Her smile brightens. “Until then.” She lifts my palm to her lips, laying a tender kiss there. It leaves a smear of red on my skin. Then she lets me go and takes her seat. “Quickly now,” she says to the bearers.
They carry her away from me. A moment later, my own bearers lift my paarit from the platform and whisk me down the steps. The acolytes and apprentices press the citizens back to give us a path. The jubilant mood has been siphoned away, replaced with brittle fear. Their faith is weak. Their doubt so easily overwhelms them. It’s pathetic. The Valtia can raise infernos with her fingertips. She can wield icebergs with her thoughts. She creates a dome of warmth over our city that lasts from the end of fall to the beginning of spring. What other people in this cold climate can grow fruits and vegetables in the frigid winter months? What city can build any time of year because the ground never freezes? Only us! All because of her power, which she uses only to serve them.
And yet, they seem cowed and uneasy as they look up at me. Suddenly this paint on my face feels like a prison. I want to scrape it from my skin and burst forth, vengeful and shouting. Instead I sit placidly as my bearers jog up the road to the temple, which sits at the northernmost tip of the peninsula that juts like a giant, curving thumb deep into the waters of the Motherlake.
I hold my head high as we move. I want everyone to see that I, for one, am not scared. I’m not. I’m not. Yes, my heart is beating like a dragonfly’s wings. Yes, my palms are sweating over the armrests of my grand chair. But that’s only because I’m hot and frustrated. Not because I’m scared for my Valtia. She’ll crush those Soturi. I saw the promise in her eyes.
She doesn’t break her promises.
The bearers mount the steps leading up to the temple. The blond young man at the right front side, the one who tried to steal an extra peek at my face, stumbles halfway up. My paarit lurches forward, and I grit my teeth to hold in the scream. But before I topple off the chair, the corner jerks upward. Kauko—who always remains behind to guard the temple on ceremony days—stands in the pillared entrance to the domed chamber, his fist raised as he commands the swirling icy-hot air around my paarit. The elder releases his grip only when an apprentice rushes forward and grabs the pole. As the blond bearer stammers his frantic apologies, more apprentices and acolytes crowd around, helping the bearers heft the weight of my paarit and my dress and my useless, as-yet-unmagical body. We move up the steps again.
A few minutes later they’ve put me down and disappeared, leaving me alone in my own corridor, waiting for my maids. More than anything, I need Mim, and it’s all I can do not to call her name. But before I reach my breaking point, she’s at my side, taking my arm and guiding me off my paarit and into my chamber.
“Do you want the others to come help?” she asks me.
“No. Please. Can you just do it?” Right now I couldn’t stand to have all the maids quivering with anxiety and whispering gossip as they work on me.
She gives me a quick nod and undresses me with practiced fingers. She huffs with strain as she lifts my dress from the floor and strides to the door with it. I close my eyes as I listen to her giving the other maids orders to put it back in its special case in the catacombs below the temple. She’s gone but a moment and then I feel a cool, dripping cloth on my chest, wiping the lead paint from my skin. “Please hurry,” I say, my fists clenching and unclenching.
“I am, Elli,” she replies in a strained voice. “I know this is hard. I know you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared!” I shriek, so abruptly that she stumbles back. “How dare you suggest that? Your doubt is probably weighing heavy on her, right when she most needs her strength!” My voice breaks over the rocks of my rage. I can’t get the sight of the Valtia’s bandaged arms out of my head.
Mim’s eyes are round as dinner plates. “S-s-aadella,” she stammers, “I’m so sorry.”
The shock on her face brings me so much shame that it burns. Tears start in my eyes and overflow in a mere second. “Apologies,” I whisper. “Please continue.”
She approaches me as if I’m a wounded bear, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. But I hold everything inside as she finishes cleaning my chest and neck and face. She gingerly removes my copper circlet, then draws my arms through my nightgown and pulls it down over my head. “Would you like something to eat?”