Content Warning: religiously motivated ableism and homophobia, both internalized and external; self-harm; and depictions of ritual sacrifice including drowning, hanging, and burning, not very graphic.

Alone but for the crows, the priestess peers through her narrow window and counts the riders. The year before, when the king sent his son to the priory to die for the gods, the boy had arrived at the head of a company of knights—big, loud men who spent the spring outside the walls and left in the summer with their young lord’s bones. This time, though, only two retainers flank the king’s eldest daughter. The priestess feels warm with relief. She had not cared for the ostentation of the boy’s retinue, and she feared the gods, too, had frowned upon such arrogance.

When the priestess can hear the crackle of hoofbeats on frozen soil, she descends. She limps across the courtyard and joins the three Dread Mothers by the gatehouse.

“Your charge nears,” they tell her in one voice. Beneath her cowl, the hair at the back of the priestess’s neck prickles. She folds her hands behind her back to keep her shivering a secret.

“I am ready,” she says. Her voice comes out hoarse. Not so hoarse she could not blame it on disuse instead of doubt if questioned.

But the Dread Mothers do not seem to notice. As one body, the older women turn to face the approaching riders. The priestess clears her throat as quietly as she can and picks at the tender skin by one thumbnail as the riders enter the shadow of the gatehouse.

In one easy motion, the prince dismounts and removes her helm. She hesitates for only a moment before she drops to her knees.

The priestess is not fool enough to mistake beauty for virtue, but she is also not so much a fool that she cannot recognize beauty when it appears before her. The prince is beautiful, like her brother was—tall and broad-shouldered, with hard, aquiline features—and wears her dark hair long and braided on the sides like a man. On this greyest of days, her brown skin shines as if she carries summer with her. Even kneeling, she looks proud and golden, halfway a god already.

“Fairest Mothers,” the prince says. Her mouth trembles, but only slightly; were the priestess not staring so very closely, she would not have noticed. The prince’s eyes—a drowning twilight blue—slide over the three masked women to land on the priestess. She speaks the ancient language clumsily, but she has memorized the proper words and they sound holy enough on her tongue: “Fairest Sister. I have come to die for the gods so I might dwell among them. I mean to make an offering of my flesh and a tomb of your temple. Will you welcome me?”

“I welcome you,” the priestess answers, “and I shall gladly give you death.”

~~~

A thousand years ago, a man became a god.

Every child of Talam Dor knows the story. Long, long ago, war ravaged the land, and a great king wept to see so many die in his name. He begged the gods to lend him strength so he might vanquish his foes. When the gods stayed silent, the king made offerings to please them: incense and wheat, cattle and sheep, heaped upon the altar. Yet savage Teutates and cruel Esus, bloody twin-fathers of the world, disdained such petty gifts. So the king offered himself.

But this offering, too, failed to satisfy the gods. The king flung himself into the black depths of a lake now dry only to wake upon the shore. He took a rope and tied one end around his neck and the other around a branch of the oldest oak in a forest now forgotten. When his men cut his body down, the king’s eyes opened.

Is this death? he asked.

Not yet,the most faithful of his knights said. Not yet, my lord.

In some stories, it is the king’s wife who finds him there. Not yet, my love, she says.

In other stories, it remains the faithful knight, and he speaks of love all the same.

The king no longer cared for the love of his gentle wife or his faithful knight. He cared only for the love of the gods, and he grew angry. Why would they not accept his sacrifice? What more could he offer them than his flesh, his mind, his heart? The king raged and roared and prayed and pled. Still the gods did not answer. At last, the king built a pyre. His faithful knight and his gentle wife watched until they could watch no longer, and then they joined hands and followed their king into the flames.

The fire blazed for three days and three nights. This time, the gods were satisfied. This time, when the king woke, he woke at their side. Taranis, the gods named him, and fiercethunderer, and oh, he was terrible and mighty. His foes burnt like chaff; his mortal sons raised temples for their father and wrote his name in ash and blood across the countryside.

A thousand years ago, a man became a god. A thousand men have tried and failed to follow. The bones of kings and lords and desperate boys line the bottoms of lakes and forest floors. Though the gods demand three deaths, few men manage more than one.

~~~

On the prince’s first day in the priory—the first pale morning of the new year—the priestess repeats the tale of the dead god-king, and the prince tilts to face the window.

For some time, the prince does not speak. She looks impossibly strange to the priestess’s eyes: too tall for her borrowed woolen habit, too fine for this cramped and ugly chamber. The room had been a dovecote some years ago, and one ancient feather in the corner keeps stirring, caught in a draft. The priestess watches it rise and fall to keep from staring too long at the prince.

Still, she cannot resist the occasional glance.

To the priestess’s consternation, the plain habit has done little to dull the prince’s beauty. It is not envy pricking at her, exactly, but it is something not unlike envy: the stinging knife-edge of want, the sour taste of shame. She recognizes it only as a feeling that will require penance.

She tries to imagine herself through the prince’s eyes. The exercise makes her feel vaguely ill. They could not look less alike, though they must be near in age. The priestess is small and soft beneath her habit, made smaller by the twisting of her crooked spine. Her hair does not gleam like burnished metal; it is brown and unremarkable, like her eyes, which do not shine like the sea. Most days, the priestess shuffles through the priory unseen. But she cannot hide from this woman. They will have no escape from one another—not for many months yet.

“The gods are terribly greedy,” the prince says at last, every word turned to silver smoke by the chill of the chamber. She smiles, eyes crinkling. “Perhaps it is greed that makes a god.”

The priestess tries to return the smile. Yet the expression does not come naturally to her. She settles for a grimace and presses on as if the prince had not spoken: “You, too, will thrice offer yourself to the gods for their judgment. If the Dread Three find you worthy—”

“Then I shall take my place among them, and we shall make a dreadful four,” the prince finishes. She holds a hand to her throat and lets her head loll to one side. “If not, I shall take my place among the worms, dreadful all the same.”

“You will ascend,” the priestess says, firm. “I shall make sure of it.”

That, after all, is the priestess’s sworn and sacred office. Through the force of her faith, she will be the one to make a god of this woman. In doing so, she will rise to stand among the Dread Mothers: holy, favored, faceless. When she speaks, the gods will answer. She will be made whole. She will be made good. She need not waste time fretting over the blood-price of failure, for she does not mean to fail.

