Chapter 2: Chapter One: Heat

Sister Lain fled down the marble halls of the Dawn Spire, and the acolytes chased after.

“Clopclop! We’re having goat brisket again! Seems appropriate, doesn’t it?”

That was Brother Misha, teasing. The others followed, four of them in all, sometimes friends, more often tormentors.

She veered behind a red velvet curtain that hid one of the half dozen prayer rooms. The others assumed she didn’t pray – her knees didn’t bend properly for their human benches – but she did. Fiercely.

They passed just beyond the curtain, their shadows bobbing across the ceiling. Sister Ribbon laughed, tone dry. “You of all people should appreciate the sacrifice your cousins made for our lunch.”

“Come sit with us,” Misha added. “You’re nearly a saint now, but surely you can still break bread with the rest of us.”

They moved on.

Lain exhaled. It wasn’t the meat. She couldn’t stomach any to begin with. The real danger was Misha’s breath, his closeness. Her pupils dilated so fast it had frightened her. Her Heat was coming on early.

She unbound her tail, letting it curl around her thigh with relief. Pressure bloomed behind her eyes and scalp, where antlers threatened to break through. She steadied herself, then jogged to Elder Tanel’s office, her hooves padding softly in their leather caps.

The door swung open and Tanel peered out, combing his fingers through his black hair as if expecting a higher-ranking visitor. “Sister Lain?”

“It’s early.”

His face sobered. “Inside.”

She stepped into the office and he closed the door behind her. The place was as untidy as ever, scrolls and vellum stacked high on top of books, his office chairs likewise transformed into small tables for his work.

Tanel lifted a pair of books from his desk in search of something. “Did it start this morning?”

“At lunch,” she said. He eased past her and she stepped aside, careful not to touch him. One of her hooves landed on a text – Late Erwin Period Songspells, Volume 3 – and she lifted her hoof from it, then daintily jumped back. The only open space was the top corner of Tanel’s desk, so Lain sat.

“Here it is,” Tanel said, lifting a bit of parchment from beneath a mug. A ring of brown stained the page. He scanned the sheet. “I’ve got the recipe.We’ll have to increase the licorice root… let me check your pupils.”

He leaned in close to gaze into her eyes. His hand met hers and before she could pull away her empathy caught him in its snare. Instantly desire surged through them both – the quickened breath, the warming of her skin. If her ears weren’t so tightly bound under the veil, they would’ve fallen back; as it was, her tail coiled around his leg and tugged him closer of its own accord. The air thickened with her Heat and before either of them could properly think his cheek met hers, nose to her throat.

It was with all the willpower she could summon that she did not put her hand on his waist, that she did not pull him closer still, but her legs parted where they had once been tensely crossed at the ankle. He pressed his face against hers, hand tightening over her own, and for a moment neither of them breathed.

Then Elder Tanel reeled back, the shame obvious. He was nearly two decades older than her; he’d known her all her life. He was her mentor.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. She wrapped her arms about herself as if to protect him from the sight of her.

“No, no, I should know better,” he muttered, fist in his hair. “Don’t apologize for what you are… And anyway, quite a dilation of the pupils –” he fumbled for the parchment again. “Yes, more licorice root. Wait here, I’ll return shortly.” He left the office and closed the door behind him, locking Lain in with the dust and parchment.

None of the other Elders allowed themselves to develop facial hair until their hair grew in fully white; but Elder Tanel’s short black beard framed his face neatly, and after feeling it on her cheek she imagined what it might be like pressed to the sensitive scales of her collarbone and shuddered. Now that she was alone the urge to imagine all sorts of things surfaced like a dolphin ready for sky, but she held her breath – sometimes that helped – and let her tail coil as tight as it wanted.

