“Clopclop! We’re having goat brisket again! Seems appropriate, doesn’t it?”
That was Brother Misha, teasing. The others followed, four of them in all, sometimes friends, more often tormentors.
She veered behind a red velvet curtain that hid one of the half dozen prayer rooms. The others assumed she didn’t pray – her knees didn’t bend properly for their human benches – but she did. Fiercely.
They passed just beyond the curtain, their shadows bobbing across the ceiling. Sister Ribbon laughed, tone dry. “You of all people should appreciate the sacrifice your cousins made for our lunch.”
“Come sit with us,” Misha added. “You’re nearly a saint now, but surely you can still break bread with the rest of us.”
They moved on.
Lain exhaled. It wasn’t the meat. She couldn’t stomach any to begin with. The real danger was Misha’s breath, his closeness. Her pupils dilated so fast it had frightened her. Her Heat was coming on early.
She unbound her tail, letting it curl around her thigh with relief. Pressure bloomed behind her eyes and scalp, where antlers threatened to break through. She steadied herself, then jogged to Elder Tanel’s office, her hooves padding softly in their leather caps.
She found the door half-open.
“Tanel?” she said softly.
No answer. She pushed the door open and stepped in. The hearth was cold. Stacks of books were piled high on every surface. His gloves were hung to dry, and his satchel was missing from its peg.
The office smelled of him: parchment, ink, some male scent that was only Tanel’s.
Lain gripped the edge of the desk, feeling the grain of the wood under her thumb as if it had been carved an hour ago. Sound and texture sharpened in her awareness.
Where would he go after lunch bells?
But she knew. Of course she knew.
Before she left the office, she tucked her tail back into her slacks.
Lain retraced her steps, keeping to the lesser-used passages that ran along the inner side of the Spire. The main cloister would be busy, Unsung Sisters carrying linens, Brighthands crossing on their rounds. She couldn’t risk brushing past anyone in this state. She wanted to touch things. To lean against warm shoulders. To feel breath on her neck.
She slipped through a servants’ door out onto the cloister walk, where frost filmed the stones. The mountain light was thin and blue, one of their first sunny days in weeks. The late winter air bit her throat, but the cold felt good, alive, the way riverwater woke the senses.
Across the courtyard and beyond the Dawn Spire sat the council hall, regal with tall arched windows, shutters open to bring in the rare bit of sunshine, and a broad staircase worn in the center by generations of civic feet.
People milled about outside, waiting for their turn to speak to the council on public matters. One or two glanced up at her as she went, a woman bowing. “Bellborn,” the woman said.
Lain gave a polite nod, and carried on as quickly as she could.
She curved wide of the building, through another courtyard less tended to, this one filled with ancient beech trees, their leaves gone still. On the other side sat the Chapel of Saint Fillan, its narrow windows catching the morning light. She made for it, capped hooves whispering against the stone. Her tail twined and untwined against her calf as if it had its own opinion about where she was going.
She placed a hand against the chapel door to soak in the roughness where the wood had split and been mended over years of winter. When she pushed, the hinges complained, then yielded.
Inside, the chapel waited in its usual hush. Most of the Dawn Spire’s buildings had been outfitted with scale lights, but they never seemed to work in this chapel, so the stubborn sconces continued to bear candles. Wax clung to the candle trays in thick, uneven drips. A faint sweetness of incense filled the cold air. The golden statue of Saint Fillan stood at the back, head rubbed smooth, back scarred by time or theft, feet missing entirely. The saint cupped her hands as if offering light. Lain didn’t like to think about anyone sawing a saint to pieces. But she had grown up with the story of Saint Fillan, so perhaps the Saint meant more to her than she did to most people.
“Tanel,” Lain whispered, scanning the pews, but he wasn’t there.
