Kossal shook his head. “You know as well as I do that the killing is only half of our devotion.”
“And why do I feel,” she asked, narrowing her eyes slyly at him, “that the other half is about to come due?”
The priest didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed on the creatures who had come to add our skulls to the wall. Ruc leaned close to murmur in my ear. “This is the time. Five of us against three of them.”
He seemed to have forgotten our truncated fight, forgotten the fact that I’d come to kill him. Maybe the arrival of the Three had wiped it from his mind, or maybe my surrender had convinced him I was harmless. Either way, he didn’t want to fight me anymore. Instead, he wanted to fight these creatures who had walked the world for countless thousands of years.
I glanced over at Ela and Kossal, then down at the Three. They still hadn’t moved. If this was a hunt, they seemed in no hurry to start hunting. On the other hand, there was nowhere for us to go. To flee was to die running. They stood with the lazy ease of predators who knew their prey could not escape.
The appearance of the Nevariim had jarred something loose inside me, broken something, some notion or belief I didn’t even know I held until it shattered. They shouldn’t have been real, shouldn’t have been standing there, and yet there they were, waiting to slaughter us in exactly the same way that they had slaughtered so many thousands or tens of thousands before us.
That mattered, somehow, mattered in some way beyond our own imminent destruction. In that moment I could not say how, only that the whole world had shifted. Staring at that awful perfection, I knew that I knew nothing, that things I had believed in the deepest heart of myself were wrong. They would unmake us—I saw that clearly enough—but I wanted to see the world clearly before I was unmade, to know it.
I wanted, just for once, to know myself.
As I grappled with my own inchoate need, Kossal, who had locked eyes with the creatures the moment they first stepped out of the brush, turned to Ela. To my shock, he smiled, then made a low, formal bow. It should have looked ridiculous—a naked old man, bent over, baking in the noonday sun—but somehow he managed to look graceful, even elegant. He might have been a young soldier at a ball, half bedazzled by Ela’s beauty, harnessing his courage to his gallantry. He straightened up, then gestured toward the Three, never taking his eyes from the woman.
“Ela Timarna, priestess of Ananshael, second, greatest, and last love of my life, will you join me in this dance?”
A quick shiver snaked up my spine. It wasn’t because of the arrival of the Three, or not just that. This was something different, more. Staring at the priestess and the priest, I felt a tremor in my flesh, a new note rising, for which I had no name.
Ela smiled, stepped in, hooked the back of Kossal’s neck with the flat arc of a sickle, drew him close, then pressed her lips to his. I’d seen her kiss him dozens of times during the trek south, chaste pecks on the back of the head, mocking, wet smacks on the cheek. This was altogether different. For a long time they stayed like that, the priest and the priestess, eyes closed, hands filled with their weapons, bodies pressed together. Something inside me stirred at the sight, an ache, as though some organ I didn’t know I possessed were trembling after a long stillness.
When they finally broke apart, Ela studied him with sparkling eyes. “My love,” she said finally.
Kossal raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Ela laughed, spread her hands. Her sickles winked sunlight. “Of course.”
Twin flowering vines of wonder and horror wrapped me, strangled me—wonder at the sight before me, horror that I would understand it all too late. Something in the way they stood, the way they looked at each other, something in Kossal’s … no, it wasn’t Kossal, it was Ela … There was something there, something about her, but I couldn’t grasp it, not quite.
I looked over at Ruc. He was wary, ready. I turned back to the priestess and priest. I wanted to study them forever, to stare at them until I knew what it was I was seeing, but of course, I could not stare at them forever. In moments the Nevariim would tear them apart.
I stumbled forward, words tumbling from my mouth. “You can’t.”
The priestess and priest turned to me.
“The Trial isn’t over,” I pleaded, searching for the words. “You are my Witnesses. You can’t die now. You can’t die yet.”
Kossal shook his head gently. “Everyone serves the god, Pyrre. Even those who never pass the Trial.”
“And today,” Ela added, winking at me, “we will make a great offering.”
“I’m not done,” I protested.
I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. My god had come. He was waiting patiently in the rushes, floating just beneath the water’s surface, lying silent on the wind. I was supposed to welcome him, to hurl myself joyfully into his embrace. I had prepared for this all my life, for the sacred moment of my own unmaking, and now that it was here … where was my faith?
I wasn’t fit to be a priestess. I had become like any other benighted woman—some fisher or farmer—scrabbling for one last moment, then another, then another, as though my life were something I could keep, as though it were some chilly crystal in a lightless cave that would stay perfectly unchanged down the endless generations.
“There is no more time,” Kossal said.
“There is. I have until the end of the day!”
Panic, like a rat trapped inside my chest, raked me with cold, awful claws. I had come so close. By afternoon at the latest, the spiders would hatch inside Chua. I could give her to the god, and then there would be only the question of my love, one last mystery, one final box to unlock. After a lifetime of bafflement I felt as though I finally had the key, that it was secreted on me somewhere, that I could find it if I only had the time … and yet that would mean nothing if my Witnesses died first.
“I’m not ready,” I whispered.
“Which is why,” Kossal replied quietly, “you have failed your Trial.”
The words went through me like a spear. I stood like a slaughtered beast, too stupid to remember to fall. Ela gave me an unreadable smile, then pursed her lips and blew me a kiss. Before I could respond, the two of them turned away, turned toward their own ends, shoulders relaxed, bronze weapons light as laughter in their hands.