The Year of the Witching(89)
The Prophet paled. The little color he had left in his lips and cheeks leeched away, until he stood before her as white and sallow as the witches of the Darkwood. “You’re right.”
She stiffened. “What?”
“I said you’re right—about me, my sins, my vices, my shame, my lust, my lies. All of it.” He looked at her and cocked his head. “But do you want to know what keeps me up at night? It’s not the lies of the Church. It’s not my sins, or even my sickness. What keeps me up—tossing and turning and sweating in my sheets—is the knowledge of how fragile it all really is. Bones break and people die. The pyres burn low, barely bright enough to keep the shadows at bay. Forces beyond our walls edge closer, every day . . . and the flock grows restless.”
He stared down at his hands, and Immanuelle was surprised to see them shaking. “And who do they turn to in their time of need? Who’s responsible for tending their hurts? Who lights the fires that lead them through the night? The Father won’t descend from the heavens to care for his children. The apostles return to their wives and beds. The flock fails to account for themselves and so the burden falls to me. I am their salvation, and I will do whatever it takes—sin, purge, even kill—in order to ensure their survival. Because that is what it means to be prophet. It’s not about the Sight. It’s not about kindness or justice or basking in the light of the Father. No, to be prophet is to be the one man willing to damn your soul for the good of the flock. Salvation always demands a sacrifice.”
Immanuelle stared at him—this man who’d used his lies to make himself a martyr. He thought he was the one who made the true sacrifice, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
It was not the Prophet who bore Bethel, bound to his back like a millstone. It was all of the innocent girls and women—like Miriam and Leah—who suffered and died at the hands of men who exploited them. They were Bethel’s sacrifice. They were the bones upon which the Church was built.
Their pain was the great shame of the Father’s faith, and all of Bethel shared in it. Men like the Prophet, who lurked and lusted after the innocent, who found joy in their pain, who brutalized and broke them down until they were nothing, exploiting those they were meant to protect. The Church, which not only excused and forgave the sins of its leaders but enabled them: with the Protocol and the market stocks, with muzzles and lashings and twisted Scriptures. It was the whole of them, the heart of Bethel itself, that made certain every woman who lived behind its gate had only two choices: resignation, or ruin.
No more, Immanuelle thought. No more punishments or Protocols. No more muzzles or contrition. No more pyres or gutting blades. No more girls beaten or broken silent. No more brides in white gowns lying like lambs on the altar for slaughter.
She would see an end to all of it. She would wed the Prophet, and while he slept in their shared bed, she would take up his dagger, carve the sigil into her arm, and end this once and for all.
“You can cut me if you wish. Chain me to the pyre, douse me with kerosene, and light a match. But it won’t be enough to save your life . . . or your wretched soul.”
The Prophet flinched, and Immanuelle watched in horror as he raised a hand to grasp the hilt of his holy dagger. When his gaze swept toward her, she staggered back, falling into the edge of the bed. But there was no place to run.
“I have made my intentions plain,” he said, and to Immanuelle’s relief he released his dagger and retired to his seat at the desk, limping and wheezing as he went. “I have been more than patient with you. But I will make myself clear one last time: Your life, and Ezra’s, relies on your decision at tomorrow’s trial. I suggest you return to your cell and consider my offer. In the morning, if it’s mercy you want, you’ll bite your tongue and choose well.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I have engaged in lust and lechery. I have delighted in the spoils of the flesh. For these crimes, I will meet my reckoning on the pyres of the purging. I ask for the Father’s mercy. Nothing more.
—THE FINAL CONFESSION OF DANIEL WARD
THE MORNING OF her sentencing, Immanuelle woke with Ezra’s name on the tip of her tongue. She had dreamed of him in the night, and as she rose, it was his face that haunted her.
Mere moments after she pushed to her feet and plucked the hay from her curls, one of the Prophet’s guardsmen appeared at the threshold of the cell.
“It’s time,” was all he said. He held a hard square of brown bread through the rungs of the cell door. Breakfast.
Immanuelle shook her head. The thought of taking anything more than a few swallows of water made her feel ill. She smoothed the creases from her skirt with shaking hands. “I’m ready.”
They took the short exit, down the corridor and up into the house proper, emerging just off the foyer. It was the route that Immanuelle knew best—and the one she would have taken had she ever had the opportunity to stage an escape. From there, they took a cart through the cold black of the plains, passing the smoking heaps of old funeral pyres, traveling fast beneath the starless sky.
The string of the cathedral lights appeared in the distance. Immanuelle folded her arms over her chest, a great chill racking her, teeth chattering, her fingers numb with cold.
Today was the day she decided her fate: the Prophet, or the pyre.