But the child’s parents did not go to him. They had seen the extent of his injury. They had seen the life leave his body. Whatever thing smiled and held its arms out to them was not their son.
The villagers who had come running when they heard the mother’s cries now stared at this child who should not breathe and the man who had somehow drawn air back into his lungs. It was not natural to make life from death. And they wondered, where had Ilya been when their wives and children and loved ones had suffered? Where was this great healer when Yana’s baby was born blue and cold? Or when the firepox had carried off half the village only a few years past? Why had he not appeared when Baba Lera wasted away to nothing, growing weaker with each passing day and praying for death that didn’t come until she was little more than a heap of sticks rubbing together her prayer beads?
They seized Ilya and clapped him in heavy chains, a collar for his neck, and fetters for his wrists and ankles. They dragged him to the bridge that overlooked the river, where the water foamed white around the jagged rocks, and they cast Ilya over the side. It is said his corpse emerged on a sandbank many miles south, perfectly preserved and guarded by a white stag, who stood vigil over the body for three full months.
The child Ilya had dragged back from the next world wandered the village, asking for his mother and father, begging for a place to sleep. Every door was closed to him, and so he was left to the woods, where he can still be heard crying.
Sankt Ilya is the patron saint of unlikely cures.
SANKTA URSULA OF THE WAVES
In the northern reaches of Fjerda, a young princess called Ursula found her way to the worship of the Saints and prayed each day to them. Those who knelt at the ash altar of Djel deemed this worship unlawful and demanded she give up the practice.
She would not. Convinced that her stubborn refusal was a sure sign she was possessed by some demon, her family hauled Ursula down to the shore, determined to drive out the evil spirit that had taken hold of the girl’s soul. There, in the shallows, surrounded by townspeople muttering prayers to Djel, they held her beneath the water as they beat the surface of the sea with ash boughs. But as many times as they dunked her under the waves, and as long as they held her there, she did not drown or even sputter for breath.
The Fjerdans took this as proof that she had become host to some unholy power. They claimed she was no longer a natural girl, but surely half fish, and that she should be cut open to see if she was truly human.
A knife was brought to shore and given to a priest of Djel, but before he unsheathed it, he begged Ursula to renounce her faith and once more honor the Wellspring. Ursula refused.
Prepared to split her in two and prove she was no longer a human girl but some malevolent scaled thing, the priest placed the blade of the knife to the hollow of the princess’s throat, when suddenly a cry rang out from the city’s watchtower. The crowd that had gathered on the shore looked far out to sea, and there they saw a wave rushing toward the city, so wide and so high that it blocked the sun. They turned and ran, but there was no escape.
The great wave consumed the city. Just as the priest’s blade hand had sought to split Ursula in two, the ocean cut into the shore, sundering it from Fjerda’s northern coast and creating the islands known as Kenst Hjerte, the broken heart. Ursula, who had clung resolutely to her faith, survived and lived to an old age in a rock cave on one of the islands, eating nothing but the mussels and oysters she collected from the tide pools, and drinking nothing but salt water.
A chapel was built into the rock on her island, where sailors’ wives still come to pray to Ursula, patron saint of those lost at sea. They leave offerings of bread baked into the shape of fish, and wish for their lovers’ swift return. When they leave, some find bones or sea pearls in their pockets, though no one is sure if these are ill or good omens.
SANKT MATTHEUS
A beast was terrorizing a town on the edge of the permafrost. Children were snatched right before their mothers’ watching eyes, and men were slaughtered in the fields.
Some said the beast was a bear, some a pack of wolves. Others claimed it was a tiger that had escaped a noblewoman’s menagerie. The town elders offered a reward and many local hunters went into the woods, but none returned with a pelt to show for their trouble, and many did not return at all.
The townspeople wrote to the king to ask for aid, and he sent the best of his hunters, a giant of a man named Dag Ivar. Ivar and his men arrived in a great procession of coaches, swords, and crossbows. Dressed in heavy coats of wool and velvet and the pelts of beasts they’d slain before, they took up residence in the town’s finest home. Ivar and his men swore that they would catch the beast and send its skin back to the king before the winter was out.
But their first venture into the woods was fruitless, as was the second, and the third. The traps they set remained untouched. They