If her hands tremble as she speaks—well, the room is very cold.

The prince’s smile vanishes. She hunches forward like she means to whisper a secret. “Yet I am no great warrior,” she says. “Not like the king from the story. I have fought in tournaments, but never in battle. And I am not so devout. I often forget my prayers, and—and I have sometimes sinned. The gods have no reason to find me worthy.”

The priestess laces her fingers together to still them. “Why did you come, then?”

“My father asked it of me. I could not refuse.”

“Duty,” the priestess says. “Well. That will do. Duty is not so different from devotion.”

“Is it not?” the prince asks. Again she turns to the window and the white sky. When she looks back, though, she is smiling: bright as sunlight, sweet as spring. “I hope you will not hold my cowardice against me. I do mean to prove myself a good student.”

~~~

The prince does not prove to be a good student.

Before the prince came to the priory, the priestess had carefully marked the days until midsummer—Teutates’s festival day, chosen by the Dread Mothers for the prince’s first death—on a wax tablet. At the time, half a year seemed a great many days. But the days pass, and the days turn into weeks, and the mounds of snow in the courtyard darken and shrink until they turn to mud, and the prince does not turn into a better student.

It is not that the prince does not try. She does not shirk her lessons, and she follows the horarium faithfully, even though she does not always know the prayers and must repeat after the priestess. Although she cannot read the ancient language, she takes the sacred texts with her when they part, and more than once the priestess comes to fetch her in the morning and finds her copying verses into a book.

Yet she is unhappy, and her unhappiness colors their days. The priestess is not blind. When they kneel beside one another in the oratory, she sees the way the prince folds under some heavier weight than worship. When they sit together in the library, the prince looks like a wild creature wrongfully confined amidst musty scrolls and moldering tapestries. She speaks too loudly, then flinches at the echo; she leaps up to pace, then slumps in her chair, despair writ plainly on her hard face. She drapes herself over the library’s chairs every way but the right way.

The prince tries. But she does not believe.

The priestess does not know how to make her believe. But she tries.

On the first warm day of the year, the prince keeps drifting to the library window, leaving the priestess at the table. The priestess watches as the prince shades her eyes and presses her nose to the glass. The light cutting through the colored glass—a portrait of a flayed saint—limns her in amber and indigo; glittering dust, stirred by a sigh, dances all around her. For one dizzying moment, she is one of the gilt-and-ink gods in the priestess’s book of hours. Then the prince pushes away from the window and falls into her seat, and she is a woman again.

The next time the prince rises, the priestess closes her book with a thud.

“Is everything well?” she asks, less because she minds the interruption and more because she likes the way the prince’s cheeks darken sweetly at the question, a fact she knows will require much prayer. “I hope I am not boring you.”

“Never,” the prince says immediately. She hesitates, then leans forward, palms upturned in supplication. “Except—I wonder, might we continue our lessons in the garden today?”

The suggestion makes the priestess’s chest clench. She is as comfortable in the library as the prince is not. She likes darkness and silence, ink under her nails instead of dirt, quiet corners far from curious eyes. Some years ago, when worsening pain meant she could no longer serve the gods through the labor of her hands, she had privately considered freedom from long hours in the garden to be something of a cause for celebration.

But the prince looks so very hopeful. So very lovely.

“We might,” the priestess says, careful. When the prince beams, the priestess feels hot and strange. She stands so hastily she almost drops her book.

The enclosed garden at the heart of the priory slumbers still. The hardiest herbs—hyssop and horehound to ease a cough, rosemary for aches, the herbs the priestess knows best—keep one corner green, but the vegetable garden is all tilled soil, and only a few fruit trees bear blossom-buds. The prince plucks mint leaves from scraggly bushes as they walk and chews them; when a bright-bellied redstart swoops across their path, she cries out in delight and the priestess can smell sweetness on her breath.

They pick their way towards the central fountain at the priestess’s pace, stealing glances at one another all the while. The prince surely thinks she is sly, but the priestess is used to being watched and she knows the feeling well. The gods are testing me, the prince must think. How she must long to be free of the priestess! How she must long to be in her father’s house!

How strange it must be, knowing she will not go home again.

The priestess settles on a sun-warmed bench, and the prince sits at her feet, long legs stretched across the path. Not a god, now: only a woman with the sunlight gilding her neck, catching like fire in her hair, softening the sharp angles of her face.

It takes the priestess some time to find her place in their book.

But eventually she does, and again the priestess begins to read aloud of death: tales of faithless and forgotten men, men who loved wrongly or too dearly, men who asked too much, men who might have lived forever had they not dared to scorn the gods. She feels certain the prince must be listening, for she can feel the awful heat of the prince’s gaze, yet—

When she lifts her eyes from the page, she finds the prince a thousand miles away.

“My prince,” the priestess says, sharp. “Please, you must pay attention.”

The prince looks startled, as if woken from a dream. Her surprise melts into a smile. “I’m sorry. I was only thinking—how lovely you look in the sunlight, and how glad I am to be with you on a day so fine.”

The priestess does not know what to say to that. She blinks at the prince and then, very hurriedly, turns the page.

~~~

All through the spring, they sit in the garden as flowers bloom to life around them. In the mornings, the priestess reads to the prince from holy books; in the afternoons, they pray together. Occasionally the prince tips her head back to rest against the priestess’s knee, and the priestess loses her spot in the prayers. Mercifully, the prince does not know the scriptures well, so she does not notice. That is a separate problem, but not a problem the priestess can solve in those most terrible and precious moments.

It has been a long time since the priestess felt a gentle touch. She flinches, at first, every time the prince reaches for her. And the prince seems always to reach for her. A hand at her elbow as they stroll. Knuckles grazing when they sit. Once, worst of all, the prince pushed a renegade curl behind the priestess’s ear, and her fingers lingered until the priestess could taste her own heartbeat. Sometimes at night, when she returns to her chamber, the priestess can still feel the prince’s hands on her, so she kneels and prays until she can hardly stand from stiffness.

