She turned on her heel toward the door, swept past the carved Five Kings and Second Daughters, past the guttering candles of useless prayers. More than one blew out in her wake.
Numbly, Red picked up a candle and a match from the small table. It took a few curses before the wick finally caught, singeing her fingers. The pain was nearly welcome, a bare thread of feeling weaving past the shell she’d built.
Red slammed her candle into the base of Gaya’s statue. Wax puddled, dripped down the edge of the inscribed bark.
“Shadows damn you,” she whispered, the only prayer she’d make here. “Shadows damn us all.”
Hours later, bathed and perfumed and veiled in crimson, Red was officially blessed as a sacrifice to the Wolf in the Wilderwood.
Courtiers lined the cavernous hall, all dressed in black. More people crowded outside, the citizens of the capital rubbing shoulders with villagers who’d traveled from far and wide for the chance to see a Second Daughter consecrated by the Order.
From Red’s vantage point on the dais at the front of the room, the audience looked like one shapeless mass, something made only of still limbs and eyes for staring.
The dais was circular, and Red sat cross-legged on a black stone altar in its center, surrounded by a ring of priestesses specially chosen for the honor from Temples all over the continent. All wore their traditional white robes with the addition of a white cloak, a deep hood pulled up to shadow their faces. They stood with their backs to Red. The priestesses who hadn’t been chosen as attendants wore cloaks, too, a solemn row of them sitting directly in front of the dais.
In contrast, Red’s gown was as scarlet as the one she’d worn to the ball, but shapeless this time— in any other circumstances, it would be comfortable. Her hair was unbound beneath a matching bloodcolored veil, large enough to cover her whole body and spill over the edges of the altar.
White, for piety. Black, for absence. Scarlet, for sacrifice.
In the row behind the priestesses, Neve sat between Arick and Raffe, poised at the edge of her seat. Red’s veil made all of them look bloody.
The Valleydan High Priestess, the highest religious authority on the continent, stood directly in front of Red. Her cloak had a longer train than any of the other priestesses’， and to Red, it almost looked a brighter white. She faced the altar, back to the court, the train of her cloak dripping over the edge of the dais to gather in a puddle of white fabric.
Overflowing piety. A high, skittering laugh wanted to lodge in Red’s throat; she swallowed it back.
Eyes hidden in the deep shadows of her hood, the High Priestess stepped forward. Zophia had held the position for as long as Red could remember, her hair long devoid of whatever color it’d once been, her face grizzled with an age that could be determined only as old. She held a white branch in her hands with all the gentleness of a mother cradling a newborn, and passed it off to the priestess at her right with the same care.
Though stoic, most of the other priestesses at least had some sort of emotion on their face— joy, for most, kept subtle but still there. Not so for the priestess now holding the branch shard. Cold blue eyes beneath a sweep of flame-colored hair watched Red with an expression reminiscent of someone observing an insect. Her gaze didn’t waver as Zophia reached forward and lifted Red’s veil, gathering the yards of fabric in her hands.
The fear she’d steeled herself against rushed in when the veil lifted, like it had been a sort of armor. Red’s fingers clutched at the edge of the altar, nails close to breaking against the stone.
“We honor your sacrifice, Second Daughter,” Zophia whispered. She stepped back and raised her arms toward the ceiling. All around, the Order mirrored her in a wave, starting at the front of the dais and cresting around to the back in a sea of raised hands.
For a brief, shining moment, Red thought of running, of forgetting about the splinter of magic that lived in her heart and trying to save herself instead of everyone else. How far could she get if she launched herself from this altar, tangled in crimson gauze? Would they wrestle her back? Knock her out? Would the Wolf care if she arrived bruised?
She dug her nails into the stone again. She felt one split.
“Kaldenore, of House Andraline,” the High Priestess announced to the ceiling, beginning the litany of Second Daughters. “Sent in Year Two Hundred and Ten of the Binding.”
Kaldenore, no blood relation, born of the same House as Gaya. She’d been a child when the Wolf brought Gaya’s body to the edge of the forest, when the monsters burst from the Wilderwood a year later— a storm of shadowy things, by eyewitness accounts, shape-shifting bits of darkness that could take whatever form they chose. By the time Kaldenore’s Mark appeared, the monsters had been haunting the northern villages for nearly ten years, with reports of them sometimes getting as far as Floriane and Meducia.