She crossed the small space, checking the curtained alcove and the tiny vestry, its door slightly warped from some forgotten leak. Her senses kept catching on small things – the crackle of frost melting on windowpanes, the soft brush of her own sleeve when she moved her arm. She felt too present in her body, too aware of how warm her palms were, how bright the colors of the stone looked.
Still, no Tanel.
She sat in the front pew, letting the cool wood press against the back of her pasterns. Her tail shifted, restless, tucked into her slacks, and she brought it out again, running her fingers along the pearly scales until she reached the curly white tuft at its end. Under the fur was a hard, claw-like spur, and she pressed it against her palm, nearly piercing herself, and that sharp edge of pain sent a pleasant shudder all through her.
“Saint Fillan watches,” Elder Tanel sometimes said, when he caught her here after hours.
“Is that all she does?” she’d asked once.
“She remembers,” he replied. “And if we’re fortunate, she forgives.”
Lain stared up at the cupped hands and tried to imagine what Fillan had been meant to hold before the gold rubbed away. A lamp. A bell. A wolf’s muzzle. In the children’s version, the saint’s miracle was simple: Fillan ploughed her fields while singing the earthsong. A wolf came, she rang a bell and tricked it into guarding her oxen instead of eating them. The story ended there, neat as a stitched hem. It was the sort of story you told to frightened children to reassure them that cleverness and faith would always outmatch hunger.
Well, she was hungry now. What bell would come to tame her?
The latch clicked behind her.
Embarrassed, she dropped her tail and turned.
Elder Tanel hummed under his breath as he eased the door shut behind him, not noticing her at first. He wore his plain robes, a dark mantle over his shoulders, his black curls brushed back with his fingers only. When he finally saw her in the front pew, tail untied, eyes wide, he stopped short.
“Lain,” he said. His voice dropped. “Oh.”
She rose, breath catching. “I’m sorry. I know I’m supposed to be in the refectory. I just –”
His gaze took her in quickly, moving from her flushed face to the flex of her hands.
“How long?” he asked.
“Since just after second bell,” she said. “It came on fast.”
He set his satchel down on the nearest pew. The gentleness in his expression didn’t falter, but a new tension drew itself across his shoulders.
“You did right to come here,” he said. “Sit again.”
She obeyed. The word had never felt like an order to her, not from him. More like a rope thrown across a chasm.
He moved down the aisle and knelt beside the pew, careful not to crowd her. None of the other Elders allowed themselves to develop facial hair until their hair grew in fully white; but Elder Tanel’s short black beard framed his face neatly. He was close enough that the scent of cold air off his robes and the warmth of his skin beneath it reached her like a promise of fire.
“Look at me,” he said softly.
She did.
“Follow my hand.”
He lifted two fingers and tracked them in front of her. Her eyes followed the movement with unnatural precision; the world seemed outlined in a slightly sharper line where his hand cut through it. His fingertips drew a little arc of attention wherever they went. She knew this was him checking on her, assessing. It still felt like a game.
He watched her pupils, then made a small sound under his breath that might have been concern.
“Only at noon bell, you said? Any pain?”
She shook her head. “No. It feels…”
She searched for the word. Alive was too small. Burning sounded wrong.
“Loud,” she settled on. “Everything feels loud.”
He made a wry sound at that. “I remember.” He hesitated. “Well. Suppose I should find that recipe. It might be in my satchel… are you feverish?”
His palm came to rest lightly against her brow.
There came a fire.
The spark of it raced through her like someone had struck a tuning fork inside her chest. The Tuning – that part of her that made her a Glinnel, that part of her that gave her empathic sense, the part that meant she could sing for the serpent – rose with sudden, startling clarity. His warmth leapt into her skin; the exact shape of his hand anchored itself in her awareness.
Tanel’s eyes widened. He must have felt the answering rise in himself, the way the Tuning sang louder when they were this close.
He knew better than to touch her. He should have pulled away.
Instead, he let his hand linger a heartbeat longer, then brushed his thumb once along the line of her temple, soothing as he had when she was small and fevered.