The first days of summer bring foul weather. Banished from the garden by storms, they walk the cloister until even the cloister floods. “The gods grow impatient to see me drowned,” the prince declares one morning as they stumble through the refectory doors. She laughs, though the priestess does not, and shakes her wet hair like a dog. The priestess’s palms itch with the urge to wipe glistening raindrops from the prince’s cheeks, so she links her hands behind her back and picks her thumb raw instead.

Necessity demands they find other ways to pass the hours. Sometimes they return to the library. Other times, the priestess brings the prince to the sacristy to pray over the relics. Once, just once, the priestess takes her to the catacombs.

Steep stairs lead from the sanctuary into blackness, and the air grows cooler and thicker with every step. There in the stone-silent belly of the priory, they cannot hear the ceaseless rain—just the crackling of the torch the prince carries and the soft sound of their breathing.

The priestess stumbles at the threshold; the prince steadies her, then takes the priestess’s hand. The priestess does not pull away. It is wrong to allow such a touch. But she is grateful for the warmth of a living body in this place, and she cannot help but imagine a draft extinguishing the torch—the prince’s hand at her waist again—the prince’s fingers—

The prince’s fingers tighten around hers. “Gods above,” the prince croaks. She thrusts the torch forward, then draws it close again. “Where are we? What is this?”

“The ossuary,” the priestess says. “These are the lay sisters.”

More dead women than living call the priory home; of course they cannot all sleep in tidy coffins. Rows of skulls smile down from carved niches, following the torchlight with their empty eyes. On every wall, mosaiced scenes of death surround the leering dead.

The prince makes a wordless sound in reply. She does not drop the priestess’s hand.

With every chamber, the dead grow holier. They slip through the charnel vault where the priestess will rest among her sisters if she cannot make a god of the prince, and they do not tarry among the bones of ancient Dread Mothers in their golden reliquaries. The priestess will have time enough in that room someday, if she is fortunate.

When the priestess guides them through one last door, the ceiling vanishes as they step into a long corridor. The prince turns in a slow circle, letting the torchlight move across the space. Stone monuments to the dead line their path. Saints and martyrs. Kings and princes.

“Your ancestors,” the priestess says, though they both know this is a polite fiction: the prince descends from a line of usurpers. Perhaps it is this unspoken truth that drives her father to make a god of his heirs. And, though the priestess would never voice such a thought to the prince, perhaps it is this truth that makes him fear the judgment of the gods—for why else would he send his children to die in his stead? The ancient king did not set his sons upon the altar.

No living king can trouble them here. All around them, dead men sleep in two-tiered transi tombs: an open-eyed effigy of the living man atop each bier, hands folded in prayer, and a carved corpse below, forever frozen in a state of lush decay.

At the end of the tunnel, the grandest of these monuments awaits.

“Taranis,” the priestess whispers as they approach. “The king who became a god.”

The dead god-king stares up at them from his two faces, one whole, one ruined. The effigy might be of any man; time has smoothed his features into anonymity. But his cadaver-face—stone worms crawling from his eyes, melted mouth open in a howl—looks newly carved.

The priestess cannot bear to look upon the face of a god for so long. She cannot bear to think of death and stone and a thousand years of lonely darkness. She turns to face the prince.

But the prince is gazing at the monument. For once, she does not smile or laugh or let her knuckles bump against the priestess’s wrist as if by accident. She only looks.

“I suppose he had another name, once upon a time,” she says finally.

“Yes,” the priestess says, though she speaks haltingly. Such details have not survived, and she has never thought overmuch about the man the king had been. After all, the sisters of the priory are not meant to repeat the versions of the tale that linger on the king and his wife and his knight. “I suppose he did.”

The prince looks ill. A trick of the torchlight, maybe.

Eventually, she takes the priestess’s hand again and turns her back on the god in the dark.

~~~

They are not meant to know one another’s names. This does not bother the priestess: she does not remember the name she was born with, so she does not wonder over the name the prince had before coming to the priory. When they are together, they are I and you, and that is enough. At night, though, when the priestess kneels on the cold stones of her bedchamber, she invents names for the prince so she might call to her in her dreams.

Cornflower, she tries, thinking of the prince’s eyes and their hours in the garden, but it does not suit. Wolfsbane seems a better fit, if she means to choose a flower, though the priestess finds the thought of death makes her uneasy, tangled as it is with thoughts of the prince. She cannot settle on a name until the night she spies the prince all alone in the courtyard—awash in moonlight, face turned to the firmament.

Belovedofthemoon, she calls the prince after that. Yet that is an unwieldy name, even in the ancient tongue, and the priestess cannot help but shorten it. Beloved, she cries in her dreams, the dreams she will punish herself for with meticulous care when the sun rises, beloved, darlingmine, why must you go where I cannot follow?

~~~

On the day of the prince’s first death, the sun rises early. So too does the priestess.

She wakes with a jolt, fading dreams clinging to her like lakeweeds around her ankles. A hand slipping out of hers, the coppersalt taste of drowning, moonlight on water: the priestess does not need a prophet’s wisdom to understand these images. But it does no good to dwell on dreams. If the gods mean to test her, so be it.

The priestess busies herself for some time after she rises. She dusts the table by her bed; she sweeps the stones, then scrubs them until they gleam. All the while, she whispers prayers. She speaks the penitential rites, makes her quavering way through the canticles, and repeats the abjections thrice. Once she runs out of holy words, she turns to prayers of her own making. She does not plead—not much—and she does not ask for mercy. She only asks that the gods act as they see fit. May their will be done. May their will not be so different from her own.

When the bells ring the third hour, the priestess goes to the prince’s chamber. She struggles through the halls that separate her from the prince, bent under the weight of the mantle in her arms. The priestess has spent many long nights sewing iron weights into the fabric, and the blood of her pricked fingers marbles the length of it.

The prince meets her at the door. Half-moon shadows under her eyes suggest a sleepless night; the thick, sweet rasp of her voice when they greet one another proves it. The priestess has never before seen the prince with her hair loose. She feels a surge of pleasure at the sight and, a moment behind, a stronger, hotter surge of shame. Oh, that the gods might release her from this sickness—that they might free her from her most unholy thoughts—

“I am glad to see you,” the prince says, and the priestess’s prayers turn to dust.

