Nightsworn | The Whispering Wall #2

Thirteen: Raklan

"There's blood down your nails." Lin gave Dela a pained look. "Why in Kiel's name did you volunteer for that?"

Dela glanced down at her fingers. Her nails were cut down short, and there was a rime of blood underneath them, but it was nothing her evening wash wouldn't sort.

One of the Clerics had brought a dead thrall into the dissection class that day, and Dela had volunteered to have a go at the demonstration. Though the fiendish little thing gave her shivers, an Unspoken had drained its venom so it could be used in class and it was harmless. Lin was just being squeamish again.

"It's just a bit of blood," she said, finishing off her gruel. "It'll wash out. And I volunteered because I was interested." She couldn't help feeling a little hurt by her friend's tone, as if there was something wrong with enjoying her vocation every now and then. "It's not as bad as a butcher's shop, anyhow."

"You were never going to be in a butcher's shop."

"No, but my mother had me helping with kills from the hunt as soon as I could hold a knife." Dela frowned. "I had to put my entire arm inside the corpses sometimes."

"Oh, don't." Lin shook her head, eyes squeezed shut. "I'd forgotten you grew up in the wilds."

"Well, I never forget that you grew up in the city," Dela replied, nudging her friend in an attempt to lighten the mood and distract her. "You're so very sheltered."

"Sheltered? Psh." Lin rolled her eyes dramatically. "The city is a different kind of wild, with just as many big scary monsters."

"I lived with the big scary monsters," Dela said, matching the playful tone. "My papa was like two of you stacked on top of each other."

"He was not."

"I swear on my life he was." She stood up to clear away her bowl and Lin followed, but she didn't argue, perhaps reminded of how tall Dela actually was for her age.

As usual, the thought of the life she had run away from sobered her. There were aspects of it she had loved – her family and tribe always around her, the smell of the grasses when they flowered, the dazzling displays of glowbugs in the light season dusks. Sometimes she still dreamed of the wilderness and the rugged expanses of the southern plains. But there was just as much that she had been glad to get away from; the husband her mother had started referring to long before she had considered married life, the strange wild priests who shrieked and hummed in the night when the spirits took them, the endless wandering, and the terror of a dark season in the open.

She had made the right choice coming here.

Their afternoon was theirs to do with as they pleased, a rare day off while yet another inspection was made of the temple and its burial chambers; first, to ensure no other bodies had gone missing, second, to double check there were no secret ways in, and third to re-ward a few parts of the temple's rune net that had worn out more heavily, just in case. Dela didn't think anyone thought demons were behind the thefts, but Lady Kerrin wasn't taking any risks. The Head of the House looked thinner and more harassed every time Dela saw her.

Behind the acolytes' halls was a large walled courtyard garden which she and Lin favoured in their time off. It was used to grow vegetables and flowers for decorating the temple hall in the light season, but the Clerics who managed it had also made it a cosy outdoor space for meditation and relaxation. Several stone benches bordered the walkways, and candles floated in metal dishes on the surface of the pond, bobbing between the large leaves of spiny lotuses, which produced spectacular sweet-smelling blooms when the light returned. In the dark season they furled up into bobbing balls of pinkish spikes to protect their fleshy centres from marauding pests, and Dela had always thought the sight was vaguely obscene.