The Heat surged up to meet the pressure, delighted to find a path. Sensation pooled at the point of contact, then spread, winding down her body in a fast and certain coil. The air seemed to draw warm around them; the saint’s statue and the pews and the altar all stood motionless, anticipating the thing inside Lain that moved.
She leaned forward just a little, so his hand wouldn’t have to reach as far.
“Lain,” he said, warning in his tone, but a plea, too.
He filled her Tuning. His pulse, his restraint, his sudden, unwanted answering to her Heat. It dipped into her awareness like a hand into warm water.
Her tail coiled along his leg, tugging him closer of its own accord.
The impulse to withdraw fought with his impulse to stay. His hand slid from her forehead to her cheek, cupping her face. The feel of his palm along her jaw was so intensely right that she swayed toward it.
Her fingers caught the sleeve of his robe, pulling just enough that their faces were very close. Her pupils were so wide now the world had narrowed to the color of his eyes, the fine lines at their corners, the way his lips parted slightly as he tried to find the right words.
“Lain,” he said again, and the way he spoke her name was not Elder to Sister. It was something else, older and more afraid.
The Tuning snapped fully open. It felt like falling and landing at the same time. Every point where they touched became its own small sun: her cheek in his hand, her fingers knotted in his sleeve, her tail along his leg. The Heat rejoiced, delighted to finally have something to coil around that was not empty air or cold stone.
He moved before she could. He shifted, meaning to stand, to put distance between them. But his knees slipped against the worn floor. He lost his balance and grabbed for the pew. She reached to steady him, misjudging the angle. They tumbled together in a graceless, startled heap onto the chapel floor.
For a breath there was no up or down.
His weight was braced over her, forearms on either side of her shoulders. Her tail wrapped itself more firmly around his thigh, holding him there. She clutched at his shoulders and held just the barest touch of her fingertips on the skin of his throat. The warmth of his body rushed across the small distance between them like heat from a banked fire that had finally been given air.
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Her Heat had no sense of scandal. It only knew that every inch of him felt like the answer to some impossible question – the roughness of his robes against her fingers, the set of his beard on his jaw, his breath – all of it sent pleasure through her. Her teeth closed without thought on the collar of his robe, fabric and the faint salt of skin beneath, a possessive tug that made him groan, low in his throat.
His body betrayed him. She felt it in the way his hips shifted reflexively, the way his hand tightened on the ground beside her head until his knuckles blanched. The Tuning between them roared and for a terrible perfect moment he gave in. His forehead dropped to hers. His nose brushed her hairline. His breath washed over her mouth. One hand lifted from the floor and braced briefly at her waist, fingers biting through the fabric as if to assure himself she was solid.
She would feel the shape of his palm there for the rest of her life.
But when his hand reached for her neck, it landed on the bell collared to her throat, and something in him caught.
He jerked back as if scalded, tearing himself free of her tail’s hold and the drag of her hands. He staggered to his feet, breathing hard, eyes wide with horror – not at her, but at himself.
Saint Fillan looked down at them both, hands outstretched, as if she had witnessed this a hundred times in a hundred different cloisters.
Lain lay where she’d fallen, chest heaving, the stone floor cold against her back and the rest of her body too warm by far. The Heat sang in her, wild and insistent. Once given a taste of what it wanted, it railed at its loss.
“Saints forgive me,” Tanel whispered.
He turned away, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Lain said. She didn’t know what she was apologizing for – her presence, her nature, the way her body reached without permission. All of it seemed to fit.
“No.” His voice roughened. “No, little one. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He kept his eyes away from her as he spoke, as if even the sight of her might be too much. When he finally turned again, he had drawn the edges of his composure back around himself, if thinly.
“I should have had a draught prepared in advance, so you could have found it in my office,” he said. “That was my failing.” His gaze flicked once to her, then away, not daring to linger. “Can you stand?”