The prince takes the mantle from the priestess’s arms, pales at the heft of it, and drapes it over the back of a chair. The priestess follows close at her shoulder; when the prince turns, they are almost embracing. The prince inhales sharply. But she does not hurry to make space between their bodies. Neither does the priestess.

“Are you ready?” the priestess asks.

“I think—I may be afraid,” the prince says, so hoarse the priestess briefly thinks she has misheard. “Would you think less of me, if that were true?”

The priestess swallows. She touches the prince’s collar. “I do not believe you. How could you be afraid, my brave prince?”

The prince’s lips part. She places her hand over the priestess’s hand, then draws it to her mouth. The priestess feels the heat of the prince’s touch all the way to her toes; she feels a burning at the back of her neck, too, as if the gods are watching.

Just when the priestess thinks she cannot endure another moment, the prince releases her. She smiles. It does not reach her eyes. “How could I not be? I have never died before.”

“Do not be afraid. You will rise again. I am sure of it.”

The prince’s throat moves wordlessly. She looks to the window, then back, her eyes shining with a fresh wildness. “Perhaps I might wear a token of yours. Some sign of your favor.”

But the priestess has nothing to call her own, nothing that might serve. “I do not know—”

“A kiss, then,” the prince says. “Perhaps I might kiss you once before I die.”

The priestess tries to answer and finds she cannot form words. She presses her knuckles to her mouth, afraid her heart might tumble past her lips and land bloody on the floor between them if she tries to speak. They stare at one another for a lifetime. A minute, maybe two.

“I am sorry,” the prince says at last, her face gone to stone. “I have misunderstood. I have no excuse but foolishness, and I hope you will forgive me.”

“My prince.” The priestess’s voice cracks like a child’s. She does not know what to say. She does not know anything but the nameless black ache in her belly. “You—you do not need my forgiveness. But we cannot. We must not offend the gods. Not today.”

“No,” the prince says, slow. “No, we must not offend the gods.”

~~~

The Dread Mothers lead the procession to the sacred spring. A small crowd follows in their wake: priestesses and lay sisters, eager pilgrims, travelers lured by the promise of a royal death. As they walk, the Dread Mothers chant a prayer. The priestess stares at the back of the prince’s bowed head, chews her lips bloody, and falls further and further behind the rest.

By the time the priestess glimpses the water, her left leg is so tight with pain that she can do little more than drag it after her. The spring is not as near as she had remembered, or perhaps—and she knows this for the truth immediately by its bitter taste—she is simply weaker than the last time she made the pilgrimage. On this holiest of days, though, she cannot afford the sin of self-pity. There will be time for that later.

“I am here,” she says, ragged and breathless, as she approaches the spring. “I am here.”

No one looks away from the prince.

The priestess takes her place near the water. The Dread Mothers guide the prince to the water’s edge, and a lay sister fastens a chain to her ankle. The gathered crowd closes around the spring; someone pushes forward, and someone follows, and the circle tightens like a wire around the priestess’s throat. Another prayer. Another silence. The Dread Mothers withdraw.

The prince falters. She turns to face the onlookers—greedy water lapping at her ankles, wind tugging at her unbound hair—and at once the priestess knows: she is scared. Even from a distance, the priestess can see the working of her jaw, one hand opening and closing at her side, her darting gaze. Her lips part, like she means to speak.

The prince does not speak.

She squares her shoulders and walks into the water.

The water reaches her knees, then her thighs. She presses forward—slow, slow. The water rises to her chest; she stumbles, cannot seem to find her footing, and the water hits her chin. The priestess imagines running to her. She imagines crying out stop, please, stop! She imagines flinging herself into the prince’s arms, and she imagines the gods striking them down, and she wonders if such a death would feel more like punishment or absolution.

But the priestess cannot run and she cannot cry. She cannot so much as flinch, not until the prince disappears beneath the water. Only then does she allow herself the indulgence of one shuddering exhalation. She does not look away, not even when the water froths and the lay sisters at her side avert their eyes, though she picks at the skin by her fingernails until not one remains unbloodied. Foam gathers—surges—sinks again—

Eventually, the water stills.

When the sun sinks low, two sturdy sisters take up the chain and draw the prince’s body from the deep. The remaining faithful look upon the dead woman. One by one, they turn away.

“See to your charge,” the Dread Mothers say in one voice. The priestess opens her mouth to answer but can manage nothing more than a soft animal noise. She clutches at her robes and staggers towards the body on the stones.

The prince—the prince’s body—is pale but for a frothy pink smear around her nose. Instinctively, the priestess reaches for her hand. She drops it as soon as she touches the dead prince’s fingers: the skin is too soft, too loose, too cold.

She is just a woman. Just a woman, in the end, nothing more than flesh and blood, and she has drowned. She has drowned, and the priestess told her not to be afraid—

But the priestess must have faith. She must she must she must.

She crouches at the prince’s side until the last footfalls fade and she knows she is alone. Then, only then, does the priestess press her lips to the prince’s blue mouth. She closes her heart to the sickness of her longing to touch this dead woman. She may never get another chance.

Darlingmine, she wants to whisper, beloved, but the gods are surely listening.

The priestess pushes her sleeves to her elbows and begins to pray.

She prays over the prince’s body for three days and three nights. When her body begins to fail—when her lips crack from thirst and her palms split open, leaving hot blood smeared all over the prince’s cold hands—the gods sustain her, as the priestess trusted they would.

She does not stop; she does not sleep. She simply prays.

On the fourth morning, the prince wakes.

~~~

Though the day is blazing hot, the prince asks for a fire, and the priestess cannot refuse her. She brings the prince to her own chamber and assembles a shrine of logs and kindling in the hearth with painstaking care. Even after the fire catches, she stays on her knees. Easier to watch the smallest twigs as they shrivel and smoke than to look at the grey-faced woman sitting on the stones. Easier to pray one more silent prayer when she is already bent.

Finally, when she can stall no longer, the priestess rises with some difficulty, her limbs throbbing with the pain she had not allowed herself to feel while she prayed by the water. She strips both threadbare woolen blankets from her bed and wraps them around the prince’s shoulders. Yet the prince’s shivering does not stop until the priestess sits by her side.

