A collective gasp spread through the room.
The last knife reached lower, scraping the tender hollow of my back just above my buttocks, and I fought the instinct to pull away, but I finally flinched. I couldn't see her, only the slate floor beneath me, my long dark hair tumbling down around my face in a swirling black tunnel that blocked the world out-except for the rhythmic rasp of the blades.
Pauline sat nearby watching, probably with worried eyes. Perfect stillness helped me hide the humiliation of my nakedness as strange hands touched me. The bearers were well aware that their lives depended on their skill. I remained perfectly still, even though I knew the knives brushing my skin were held with cautious hands. I lay naked, facedown on a stone-hard table, my eyes focused on the floor beneath me while strangers scraped my back with dull knives. By this point, numbness had overtaken me, but then midday approached, and my heart galloped again as I faced the last of the steps that kept here from there. The prescribed liturgies passed as they were ordained, the rituals and rites as each had been precisely laid out, all a testament to the greatness of Morrighan and the Remnant from which it was born. I pushed away from the window, fogged with my own breath, and left the endless hills of Morrighan to their own worries.
I closed my eyes against the thought, knowing that soon the day would cleave in two, forever creating the before and after of my life, and it would happen in one swift act that I could no more alter than the color of my eyes. There was no escaping what was to come.įor good or bad, the hours were closing in. It was the first of June, but cold gusts bit at the hilltop citadelle as fiercely as deepest winter, shaking the windows with curses and winding through drafty halls with warning whispers. Today was the day a thousand dreams would die and a single dream would be born.
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