Her legs didn’t feel like they belonged to her, but she found her hooves and pulled herself up with the help of the pew. The air between them pulsed with the remnants of the Tuning’s flare, quieter now but silent.
“I’ll fetch ingredients. I’ll have to double the licorice root, I think,” he said. “Stay here. Do you understand? Don’t go back through the halls like this.”
She thought of the acolytes, of Misha’s smile, the way her own pupils had opened at the nearness of his breath. She nodded again.
He grabbed his satchel by reflex, then paused at the door. For a heartbeat, he looked like he might say something else. Whatever it was, he swallowed it down and slipped out into the early afternoon, leaving her alone with the saint.
The silence fell heavily as his footsteps carried him away from her.
Lain sank back into the front pew. She pressed her hands together, fingers interlaced so tightly her knuckles paled, trying to give herself some other sensation to focus on.
Dust lay in the creases of Saint Fillan’s golden robes. Someone had once taken a chisel to the side of her face and the top of her head, carving out some portion of metal that must have seemed worth the sacrilege. No one spoke of that part. They spoke only of the missing feet, the theft explained and forgiven.
Lain stared at the smooth, worn face and tried to picture the saint as she must have been in life. A woman in a field somewhere south, bell at her belt, crozier in hand, scolding wolves into obediences and blessing crop rows with the same mouth. The stories said Fillan had carried light in her palms, that she’d soothed madness in roadside shrines and guided lost travelers down from passes with her glowing hand like a reverse wil-o-wisp.
She wondered what the saint would think of this little chapel now, with its cracked window and neglected candlesticks and the young Kelthi sitting at her feet, shivering with the aftershocks of a body too ready to burn.
A faint tremor rolled under her hooves.
It might have been a carriage, rattling somewhere in the streets beyond the walls. It might have been winter settling more deeply into the mountain. Or it might have been the Underserpent, turning once in its sleep far below the Spire, some distant part of it aware that its Bellborn had begun to change.
Lain placed a palm flat on the pew beside her. The wood was solid. The world was, for a moment, still.
She bowed her head.
“Saint Fillan,” she murmured. “If you are watching, please don’t let me fail. Bless me that I may succeed in giving my life, so that the Underserpent may sleep and continue to protect us.”
The saint responded as usual, with quiet indifference.
Time dragged. The Heat didn’t fade, but it settled into a more bearable hum. Without Tanel’s nearness, without the Tuning blazing between them, it had nothing immediate to climb. It paced inside her instead, restless but contained.
At last, the latch clicked again.
Tanel returned, cheeks flush from the cold, a small clay cup steaming in his gloved hands. The scent of licorice root and something sharper reached her before he did.
He approached slowly, as if wary of stepping back into a snare he had only just escaped.
“I doubled the licorice root,” he said. “It will work faster.”
She made a face despite herself. “Licorice tastes terrible.”
“That’s the point.” He gave a small smile. “There’s nothing exciting about a bad taste.”
Lain shook her head. Silly.
He passed her the mug with care, his gloved fingers barely brushing hers. She took a breath and drank. The draught was thick and hot and bitter, the aftertaste clinging to the back of her tongue. It slid into her stomach and bloomed there in a heat that dulled rather than sharpened.
“Good,” he said. “All of it.”
She obeyed, swallowing past the urge to gag. When she finished, he took the empty cup and set it on the floor by the pew.
The edges of the world softened almost at once, as if she looked at everything through a layer of dirty glass. The bright awareness of the wood grain, the stone, his scent all but vanished. Her limbs grew heavy.
Tanel sat on the step before her which led to the altar, far enough away that their knees could not touch, close enough that she could still see the lines at the corners of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“For what?”
“I should be able to manage this. I’m meant to be –” she swallowed. “I’m meant to be fit for service. For the wyrm. If I can’t even keep from… from pulling at you…”
He looked stricken. “Lain,” he said quietly. “Listen to me. You have done nothing wrong.”