The prince eases into her, and the priestess slips her hands under her thighs to keep from reaching for the prince with unbecoming desperation. After three days with her hands on the prince in prayer, she almost does not know what to do with her body; she can no longer fully distinguish between the forbidden and the sacred. Still, she can recognize the warmth in her belly at the prince’s head on her shoulder as the former.

“I knew you would return to me,” the priestess whispers. Her throat aches, and she feels afraid, though she does not know why.

“Did you? Did you not doubt—not for a moment?”

“You have been chosen by the gods,” the priestess says instead of answering the prince’s question. “You, sitting here, it is a miracle. Are you not glad?”

She cannot keep the awe from her prayer-worn voice; she cannot understand the flatness of the prince’s voice. She tilts her head, hoping to feel the warmth of the prince’s skin against her cheek. The prince is freezing to the touch.

“No,” the prince says. “I am not glad. I am only tired and I am cold and I do not wish to die twice more. I do not understand why I should live when my brother did not.”

The priestess opens her mouth, then closes it. She swallows around a lump in her throat. “That is a question only the gods can answer.”

“You know more of the gods than I.”

“The holy texts tell us it is a matter of love. The great king loved the gods, and they rewarded him for his devotion—”

“It cannot be love. I hate the gods and I have lived.”

The priestess inhales like the prince has slapped her. “You do not mean it.”

“I do.” The prince looks at her, eyes flashing. “Why should I love the gods? They do not love me. They do not love you.”

“Please,” the priestess says. “Please—”

She cannot find the words. It does not matter. When the prince opens her mouth again, only a sob comes out. Her face crumples; all at once she collapses into the priestess.

The priestess hesitates, frozen for one shame-sick moment, then folds her arms around the prince’s heaving shoulders. She knows what the Dread Mothers would say. She can hear them, almost, at her ear; she can feel the rod on her back. Yet the prince feels sweet and right in her arms, and it cannot be such a wicked sin to offer comfort to a weeping woman.

When the prince pulls away, she looks nothing like a god: her blue eyes raw and red, snot and tears all over her proud nose and beautiful mouth. She touches the damp shadow on the priestess’s habit, right above her breastbone, and her cheeks darken.

“I did not know how badly it would hurt,” she says. Her voice wobbles like she might break once more. “I cannot do it again. I cannot. I am not fearless as you are.”

I was not fearless, the priestess wants to say. You were dead. You were dead. I watched you die, and I was so afraid.

“You must,” she says instead. “Oh, my brave prince, you must.”

~~~

The next festival day—the equinox, sacred to Esus—is not for three months yet. But they do not return to their lessons. The priestess tries. She brings holy books to the prince’s chamber, and she reads from them even when the prince will not look at her. When the prince refuses to come to the oratory, the priestess opens the window to catch the chant on the breeze and takes it as a victory when she sings and the prince’s hunched shoulders soften.

She cannot sing alone forever, though. Eventually, the priestess begins to come to the prince’s chamber empty-handed. She spends many an afternoon bowed in prayer by the prince’s bedside, imagining she might somehow achieve sanctity enough for two. The prince sits with blankets heaped around her and gazes unsmiling out the window. When she does speak, it is only to blaspheme or to ask, very quietly, if the priestess might instead sit by her side.

The pit in the priestess’s stomach worsens as summer melts into autumn; she cannot see how the gods will meet the prince’s second death with anything other than retribution for such ingratitude. Yet she cannot bring herself to press—for the prince is not well.

The priestess pretends otherwise until she cannot. The shine does not come back to the prince’s skin; her fingertips and palms stay pale, like a woman too long in the bath, and she takes to wearing gloves even when they are alone. She no longer wishes to walk in the garden, though the days are long and lovely. Some mornings, she does not answer when the priestess knocks.

One day the priestess comes to the prince’s room and, when the prince does not answer, lets herself through the unlocked door. A stranger sits on the prince’s bed, her back to the priestess. Then the priestess sees the knife and the tidy pile of hair on the stones.

“Oh,” she breathes.

The prince twists to look at the priestess. She looks older. Smaller, too. “When I was drowning,” she begins, but her voice turns thick and she cannot continue.

The priestess limps across the room, hardly thinking, and lowers herself to the bed. She touches the prince’s shorn scalp. “You do not have to explain,” she says, and she does not pull away, not even when the prince turns so it is her cheek in the priestess’s hand.

The priestess feels like she is watching someone else from high above; surely it is some other woman with her fingers curled at the prince’s nape and her heart in her throat. Oh, but she has never been so close to the prince—she has never noticed the barely-there scar by her eye, or that divot in her lip, or the way the lines around her irises gleam silver like starshine—

The prince leans forward so their foreheads bump and brings her gloved fingers to the priestess’s cheek. Her gaze drops to the priestess’s mouth, then cuts back to her eyes.

“Please,” the prince says. She does not have to say anything else.

“We cannot,” the priestess says, thinking of the day she kissed blood and bile from the prince’s cold lips. “You are my prince. You are to be my god.”

“On this day, I am merely a woman. I am merely a woman who wants you.”

The priestess’s breath catches. “Would it bring you pleasure to kiss me?”

The prince brings her thumb to the priestess’s lower lip, gently, as if she expects her to shatter at the touch. “I think it might,” she says. “I cannot tell. It might only bring me pain.”

Pain is better than pleasure: pain is sacred to the gods. The priestess cannot deny her pain.

When the prince leans in, the priestess does, too.

The priestess has never been kissed. Even if she had kissed a hundred women and a hundred men, though, the prince’s kiss would be the finest thing she had ever tasted: wine, bread, blood, no less holy for the clumsiness of those first fumbling moments.

When their noses bump, the prince laughs breathlessly against her mouth. She tangles a hand in the priestess’s hair, which sends scattered sparks up behind her eyes, and tugs the priestess’s lip between her teeth, which does something to the priestess’s insides that she cannot describe.

“Wait,” the priestess gasps when the prince reaches for her hip and the heat in her belly flares so fiercely she thinks she might be sick. “Wait, wait—”

The prince pulls back, pupils blown. And she is smiling. She is smiling for the first time in so, so long. The priestess reaches for the prince’s hands and pulls them into her lap. After a moment, she draws them to her racing heart instead.

“Pray with me,” the priestess says, “and we shall vow to never speak of this again.”

The prince only kisses her again, soft and sweet and starving.

“This is my prayer,” she says. “This is my vow.”

