maenad, she followed Aera wherever she went, a shadow at her heels, a hunting-cat on a loosely held leash.
Coram went with her as well. It was too soon to reveal that Aera’s relationship with him was anything more than priestess and bodyguard, but that would come. Things were changing. There would be a time when those who served the god would not have to give up everything else to do so.
For some, though, this new freedom brought not relief but pain. Maya’s fellow maenads were still shocked, half-vacant, dealing with what Maya herself had had to deal with: the realisation that they’d been nothing but murderers, that the gift they’d thought was honouring the god had been nothing but a useful—and bloody—tool for the priests.
And they were feared. Philos watched, and saw how even the animal-shifters—those like Leos—were accepted more easily than the maenads. The temple people remembered them as pure hunters, born to do nothing but tear and kill. And even in their human state, the priests, priestesses and others skirted round them, intent on not meeting their eyes, on not letting their paths cross.
They emerged very seldom from their quarters, the underground chamber where they’d lived. And Philos, watching them with a pity that had started with Maya and spread, knew that, for them, it would feel easier to hold themselves aloof rather than risking contact with others and being rebuffed.
He had been there. So few people had overcome their discomfort with his gift—Aera, Coram, Venli, Leos…Maya. How many fewer would manage to do so with the maenads, with all the blood that stained their hands?
That first day, Aera had spoken at length with them. And two days after the takeover of the temple, Philos saw Maya go down into their quarters. She came out shivering, though, the harsh lines of her maenad face set even harder, set like stone. Whether she’d managed to help and comfort them or not, she had found no comfort for herself.
She walked across the courtyard and disappeared into the doorway to the staircase that led to the central tower’s roof. Philos glanced at the sun where it was sliding into the west, dyeing the thin trails of clouds so deep a red it was as if the sky were bleeding to death. She was coming towards another change, and as she had last time, she was going to go through it alone. The day before, when the first spasm had shaken her and Aera had turned to her in concern, she’d made it clear, through gritted teeth, that she would so much prefer to not be watched.
Helpless, he looked after her as she disappeared. She was hurting badly, and he could do nothing. All he could do was keep away from her, far enough away that the empathy could fade and die, wait and see if anything he’d felt for her was real.
It wasn’t dying fast. Every time he saw her, saw the set look of pain in her face, obvious even in her changed maenad features, remembered that he’d put that there, it struck through him like knives. Worse than the guilt he’d felt over Venli, worse than the pain he’d felt when Maya had told him he was not enough for her. To see her like that, when it was his fault, and he could do nothing to make her better…
“You know,” said Venli, “you’re being stupid.”
He turned to see her standing beside him. He was scraped raw, bleeding—of everyone he didn’t want to talk to, Venli was the one he wanted to least. He couldn’t think about her now, not when Maya was moving through her days with that awful look on her face. “If you have nothing more helpful to say—”
“That is the most helpful thing I can say to you.” Her eyes blazed into his. “You’re going round in circles, acting just the way you did two years ago. All that time away, and have you learned nothing?”
“I know, all right?” It was more than he could stand, having Venli assuming the right to reprimand him about not just what he’d done to her, but what he’d done to Maya. As if he didn’t already hate himself for being so stupid as to do it again. “Clearly, I haven’t learned. Believe me, I feel that a lot more sharply than you do.”
“Gods.” Venli rolled her eyes. “That’s what I mean. A few little similarities, and you start believing you’re exactly who you were two years ago. You’re not. That’s why you’re stupid.”
He looked down at her, anger settling into a kind of heavy patience. “Very well, I’m stupid. I must be, because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If what I’ve done has shown me anything, it’s that I am who I was two years ago.”
Venli sighed, too dramatically. “Except that you’re not.”
“What?”
“You’re not the same as you were. And she—she’s not me. It’s not the same thing, and you’re wrecking it by letting yourself believe it is.”
For the first time something like hope unfolded within him, turning his stomach upside down. “What? You’re saying I—”
“You do love her.” Venli looked away, folded her arms across herself. “Idiot.” Sudden anger spat through her voice. “I’m the last person who should have to be telling you this. Believe me, I damn well wouldn’t be if Leos hadn’t said I should.”
“But—Venli, what—how can you possibly know?”
