Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [115]
The man who couldn’t stand on his own two feet managed to give Cauvin a look that hurt. “‘Behind the walls,’ you say? So this man initiated her into the Bloody Mother’s priesthood?”
The palace orphans had their own way of talking. It wasn’t a separate language—the words were ordinary Wrigglie—but the meanings changed … doubled or even tripled. “Behind the walls” meant inside the palace, but the phrase also described someone who was doing favors for the Hand or who’d become one of them. Cauvin hadn’t expected the froggin’ Torch to know the hidden meanings.
“Don’t gape like a gaffed fish, boy. You were there; you know what I’m talking about.”
“They took favorites,” Cauvin admitted, shamed by the shakiness in his voice. “Women, mostly—girls, but boys, if they were the pretty kind—” He stole a glance at Bec who, thank the froggin’ gods, seemed not to be paying attention.
“Leorin, from what you tell me, was very pretty. You, I imagine, were not. She was taken behind the walls; you weren’t. You were in the pits when the Irrune stormed the palace; she wasn’t. What should that tell me about your ladylove, Cauvin?”
“Nothing!” Cauvin shouted, suddenly on the verge of blind rage … blind panic. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean what you’re saying it means. People went behind the froggin’ walls, people came out—”He tugged at his hair and stared at the sky because he couldn’t hold the Torch’s stare. “Frog all, Torchholder—they took me behind their froggin’ walls, into the room where they kept their froggin’ statue of Her. Gave me a choice, and when I said no, next thing I knew I was bent over backward on the froggin’ altar with a black knife cutting into my chest. I thought—I thought I was done for, but I walked out, Torchholder, same as I walked in. I got the scars to say it was no froggin’ dream—” Cauvin peeled back the neck of his shirt to reveal the bronze slug and a handspan’s length of the knotted, pale lines that crossed his chest. “I kept my heart.”
“I know you did,” the Torch said softly.
Cauvin heard, but wasn’t listening. “I didn’t change, and Leorin didn’t either. We both knew everything they told us was lies. How we’d been chosen to do the Mother’s work. How we wouldn’t need tattoos because the Mother would stain our hands with real blood. How we were going to carry the Mother along the coast to Ranke. The sea would turn red for us, the sky black. Our army would grow until nothing could stop us, and the Mother would come down to remake the world. It was all lies, and even if it wasn’t, it still wasn’t the truth ‘cause we weren’t an army, just sheep-shite and sweat. If we were the vanguard, then either the Mother didn’t plan to win Her wars, or She sure-as-shite didn’t need an army. No matter what they told us, we knew froggin’ better than to believe.”
The Torch nodded. “You and a handful of others. You kept more than your hearts, Cauvin, you kept your lives. Arizak, Zarzakhan, and I questioned every orphan we pulled out of those filthy pens. We saved the ones who hadn’t forgotten what it meant to be human, and they were the only ones we saved. Are you listening to me now, Cauvin? We scoured the palace, Arizak, Zarzakhan, and I. We put out the poisoned meat and we set the fire afterward. Except for you and a handful of others, we spared no one. No one, Cauvin, not a priest, not a slave, not an orphan, no matter how young.
“The Bloody Hand was a plague on the soul of man. If we had the slightest doubt about an orphan, we did not send him—or her—to the safe rooms. We judged them, and we killed them. All of them.”
“Not quite all,” Soldt corrected. The stranger had been so quiet, Cauvin had forgotten him.
The Torch sighed. “No, not all of them. Some got away and stayed hidden for ten years. Damn. That’s a long time for a man with red hands to wear gloves and plot