~~~

Pleasure and pain cannot be separated so easily.

Every morning, as the priestess walks the corridor that separates her from the prince, she practices what she will say: we cannot, we must not,likea sacred chant.

Every morning, she steps into the prince’s room, and the prince draws her into her arms, and the priestess does not speak of cannot and must not.

Every night, she closes the door to her chamber, folds herself over on the cold stones, and abjects herself before the gods.

She prays until the raw, red patches at her knees and elbows turn to black bruises that will not fade. If she were a stronger woman, she would refuse the prince and confess everything to the Dread Mothers. But she cannot refuse, and so she cannot repent. She cannot speak the sacred words. Instead, she begs the gods to punish her instead of the prince; she imagines herself crushed under the weight of both their trespasses, evil a great stone upon her back. In her darkest, most desperate hours, she digs bloody lines into her arms and whimpers like a whipped dog.

Once she spent her days in worship. Now she spends her days curled in the prince’s bed. All they ever dare to do is kiss, chaste but for the hunger. Yet that is sin enough, the priestess knows, and the words they say to one another are worse than anything they might do. Her own wickedness amazes her. Every time the prince tilts her chin to kiss her, she feels like a woman possessed. Every time she kisses the prince, her heart goes up in flames.

The gods do not speak to the priestess like they speak to the Dread Mothers. When she was a child, she would plead with them for answers. Why have you made me a wicked creature? she would ask the rafters, weeping, thinking only of the other novices: those beautiful, shining girls who did not spend their nights alone in the infirmary. Why have you given me this pain? But she is a woman now, and she understands that answers must be earned. Faith does not require proof—and even if it did, what greater proof could she ask for than a drowned woman who did not die? No, no. She cannot begrudge the gods their silence.

But she cannot bear the weight of it, either. She does not understand. She does not understand how the prince can speak of the gods so coldly and still live. She does not understand how something as sweet as the prince’s hand in hers could be the most iniquitous of sins.

And if she does not know these things, then she does not know anything at all.

~~~

On the day of the prince’s second death, the priestess rolls out of her lonely bed and promptly vomits on the stones. After she finishes heaving, she cleans the mess she has made. She pauses at the window to look at the gallows in the priory courtyard. Then she smooths the wrinkles from her habit and goes to fetch the prince.

The prince meets her at the door wearing only a too-small shift. The muscles of her arms stand out against the white linen, brown and hard, and the priestess, who has spent the walk to the prince’s room telling herself a thousand times she will not offend the gods today, thinks a thousand thoughts that would offend the gods. Then the priestess thinks the shift looks very much like a winding sheet, and her stomach twists in a different sort of knot.

“My prince,” she says.

“My fair priestess,” the prince says, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “Have you come to escort me to my death?”

“Your death and your resurrection.”

She speaks firmly, leaving no room for disagreement, but the prince’s eyes glisten doubt-dark, and when she touches the priestess’s arm to guide her into the room, her fingers tremble.

The priestess does not know how to comfort her. She does not think it would be possible to do so. Everything sticks and dies in her throat, and an ugly silence fills the room as she helps the prince into her surcoat: a fine thing, more suited for a coronation than an execution. The woad-dyed embroidery hones the blue of the prince’s eyes like a blade.

“Well,” the priestess says, “the hour draws near.”

She does not release the prince’s hands.

“If I do not return, please know—”

“No. Do not say anything. You will return.”

The prince’s face contorts. She looks at their tangled hands, then up again, eyes shining. “I do not know why the gods spared me, but I feel certain they will not make the same mistake twice. I am not faithful. I am unworthy. And—and I have sinned—”

The words slip through the priestess’s ribs, dagger-sharp. She knows the truth, even if the prince does not: she is the one who has failed. If the prince does not rise, it will be the priestess’s fault. Her wanton greed. Her weakness in the face of temptation. The Dread Mothers commanded her to make a god of the prince, and the priestess has made sinners of them both.

“Please,” the priestess says. “Do not say another word. All will be well.”

When the priestess moves to leave, though, the prince lingers. She looks around the little room. With a shaky hand, she touches the hollow of her throat. “Will it be quick?”

The priestess hesitates. “No,” she says. “I do not think so. But you must be brave, my prince. You must trust the gods.”

Then, despite all the stern promises she has made to herself about the things she cannot and must not do, she kisses the prince right there in the sacred silence.

“I trust you,” the prince says.

~~~

For three days and three nights, the priestess kneels by the prince’s bedside and clings to the cold arm of a dead woman.

She prays. She does not know what else to do. She prays as the prince’s body goes stiff and limp again; she prays as the prince’s skin pales and, where the body touches the bed, darkens like a wine stain. She prays the prince will rise. She prays she will stop seeing the prince upon the gallows when she closes her eyes. She prays for mercy and for absolution. She prays until she can only mouth the prayers, holy words sticking in her raw and ragged throat.

The priestess prays until the third night, and then she can pray no longer. She is tired of the gods and their silence and their hunger. She buries her face in the crook of the prince’s neck.

“Come back,” she croaks, breathing deep of salt and cedar and the black smell of death. “I am sorry. I am sorry. I have failed.”

The corpse, like the gods, does not deign to answer. When the priestess reaches for the words of another prayer, they slip through her fingers, and she cries herself to sleep like a child.

She wakes to a rattling cough.

The priestess jerks back from the precipice of a dream; fire and smoke and moonlight drop away, leaving her once more on her knees. “My prince,” she gasps, hoarse from weeping, thick with sleep. She clutches at the prince’s arm and finds it warm. “Oh, my prince—”

The prince rolls to her side. She looks at the priestess, or through her, dark eyes cloudy and unfocused. Then, by way of greeting, she coughs again. Blood splatters the priestess’s hands, though she does not think to mind.