She dragged her gaze up to his, and he could feel the unwillingness within her, the old hurt that was, now, not so much pain as humiliation. But for someone like Venli, humiliation was worse than pain. “Because you never looked at me the way you look at her.”
“I—oh.”
She looked away again. “I knew, back then. I knew you didn’t love me, even when you said you did. I kept hoping, and sometimes, when we were…” she flushed, stumbled, “…when we were together, it felt like you did. But other times, I’d look at you and I’d just see…haziness in your eyes, the way you look when you’re using mindspeech. And I realised…not immediately, but it kept coming back to me…that what I was seeing was your gift at work, nothing to do with me at all.”
She swallowed. “That’s why I went away that time. I—I hoped I was wrong, I hoped… But when I came back, that was when you told me, and it turned out I was right.”
Anger licked through him, but not as much as he’d thought he’d feel. She should have told him this a long time ago, should have set him free from the weight of guilt he’d thought was all his. But…well, what did it matter? What mattered was what else she was saying, about him. About Maya.
“And with her—I look—it’s different?”
“Yes.” She hesitated a moment, and again humiliation showed in her face, bone-white, naked. “For the gods’ sakes, I shouldn’t need to tell you. After we—two years ago, after you told me it was over—you never looked at me that way. You never looked…” She gave her hands a sharp shake, as if trying to be free of something. “I’m just going to say it. It doesn’t matter to me anymore, it doesn’t matter. Look, I was hurt, and you felt…oh, guilty, sorry, I know all that. But you never looked at me the way you’ve been looking at her. As if, if you could, you’d cut your own arm off to stop her hurting. Think, Philos. Think about what you’re feeling now, when you look at her, when you see all that pain and know you caused it, and tell me it’s all just the same as what you thought you felt for me.”
The words hit him like blows. He found himself staring at her, looking like the idiot she’d called him.
She was right. He should have seen it himself, should have seen it days ago. He’d never felt like that about Venli, even after the months of being with her, the months of thinking that it was real. But with Maya—he’d lived through only a few days of this and yet Venli was right, he was ready to cut his own arm off if it would spare Maya pain.
He had to go. He had to go and find her. But leaving Venli like this…
“Venli—”
“Oh please.” She jerked a look at him. “Why do you think I’m telling you? It’s not because I want anything. I’m happy now. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be too. Go find her, for the gods’ sakes.”
“Maya?”
She was sitting on the edge of the roof, in mostly human form, a little huddled, her hands gri
pping its edge, her legs dangling. For an instant his imagination flashed an image into his mind. Her hands changing their grip, pushing her off into emptiness, towards the hard ground below. The way she’d done as a maenad; the way that, if she did it now, would kill her.
But then she turned her head and he knew that wasn’t what she was thinking. She might be unhappy, and hurting through and through, but she would never give up like that.
“Yes?” she said.
Now he was here he couldn’t think how to start, or where. How could he take them back to where they had been? How would she believe him?
He thought of how Venli had started what she’d said to him. After all, there were worse ways to begin an apology.
“I was stupid,” he said.
Maya’s shoulders slumped a little more. “Please, not now. You didn’t mean to, I know, I know.”
Her pain went through him. The usual empathy, of course, but so much worse than that had ever been by itself. He had been stupid. What he’d felt for Maya, since so early on, it had always been stronger than anything that had come before it. If he hadn’t been so afraid of making the same mistake twice, he’d have known that, he’d have recognised it for what it was.
He still had none of the right words, nowhere good to start, but he couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t be cautious, careful, all the things he’d tried to be, all the things that—with horrible irony—had ended up pushing him into the worst mistake of his life.
“I was stupid,” he said, “because I love you. I loved you all along, and I was an idiot to doubt it.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. You don’t know this. You said, you won’t be sure until you go away, until you’re out of reach of…” She broke off, gestured towards herself.
“I do know it.”
“You don’t.” The familiar flash of anger blazed into her face. “Stop trying to be kind. If you hadn’t been kind to start with this would never have happened. Now I’m just trying to—to—” She stumbled, missed out what she’d been going to say, carried on. “And you’re here again, being kind, making me—” She broke off. “Don’t do it. I’ve had enough.”
Blood of the Volcano: Sequel to Heart of the Volcano Page 22