Her vision blurred slightly. She blinked, and tears spilled down anyway.
“You are Kelthi,” he went on, choosing each word with care. “Your Heat is a part of what you are. The Dagorlind have ways of speaking about it that make it sound like… well, nevermind what they say, it’s just a fact. A thing that happens to you. Like the way hair grows, or the color of your eyes. It’s just that… Here. In Ivath. It’s asking more of you than any other Glinnel, to remain pure for the Underserpent. It makes you more worthy, not less. Because yours is a mountain that is much harder to summit.”
He spread his gloved hands on his knees as if to show her they were empty.
“I asked you to trust me with this,” he said. “Today, I failed you. I never should have touched you. I should have remembered how strong it can be.” His mouth twitched, a bitter self-rebuke. “I’m the one who should be seeking absolution here, not you.”
Her head lolled slightly against the pew back. The draught was doing its work quickly; her body floated someplace far away, the sharpest edges muting.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she mumbled.
He startled. “You haven’t.”
“If we bonded,” she said, not entirely sure why she was saying it out loud. “They’d kill you. Or me. Or both.”
He closed his eyes briefly, as if she had named a nightmare he’d been carefully avoiding. That’s why she’d asked, she realized; confirmation of the consequences.
“They will not kill you,” he said.
“No,” she sighed. “I suppose the starbloom will do that.”
He flinched. “Lain.”
“It’s true,” she said. The draught was making her vulnerable to the sorrow she’d been pressing down. “Three days from now. I’ll drink it, then I’ll give myself to the wyrm, and I’ll sing. My last song. It’s what I’ve been preparing for.”
His mouth pressed into a thin line. For a moment he looked much older than his years.
“The Ceremony is in three days’ time,” he said at last. “Yes. But until that moment, you are not a sacrifice. You are my student. My Sister, and my charge.”
She watched him. She could see how carefully he held himself, like a man afraid to lean too hard on anything, least of all himself.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
He considered this. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“For me?”
“For you. For Ivath. For the Underserpent.” His eyes flicked to the floor, then back. “Not of you. Never of you.”
That helped, a little.
He cleared his throat. “The Ceremony will be difficult. Even if everything goes exactly as it should. The resonance alone is… intense. I want to be sure you are as prepared as you can be.”
“I’ve been prepared since I was eight,” she said. “You’re the one who’s late to it.”
He huffed a small, unwilling laugh. “Fair.” His gaze softened. “Will you sing for me? The Starbloom song. As you’d sing it at the altar.”
It seemed foolish to try, with the licorice root making soft her limbs and throat. But the song itself was ready, coiled under her tongue the way it always was.
“Here?” she asked.
“Here,” he said. “No one listens at this door. And the serpent hears you wherever you are.”
She drew a quiet breath and forced herself upright. The world swayed once, then stilled. Her hooves found their place on the floor. Tanel stayed where he was on the step, hands folded, eyes lowered as if she were already at the altar and he was only a witness.
She removed the bronze bell from around her neck. One ring. The tone rippled through the river of her Tune, a sailboat gliding down a quiet stream. The Underserpent stirred in her thoughts, a presence always, attuning to the bell. She opened her mouth to sing.
Starbloom bright, in shadow grown,
Bind the breath to blood and bone.
Still the heart and seal the flame,
Sleep the wyrm, and speak no name.
She wove in the old pattern Tanel had taught her in the note – three parts prayer, one part command. It was not an easy song. But she’d had a lifetime to practice it.
The copper bell warmed in her palm. The Underserpent’s life was a series of long, strange dreams held deep in its sacred nest below the Dawn Spire. It reached its mind to hers. A coil of the Underserpent’s dreams merged with her Tuning: a spiraling dance of figures around a fire; a field of golden blooms in a valley atop a mountain; the taste of riverwater, sharp and cold. She merged with the wyrm.
One must fall so one may rise,
Ash to air and soul to skies.