“Do not try to speak,” the priestess says, finding something of her voice. She takes the prince’s hands in hers to keep the prince from reaching for her throat.

“It hurts,” the prince rasps anyway.

The marks left by the prince’s first death were small things, the size of secrets. Pale hands and cold fingertips. A lacy marbling to her skin in the right light.

The marks left by the prince’s second death are different. The priestess wiped the blood from the corners of the hanged prince’s eyes; she kissed the red from her lips. But she could not mend all her wounds. And, though the priestess’s own voice is ragged from prayer, the prince’s voice is a thousand times worse. It is not the prince’s voice at all.

The priestess frees one hand from the prince’s hold. She touches her neck, right below the raw line of the wound, then strokes her petechiae-freckled cheek. “The pain will pass,” the priestess says, though the words taste false. “You are alive. That is what matters.”

“I do not understand,” the prince manages. She shifts uneasily under the priestess’s hands, trying to rise, then slumps back again. “I do not—I do not—”

“The gods have named you theirs. There can be no question. No mortal man has done what you have done, not in a thousand years. Only once more, my prince. Only once more.”

The prince jerks away from her hands. She stares at the priestess, her chest trembling with the effort of each breath, for a long moment. “I would like to be alone,” she says, perfectly calm. And then her voice lifts and splinters: “Please! Go! Go!”

The sound of the prince’s weeping follows the priestess to the end of the corridor. She stands there and counts the stones of the opposite wall. She counts nine hundred and twelve stones, three at a time, then walks back to the prince’s door. She does not enter, but she presses her palms to the wood and listens for a long time.

~~~

After the prince’s second death, the priestess wipes her wax tablet clean and marks the days until the winter solstice. At night she counts the lines like the knots of a prayer cord.

She prays the hours, and she trudges to the oratory on even the most bitterly cold of days. She does what she must, for she knows the gods are watching. She knows they are listening, too, and she cannot imagine what they must make of her hollow-hearted words.

All her life, she has clung to her love for the gods above all else. The Dread Mothers chose her to serve the prince for the unwavering strength of her devotion. To serve the prince was a reward, sweet recompense, a promise that she might someday stand beside the Mothers and ask the gods for answers. And it is this devotion, she feels certain, that has kept the prince—her faithless prince—alive.

She does not love the gods anymore.

The knowledge comes to her for the first time on her knees. Immediately she knows it to be true. Despair empties her out; grief swells to fill the hollow places. If she does not love the gods, if she is not worthy of their love, then she does not know how to save the prince.

Yet try as she might, she cannot mend this wound inside of her. When she thinks of the gods, she no longer thinks of their strength. She thinks only of her prince weeping in pain—the rot-and-vinegar smell that lingered in the priory after the Dread Mothers stripped the bones of the prince’s brother—all the dead and damned men who ever dared to love too dearly—the king, the ancient king, and the faithful knight who loved him—oh, the king who had another name.

So she prays the hours, and she trudges to the oratory on even the most bitterly cold of days, and she does what she must.

But she does not love the gods.

~~~

Bruises bloom and fade and die like flowers at the prince’s throat, but the wound does not heal. The priestess sits in the prince’s bed, hands beneath her thighs to keep from picking at her nails, and gazes at the back of the prince’s neck, misery a black and heavy weight in her belly.

In the sanctity of the prince’s chamber, the priestess does not like to speak of death. She cannot voice her fears without crumbling, and she does not wish to crumble in front of the prince. Mostly they spend their hours in silence, pressed together like two halves of one whole. Sometimes, as on this night, the prince extracts herself from the priestess and drifts to the window. The prince stares at the moon; the priestess stares at the prince.

The days have grown short. They do not have many quiet hours left.

When the priestess can stand the silence no longer, she sighs, just enough to soften the slant of the prince’s shoulders. “Tell me what you are thinking,” she says.

She often asks this question. Almost always, the prince demurs. The prince’s voice has not returned to her, not fully, and she does not speak as readily as she once did.

This time, though, the prince hesitates long enough that the priestess knows she means to answer. The prince does not look away from the window, but her hands tighten on the sill.

“In another life,” she begins, then stops. She turns to face the priestess, wet eyes glinting in the candlelight. “I was thinking—in another life, perhaps you and I—”

Her voice cracks. She does not complete the thought. There is no world, the priestess knows, in which they might be merely you and I. In another world, in a world without gods, the prince would come to sit upon her father’s throne, and the priestess—

Well. She does not know who she would be without the gods. A child’s crooked bones, long forgotten. It was the gods who saved her. The gods who brought her to the priory.

Today, though, the priestess cannot help but press. She rises from the prince’s bed and crosses the room to step into her arms. “Who would we be, in another life?”

Pain works across the prince’s face, then eases into tenderness. She brushes a curl behind the priestess’s ear. “I would wed you,” she says, soft, “as a man takes a wife. Why should I not? You would be mine, if you would have me. I would be yours. And we would be—”

“Happy.”

“We would be happy,” the prince agrees, and smiles, all sorrow.

The priestess tucks her face into the prince’s chest; she smells salt, smoke, cedar. “I did not know doubt before I met you,” she whispers. “Oh, you have made an apostate of me.”

The prince tilts her by the chin so they face one another once more. “You have taught me how to worship,” she says, and kisses the priestess like she means to prove it.

The prince’s mouth moves to her jaw, her throat, lower—gentle, then hungry, then grief-desperate, with all the ardor of a saint. The priestess feels the wall at her back. She cannot remember how she got there. She means to say I must go or we dare not. “Yes, yes,” she gasps instead, and does not say anything else for some time.

“Come to bed with me,” the prince murmurs against her skin at last. “I cannot bear to die a third time without having known you.”

“I cannot,” the priestess says, though saying so feels pointless when she has done a thousand things she could-not-must-not for this woman. But the thought of the prince seeing her, knowing her, makes her feel hideously ill. “You will not want me.”

The prince takes a step back. She pulls the gloves from her drowned woman’s hands. She peels away the scarf from her hanged woman’s neck. Standing there, silvered by the moonglow spilling through the window, she looks nothing like the woman who first fell to her knees at the gatehouse and asked for death. She looks older, and so very tired, and so very beautiful.

