But such hope was dashed with Matron Grannice’s next words. “You must, Healer Paltry. A supplicant before the Oracles must be cleared spiritually and physically.”
Paltry stared at the ruined illuminarias. “Of course, you’re right. But let’s be quick about this. I must study in more detail what happened here.” He waved for Dart to stretch back on the bench. He examined her with swift efficiency, hurried, with none of his usual gentleness.
Dart trembled under his touch as he checked her body from brow to toe. Lastly, he crouched between her spread legs and reached toward the ache in her loins, probing toward the root of her shame. “She’s been bleeding,” he said.
“Her first menstra,” Grannice explained, arms folded.
By now, tears rolled down Dart’s cheeks. She awaited the end of her life.
With a clearing of his throat, Paltry straightened and gained his feet. “Everything appears fine,” he said, patting her inner thigh. “She can attend the night’s ceremony.”
Dart gasped in shock, struggling to speak.
“Up with you then, child,” Matron Grannice said. “Into your clothes.”
Dart stared between the portly woman and the healer as he marked her forehead in blue oil. “I… I passed?”
She could not keep the incredulity out of her voice. Was she healed? Maybe the attack in the rookery had been just some horrible nightmare. She could almost believe it, wanted to believe it. At times over the past days, it had even felt that way. Or had some Grace secretly blessed her, made her pure again?
“Pure,” she repeated aloud. In her heart, the word also meant home and family.
“Yes, yes,” Matron Grannice scolded, “it’s indeed a blessed miracle. Now get yourself dressed. You’ve much to do before the full moon rises.” The matron turned to Paltry. “What of the other girls? Those still in the hall?”
Paltry shook his head. “I can test no others. It will take some days to acquire another four illuminaria. As such, they will not be able to attend this moon’s ceremony.”
Grannice hurried Dart into her clothes. “See what you’ve done, child! Ruined it for all the others!”
“But I didn’t mean to-”
“It’s truly not her fault,” Paltry pledged in her defense.
Dart nodded vigorously, tugging on the last of her clothes. She could only imagine the anger of the remaining thirdfloorers. There would not be another choosing until midwinter.
Frowning deeply, Matron Grannice led the way to the door. Dart hopped after her, trying to get her foot into her last slipper. Pupp, thinking it a game, jumped and nipped at her loose footwear. She shooed him away.
The matron reached the door and tugged it open. As Dart pulled into her slipper, she heard the matron’s announcement and the shocked responses that followed. Wincing, she stood in the shadows, sheltered behind the large woman’s bulk.
Healer Paltry placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder and leaned to her ear, speaking low and urgently. “I don’t know what you did with Master Willet, but I promise you I’ll find out.”
Dart gasped. Understanding struck her immediately. She had passed the healing wards on the seventh floor on her way to the rookery. The room tilted, and her vision darkened. Paltry was Willet’s partner. The healer had lied about her purity a moment ago. She remembered his fingers… in her, probing… possibly even appreciating his partner’s bloody handiwork.
A shudder passed through her. She felt violated all over again, her momentary hope dashed into ruins. She felt unmoored, terrified, trapped.
“I’ll be watching you, Dart.” His voice was as gentle as ever, but his fingers dug deeper, painful, threatening. “In the meantime, it seems we both have secrets to keep.”
Matron Grannice spoke above the babble of shocked voices from the hall. “Come, Dart. Night won’t wait on you forever.”
With a small cry, Dart fled the healer’s grasp and into the passageway. Forty pairs of eyes narrowed at her in angry rebuke. None came to congratulate her on the blue cross on her forehead. She felt a bone-deep urge to flee to the nearest privy and scrub the mark off. But for now the cross was all that stood between her and banishment.
She continued down the hall, refusing to look back. She had won back her home for a short time-but was it even worth it?
Laurelle and Margarite met her at the end of the hall. They stared at her as if she had been freshly dredged up from the muddy bottoms of the Tigre.
“What happened back there?” Laurelle asked.
Dart shook her head. She had a more important mystery to ponder: What was she going to do now?
Night came much too quickly.
Dart huddled with the crowd of other supplicants in the hall below the High Chapel. In the center of the room, a spiral brass staircase wound up to the sacred domed chamber above, but the way remained locked, awaiting the rising of Mother moon’s full face and the chiming of the oracular bells.
Earlier, after sunset, Dart and the others had been sent here to prepare themselves. Small altars dotted the walls of the hall. After fasting the entire day, the supplicants to the Oracles were required to burn a stick of incense, sending their prayers up into the aether, while dropping leaden weights into deep watery troughs to shed their sins into the naether below.
With this final purification complete, only the waiting remained.
Dart stared around her. Off by the staircase, in a place of honor, the young men and women of the fifth and sixth floors gathered, stubbornly struggling to look calm or bored, but Dart saw their terror. Time ran short for members of this group. It was the very last ceremony for some of them, the last chance to be chosen.
On the other side of the hall, the fourthfloorers chattered merrily, wide-eyed and still fresh to the ceremonies, excited by the pageantry of it all.
Closer at hand, a sea of boys surrounded her, all thirdfloorers, dressed in the traditional black breeches, tucked into gray boots with loose gray shirts. The likelihood of being chosen was slim for those of such tender age. As such, their attention was focused away from the spiral staircase and toward the odd trio of small girls in their midst: Laurelle, Margarite, and Dart.
Word of the incineration of the illuminaria had spread rapidly through the Conclave. A few glared at Dart with murderous intent, others seemed merely intrigued, while most simply found it all too amusing.
“So they blew up?” Kessel asked, motioning with his hands and whistling. “I wish I could have seen poor Healer Paltry’s face!” The boy screwed up his own face into a mock of outraged shock.
His young attendants almost burst from trying to stifle their laughter, patting him on the back, holding their sides, and trying not to make too much noise.
“It was not funny!” Laurelle huffed at him, pinning the others with a baleful glare. “The… the accident ruined the chances for the other girls. Now they have to wait half a year, until the midwinter ceremony.”
“That only leaves more chances for all of us!” Kessel said with a shrug. “We should be thanking that girl.”
The gathered gazes focused back on Dart. She tried to shrink away.
“Don’t worry,” Margarite said heatedly. “The other girls will be thanking her later up on our floor.”
“That’s if she isn’t chosen first,” said a boy in the back. Dart did not know his name, but she had noticed him before. He was new to the Conclave, arriving only last year. He was taller than the others, his skin a deeper bronze than theirs, suggesting he came from one of the lands far to the south. But he never said exactly where, not even to his fellow thirdfloorers.
“She’ll never be chosen,” Margarite shot back. “Look at her, wearing hand-downs from storage. She smells of mothguard and mold.”
Dart kept her arms crossed over her black dress, tucking down her frayed gray half cloak. Even her boots were mottled white with age, not like the rich gray leathers of Margarite’s and Laurelle’s footwear.
“It is not the cut of one’s cloth that will be judged here,” the bronze boy said, turning away dismissively.
Dart appreciated his support, but it was futile. Despite the blue cross on her forehead, she was not pure enough to kneel before the Oracles of the Myrillian gods. It was not only mothguard and mold that would be sniffed out by these blind seekers of handmaidens and handmen. They would surely know of her corruption. The servants in the High Chapel were not mere boxes of old humour, like the illuminaria. They were the very senses of the