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Lain was never quite allowed to forget that she wasn’t human. There were times where it burned weakly inside her, times when she was spoken to less like a beloved pet and more like a friend or an equal. But this was the cost of her difference. The Heat came three times a year, It had been Elder Tanel who came up with the cocktail of herbs to suppress the ache that clawed at her midsection and demanded satisfaction. But in those moments before she drank it, she was a wild thing, a roiling mass of nerves and wanting, the Heat acting almost entirely apart from her own will, much like her tail, which flexed at her leg –

She filled her lungs. The room was full of books. Books were boring. Books brought no pleasure at all. Certainly being sprawled with her shoulders to them would be uncomfortable. Surely Elder Tanel pushing her back with one hand and gripping the wool of her thigh with the other wouldn’t be nearly as pleasant as she imagined with all those hard-edged texts digging into her shoulders –

The door opened and she flushed as if Tanel had walked in on her pocketing his coinpurse. He didn’t notice. He’d taken a moment to don a pair of leather gloves, which she knew was smart; her Heat insisted through her empathic touch. But it still stung.

In one gloved hand he held a steaming mug. The room filled with the scent of black licorice.

“This should work.” He stepped gingerly over a stack of books and nearly tripped. Lain leapt in to steady the mug.

They exchanged a look, as if Tanel knew how little she liked this process, as if she knew how much he would have allowed her the freedom of her nature, given the chance. Not with him – he would’ve had that already, if he were that sort of person – but with others her age, or others of her kind.

Tanel had saved her life, spared it of the fate of those afflicted by Wyrmrot, and the exchange for living on borrowed time was preparing herself to be given wholly to the Underserpent. She could not waste her purity on shameful Kelthi urges. In three days, she would be given as a sacred offering, and saving Ivath depended upon her purity and knowledge of the Glinnel’s Spellsong. She had Tanel to thank for these years raised among the Brothers and Sisters of the Dagorlind.

She closed her eyes and drank, the black-tinged brew filling her mouth and sinuses and oozing slippery down her throat to smother her writhing need. The brew was so bitter that tears welled in her eyes. Her Heat dulled like a blade ground on pumice stone. She didn’t know what else was in the drought; she thought maybe elder bark, ground apricot pit, but she’d never asked. She didn’t want to know.

Tanel wiped a tear from her cheek with his gloved thumb. The smallest pulse of desire emerged, then sank again, a carp in darkened water.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Just three more days. Are you ready?”

“Yes.” The edges of the room appeared glazed in her vision. It was lovely, that glaze. Peaceful.

Tanel nodded. “Can I hear the song?”

She removed the bronze bell from her neck. One ring. The tone rippled through the river of her empathy, a sailboat gliding down a quiet stream. The Underserpent stirred in her thoughts, a presence always, attuning to the serpent stone pinned to her robes. With one hand over the stone, she began to sing.

Starbloom bright, in shadow grown,

Bind the breath to blood and bone.

Still the heart and seal the flame,

Sleep the wyrm, and speak no name.

Her voice opened like a door to a mysterious place within that was both nostalgic and new. It had this effect on all those who heard it. While her mouth carried only one note, it seemed to hold two always: one tone the past, the other, the future.

The serpent stone warmed beneath her palm. The creature’s life was a series of long, strange dreams held deep in its sacred nest below the Dawn Spire. It reached its mind to hers. A coil of the Underserpent’s dreams merged with her empathy: a spiraling dance of figures around a fire; a field of golden blooms in a valley atop a mountain; the taste of riverwater, sharp and cold. They merged.

One must fall so one may rise,

Ash to air and soul to skies.

Give the gift, then go below

The song must end for life to flow.

She woke from the song as if from a dream, her mind untangling from the Underserpent’s in slow waves. Elder Tanel’s eyes were closed, brow raised as if trying to catch something just beneath his hearing.

Tanel smiled. He blinked away tears. “Beautiful. You’ve come so far.”

He reached into his pocket for a small hempen bag with a drawstring. “I’ve made you several doses, though you may find you don’t need them before –” he faltered. “Before the ceremony.”

“Thank you.” She tucked it into her pocket. “Thank you, for–”

“No, no, not just yet,” Tanel said, waving off her gratitude. “Three more days. Save your thanks for then. I’ll have a gift for you.”

She grinned. “Is it an apple?”

He blinked. “An apple?”

“They’re my favorite.”

“This time of year?”

She laughed, stepping past his maze of tomes. “Fair point.”