Give the gift, then go below
The song must end for life to flow.
She woke from the song, her mind untangling from the Underserpent’s in slow waves. Elder Tanel lifted his head, eyes bright.
“How bad?” she asked.
His brow furrowed. “Not bad. Strong.” He paused. “Stronger than last month. The wyrm has always listened to you.”
She sank back against the pew once more.
“Thank you.” Her heart swelled. “Thank you, for–”
“No, no, not just yet,” Tanel said, waving off her gratitude. “Three more days. Save your thanks for then. I’ll have a gift for you.”
Her ears shifted beneath her veil. “You’re not supposed to give me anything before the Ceremony.”
“Well, it’s too late for that. I can’t be talked out of it now.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
She made a face. “If you tell me it’s another relic, I’m going to throw it at you.”
“I wouldn’t waste this gift on scraps of saintly fabric,” he said. “I do have some sense.”
She thought of the relic chamber anyway, with its glass cases and locked drawers, its dried petals and broken bells none of them were allowed to touch.
She grinned. “Is it an apple?”
He blinked. “An apple?”
“They’re my favorite.”
“This time of year?”
“Fair point.”
The draught tugged her further from the bright edge of everything, but Tanel’s soothing voice held her in place.
The bells in the distance chimed in a slow, measured line. Third bell past noon.
Tanel glanced toward the sound. “I should see you back to your cell before the Unsung Sisters begin their rounds,” he said. “Can you walk?”
She nodded.
He rose, then offered his arm automatically, stopped himself, and let it fall back to his side.
“Apologies,” he muttered.
Lain pushed herself to her claws, the room moving gently around her as if it, too, had taken the draught.
“It’s alright,” she said. “I remember the way.”
“I know you do,” he said softly. “But I’ll follow. At a respectable distance. To make sure you don’t fall asleep in a hallway.”
She snorted. “Very dignified end for the Bellborn. Collapsing next to a mop bucket.”
“Don’t tempt fate,” he replied.
He moved to the door and opened it, letting in a thin blade of bright mountain light. Lain turned, just long enough to see it fall into Saint Fillan’s cupped hands.
“Three days,” she whispered.
Then she stepped into the cold, and Elder Tanel followed her back toward the heart of the Dawn Spire.
The hallways were quiet as she returned to her cell. Some halls had songstones pressed into the mortar, which hummed faintly as she passed. Only one in ten would ever resonate for a Tuned. The one outside her cell did. It buzzed low, nearly inaudible, as if sensing her mood.
She shut the door behind her and unwrapped her veil, her ears springing back to shape. She rubbed the sore points at their base, then unlaced the caps on her hooves and pulled them off, letting the stones cool her soles. When she unbound her tail, the fur at the tip puffed with static.
She disrobed, noticing the hem of her blue slacks needed mending. So she sat cross-ankled, needling each stitch with quiet attention. No one had asked her to – typically either a Sister or an Elder would say something to her about a loose seam if it was in need of repair – but it felt important to her now, that everything was in order.
At her bedside were several tinctures, some gifts from Tanel, others concoctions she’d gotten from the goatherd or learned to make herself using the herbs of the cloister’s garden. She brought out a brown glass bottle of thyme oil and massaged her cloven hooves one at a time, paying special attention to the sensitive skin between the claws, her enjoyment of this heightened by her Heat even after drinking the suppressant. She used lavender oil for her scales – the sides of her neck, her collar bone, her tail, her spine, a few spots on her wrists and arms. By the time she was finished her hands had warmed with the scent of it and her scales and hooves shone with health.
She didn’t know why she was still doing this. In three days’ time it wouldn’t matter.
She pulled the blanket up and folded herself small. The chill of her sheets was clean in a way she liked. The thin cot’s springs had a sound she knew. She lay on her side and tucked a hand below her chin. Somewhere under the Spire, the wyrm was dreaming. Soon she was, too.