They always did. Even the Denorians, who placed an irreverent amount of value on science over religion, spent their last, raging breaths cursing the gods for condemning us with grief.
The names of the Alskader goddesses spurted from her rant as the Shriven slipped silently into the square. Magritte the Educator. Rayleane the Builder. Dzallie the Warrior. I couldn’t parse all her words, but I knew that feeling of vitriol. It rose in my chest, the anger, and I bit down hard on my cheek. I couldn’t afford to feed the slow burn always smoldering next to my heart.
Not a day went by when I didn’t bite back fury. Every moment was a fight against the close heat of rage when I caught someone’s eyes staring, and I knew from that one look that all they saw was a dimmy. I stopped being a person and was reduced to danger wearing the skin of a teenaged girl in a hand-me-down sweater. But the anchorites’ chorus of voices in my head reminded me that anger loosened my grip, and I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t be like Skalla.
The Shriven descended on her like a shroud. Their long staves whipped through the air, fast and dangerous as eels. I lost sight of her for a moment, then dark crimson spurted over one of the Shriven’s white-clad shoulders. He collapsed in a heap with Skalla on top of him, and I gagged as I caught a glimpse of her face. Blood streamed out of her mouth and down her neck—she’d torn the man’s tattooed throat open with her teeth.
A moment later, it was over. Skalla’s wrists were held behind her back at vicious angles by two of the Shriven, another two stood at her elbows and a fifth had his hand wrapped tight around her throat. She wasn’t but a slip of a thing, but dimmys were unnaturally strong, and it looked like the Shriven were going to be extra careful with Skalla. They didn’t often lose one of their own—they were trained for this work.
As they hauled her away, I tried not to picture the inevitable scene on the wide square between the palace and the temple. I’d seen it so many times—before I was old enough to know to hide, one of the anchorites had always taken it upon themselves to drag me and any of the other dimmys in the temple’s care to the executions. As though it would help. As though anything would help.
They would chant Skalla’s name as the tattooed Shriven led her through the crowd. Skalla. Skalla. Skalla. The Shriven would pull her onto the platform, still writhing and wailing. They used to hang the diminished, but the day before my twelfth birthday, the Suzerain had declared hanging immoral and cruel. So violent dimmys lost their heads these days—as if that bloody death was somehow less cruel.
All of us in the temple knew the truth. Donations poured in after those executions. Folks were so grateful to be protected from one of the diminished, they’d increase their already steep tributes. There was money in fear, and money in blood, and there was nothing the Suzerain liked better than a fat tribute and a city that remembered who kept them safe.
Waiting for the Shriven to clear the market square before I headed back to the temple, I could imagine Skalla standing on that platform, fighting like a wild thing. They never went quietly. Her fiery red hair would be tangled and matted with blood, her fingers raw from scraping the stone walls of her cell. There would still be blood on her face, dried and flaking.
They’d wait a day. Let the story spread. Drum up the crowds. The Suzerain’d be there at the back of the platform, all calm and beatific in their white robes. The benevolent guardians of everyone in Alskad—except for the people who needed them most.
People like me.
* * *
The yeasty warmth of the day’s bread baking swirled around me when I opened the kitchen door. Perhaps tomorrow, on my birthday, Lugine might slip me a thin slice of ham or a cheese rind with my dinner roll. She’d never hugged me like she had Sawny and Lily, but from time to time, if it was a special occasion, she’d give me a small treat. After all, I’d been with the anchorites longer than any other dimmy but Curlin.
As I turned to close the door, I was startled to see Sula, Lugine and Bethea sitting at the kitchen’s long slab of a table, their faces grim. They shouldn’t have been back in the residential part of the temple yet—adulations were barely over. Moreover, it was more than a little strange for all three of them to be in the same room together like this. What would bring them all here at this hour?
My hands trembled as I dumped the sacks of oysters into the tin trough at the end of the table and shrugged out of my sweaters. I sent up a silent prayer to my twin. Watch my back, will you?
“Before you say anything, I know I should’ve gone to adulations this morning, but I hadn’t yet had any luck this month, and I wanted to find at least one pearl for you before my birthday.” I gave the women my best smile, which none of them returned.
They were each powerful within their orders. Anchorite Sula supervised all that went on in the trade library and made certain that each of the temple’s charges were assigned a craft or else made our way into the Shriven. Anchorite Lugine oversaw my work as a diver in the summer and in the canneries in the winter. Long-suffering Anchorite Bethea, the eldest of the three, was responsible for the spiritual education of us brats the temple took in. They were the closest thing I had to real parents. Though, to be fair, they were collectively about as warm as an ice floe. I’d spent my whole childhood with their eyes on me, watching me with the same wariness they’d use with a rabid dog.
Once, when I was barely seven, a gang of grubby urchins cornered me in a back alley. One of them managed to break my nose before I fought my way free. I ran through the streets, blood and tears streaming down my face, and sought comfort from Lugine in the kitchen. She’d taken one look at me, thrown me a dishrag and set me to scrubbing pots. From then on, when the other brats came after me, I scrambled up onto the roof of the nearest building or into a dank corner to hide.
That was how Sawny and I’d found our spot on the temple roof.
Sula sighed. “We’ve long since given up on forcing you to attend daily adulations, Obedience.”
My jaw clenched. I hated being called by my given name, and she knew it. The name “Obedience” had always seemed like a cruel joke. “I’d prefer you call me Vi, Anchorite.” I fetched a plain ceramic bowl and a spoon from one of the shelves that lined the walls of the cavernous kitchen. “My birthday’s not ’til tomorrow, and before you ask, I already sent my ma a birthing day note. Did you come to tell me you’d miss me when I leave?”
I lifted a ladle from its hook and started toward a pot of rich broth studded with root vegetables and chunks of lamb. Before I got close, a low, disapproving sound from Lugine stopped me. I turned to the half-congealed pot of pea and oat mush on its hook at the edge of the hearth instead and filled my bowl, and settled myself on the rough bench across the table from the anchorites to eat. Diving was hard work, and trouble or not, I was ravenous. I shouldn’t have provoked her with the stew, though. Not when she already looked so angry.
“Tell me, Vi. What are the rules of the pearl trade?” Lugine asked.
I swallowed my spoonful of lumpy mush and recited the rules I’d been taught since I began to train. “All the fruits of the dive must go toward the betterment of the temple and its occupants. The meat to feed the servants of the goddesses and gods, the pearls to glorify the goddesses and gods by making their home and their servants beautiful.”
“And why are laymen allowed to partake in the bounty of the sea?” Bethea asked.
“So that they, too, may share in the glory of Hamil’s gifts.”
Sula nodded. “And how do the laymen honor the god’s gifts to them?”
“I don’t plan to stay here and keep diving, Anchorite,” I said. “I’ll look for work in the North, near my ma’s people.”
“Answer the question.”
I sighed. “Laymen must offer their bounty to Rayleane, Hamil’s partner, to thank him for his gift. They can keep what the goddess doesn’t want and be paid for their service besides.”
The anchorites stared at me in silence. I set my spoon on the table, the pouch