“I love you,” she says in her ruined voice. “I will always want you.”

The priestess’s throat goes tight; the tip of her nose prickles with the promise of tears. She turns so she might blink at the wall instead. The prince slips her arms around her waist.

“As long as I live, I will love you,” the prince says. “The gods cannot take that from us.”

The priestess does not think she can speak without crying, so she tilts her head to make room for the prince’s mouth on her neck. After a moment, she guides the prince’s hands to her hips. “Undress me,” she manages. Her voice comes out shaky, ill-suited for words that fill her chest like an incantation. She licks her lips and tries again: “Please, undress me.”

The prince eases the priestess’s habit over her shoulders and lets it pool around their feet. The room is so cold. The prince’s fingertips are so hot. She touches the priestess’s twisted left shoulder blade. She drags her fingers along the sunken curve of it, all the way to the base of her spine, and back to her other shoulder.

“I am not favored by the gods,” the priestess says, low and miserable. She stares at the rafters and imagines the gods staring back at her, death and fire in their eyes. “I do not know why they punished me. I—I only know that you were meant to be my penance.”

“You are favored by me,” the prince says. She strokes the line of the priestess’s spine again. With tender fingers at the priestess’s hip, the prince guides her so they face each other. Slowly, she sinks to her knees. She brings the priestess’s hands to her lips. “You told me once that it is love that makes a god. Well, if that is all, then you have made a god of me already.”

If you loved me,the priestess wants to say, you would worship the gods. If you loved me as I love you, you would not be so selfish. You would let them save you.

But she cannot make herself say the words, just as she can no longer make herself believe them, and she cannot bear to stare at the prince on her knees for a single moment more. She draws the prince up and, with trembling hands, undoes the clasp of her collar.

~~~

On the day of the prince’s third death, the priestess wakes and she cannot move.

Panic fills her chest and rises in her throat. She tries to flex her toes. She does not know if the attempt succeeds: she cannot feel anything below her waist.

Her breath comes fast, frantic, every lungful bitter and iron-sharp. Fear will not help, she knows. It has been a long time since her body betrayed her so completely, but not so long that she does not remember the uselessness of fear.

She is afraid.

She digs the heels of her palms into her left thigh with all the violence she can muster. Nothing. Nothing. She drags herself half-upright to lean against cold stone. For an instant, she thinks she feels something—a sting, a cramp—but the feeling passes.

“Please,” she whispers to the gods. “Please, let me go to her.”

She does not expect an answer. She does not receive one.

With the wall at her back, she can just glimpse the window across the room. It is the longest night of the year—the black day that belongs to Taranis alone—and she cannot guess the time of day from the unrelenting dark. Perhaps it is early still. Perhaps she has time.

Yet even as she grasps at this thin thread of hope, the terce bells ring, and fear blossoms hot in her belly. She closes her eyes, thinking to say the penitential rites, but cannot find the words. All she can see is the prince’s face burnt into her lids like a brand.

“Please,” she says again, no longer thinking of the gods at all.

When she inhales, she tastes smoke.

With a sob, she tries again to draw her right leg up. This time, her body complies. She makes it to the edge of the bed, then lands unsteadily on her feet. Her left leg is worthlessly stiff, and pain blows through her right leg when she stands, sharpest at the back of her knee, like the slightest pressure might make it fold. But pain is welcome: pain means she can walk.

She stumbles more than once, but she cannot, must not, does not fall. When she reaches the wide doors to the courtyard, she pauses to catch her breath. Her lungs burn and her legs throb. Some small, craven part of her longs desperately to turn back. She cannot, must not, does not.

She steps through the door and finds the priory aflame.

Too late. She is too late. A great pyre occupies the center of the outer courtyard where the gallows had been—a towering structure of oak and pitch upon a raised bed of earth. The swollen fire drowns out the stars and turns the gathered crowd into shadows: the Dread Mothers, some scattering of sisters, all made strangers by the darkness and the firelight. Through the flames, the priestess can see one central post rising above the rest.

She can see the dead woman bound there, too.

The priestess presses one hand to her mouth and bites down hard on her palm. The distraction of a mouthful of blood keeps her on her feet. She staggers on, the whole wretched world shrinking almost to nothing: blackness, only blackness, and a wet smear of crimson.

The priestess prays as she walks. But she does not pray to the three gods, for at last she understands something of the truth, and something too of love. The holy texts are mistaken. It is devotion that makes a god, yes—but, oh, the gods themselves know nothing of devotion. They know nothing of love. So she prays to the faithful knight who followed his king into the flames. She prays to the queen who would not let her husband burn alone. And she prays to the prince.

It would be easier, of course, with a name—and only then does the priestess think to wonder what the worshippers will call her prince in a thousand years—but the priestess makes do. All gods, after all, have their sobriquets. Esus is raveningmouth. Teutates is blackdevourer.

Her prince is darlingmine and sweetestblue and belovedofthemoon. These are nothing like the names of gods. They will suffice.

“No,” the Dread Mothers shriek, their single voice splitting into three: “No, no—”

If the priestess had more time, she would tear the masks from their faces. She would look upon them, and she would know them for what they are: old women, only cruel old women, who would raise a child to taste of love and think it sin. But she does not have much time at all.

The priestess steps into the fire. She scales the pyre, great logs collapsing into coals beneath her hands, then crawls forward on torn palms and bloodied knees. Distantly, she hears a woman screaming. The priestess wants to scream back at the woman to hold her coward’s tongue. When she tries, she finds the voice is her own.

With the last of her strength, the priestess pulls herself to her feet. She stands atop the pyre, swathed in a pain as blinding-bright as apotheosis itself, and looks out at the courtyard. She looks at the Dread Mothers. She looks at the gatehouse, and the cloister walls, and the window of the prince’s room. Then she folds her arms around the black and blistered body at the stake.

“You are my beloved,” she whispers into the prince’s ear, “and I am yours. Oh, what power could take you from me? Let my love make a god of you, and together we shall hurl these cruel pretenders from their thrones.”

The prince’s eyes open. They are the sweetest blue the priestess has ever seen. All around her, the flames climb higher; all around her, moonlight.

___

Copyright 2026 M.R. Robinson