My stomach aches with a terrible word that wriggles in my guts, making itself known whether I like it or not: doubt. I can’t unthink it, and I can’t pretend that I haven’t thought it before and won’t think it again. My doubt is why I stand before Saint Vinnica’s statue now. When I speak to her here in the garden, it feels as if someone is listening to me, so I send up a little prayer, a wish that the Father spoke to me rather than through me, some reassurance that he is the loving Father I have been taught to believe He is. I close my eyes and lift my face to the sun and listen to a swallow chirp in the Grace Tree. By the time I open my eyes once more, I feel calmer, comforted.
As I gaze at the statue, I wonder how anyone could identify it as Vinnica. She’s usually associated with either snakes, which represent Elath the Great Demon, or a chalice, a symbol of her body, which she sacrificed for the world, but if there were ever snakes or a chalice carved into the stone, they’ve long since faded with time and age.
I crouch down to push aside the tall sorrel leaves that obscure the saint’s legs and feet and find that the statue rests on a limestone block with faint Sanctus symbols carved into the stone. When I press my fingertips to the inscription, one word—one distinct feeling—jumps out at me: hand. But there’s more to it than that. Wrapped within the word are other ideas, other meanings. This hand is warm to the touch. It reaches for mine, but it also holds away things that would harm me. It feels oddly personal, and makes me long for something I don’t have the words or understanding to name.
It’s not surprising to find Sanctus carved into a statue’s base, but I’ve never felt a text as strong as this one. My fingertips drift across the stone, hungry for more. It’s mostly gibberish until I come across a few lines that are crystal clear:
Sing, faithful, of beloved Vinnica,
Prison and prisoner,
And pity her,
The eternal Vessel,
The heart of the Father’s sorrow.
I take my hand away, puzzled. Why would the Father be sorrowful when Vinnica’s sacrifice allowed Ovin to imprison Elath the Great Demon? My curiosity piqued, I sneak back into the scriptorium to fetch a sheet of parchment and a piece of charcoal. Then I stop by the garden shed to scrounge up one of the wire brushes we use to scour terra-cotta pots before replanting. I work up a sweat, scraping off the moss and lichen encrusting the statue’s base until I have enough cleared off to take a decent rubbing.
After all that, the results are disappointing. Sanctus is a slippery language on a good day, but I’ve never encountered a text this incomprehensible. I can’t even find the one passage I was able to read moments ago. Growling with irritation, I fold the parchment into fourths and stuff it into my pocket. I’m about to go back inside when a series of high-pitched notes dances through the air. A bird circles above me before it comes to perch on the statue’s shoulder.
Blue wings. Gold breast. A black band on each side of her face delineated by a white stripe above and below. Long wings and scissored tail tapering out of sight behind the statue. She’s a soulswift, a Vessel who has transcended her body to become a bird who carries the souls of the faithful to heaven. She cocks her head and releases a trilling more beautiful than any other sound on earth, proof of eternal life beside the Father in heaven.
This is what I will become when I die. Has the Father answered my doubt with this reminder of my duty on earth? Cowed, I grope for some sense of His presence in my heart, but a hollow ache is my only answer.
At last the soulswift takes flight, circles twice, then soars off beyond the convent walls, taking her heartbreakingly beautiful call with her.
Two
Well after dinner and twenty bells, the scriptorium is empty except for me, the lone Vessel who is staggeringly behind in her work.
I wonder what normal girls are doing in Varos da Vinnica, the town outside the convent. Knitting and gossiping with other women beside a fire? Telling stories that have nothing to do with burning cities or the end of the world? Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s more fun than translating Saint Wenslas’s apocalyptic visions into Kantari. It would be nice to find out what being normal feels like, if only for a day or two.
I rub my bleary eyes with ink-stained knuckles and get back to work, copying out verses that detail what will happen should the faithful fail to contain Elath the Great Demon in her earthly prison at Mount Djall.
Your forests shall become deserts.
Your seas shall become salt and sand.
Your fields shall drown in the punishing floods of the Father.
Your winters shall yawn across months, then years,
Until there is nothing left but death and death.
Most scholars believe Saint Wenslas’s visions are metaphorical rather than literal, but most scholars have never set foot in the Dead Forest, the place where the souls of the sinful go when they die, where they are transformed into telleg, the monsters that haunt the earth for eternity.
Sweat glazes my shorn head and slicks my armpits. As I shift my leg to unstick the back of my thigh from my stool, I hear the rustling of parchment in my pocket. Welcoming a distraction from my troubling thoughts, I let my hand find its way to my pocket and pull out the rubbing of the strange inscription. I spread it out on the table and touch a random spot. This time the power of the Sanctus text is much stronger, grabbing hold of me, gluing me firmly to the page, filling me with one distinct word: mother.
Not just any mother. My mother.
I can’t see her face, but I sense her in the room, close by. She hums a tune as I doze off in a bed of furs, the comforting scent of woodsmoke and burned sage surrounding me like a blanket. The physicality of her—the realness of her body—sends a pang of longing shooting through my chest, as fresh as the day the Goodson first brought me to the convent. I rip my hand away so fast I nearly topple over.
“Gelya?”
I let out a bleat of surprise and leap to my feet, smacking my head against the lamp for the second time today, and I find Zofia standing before me. I’m so relieved to see her that I wrap her up in a fierce hug, her steady presence calming the turbulence of my thoughts.
“I’ve missed you, too,” she laughs as she untangles herself. The flicker of the lamp’s light dances across her face, and I can’t help but think—not for the first time—that someone as lovely and smart as Zofia shouldn’t be hidden from the world behind stone walls. She’s from Auria, like the Goodson, and with her graceful height and gray eyes, she could be his niece. When she sings The Songs of the Saints for the pilgrims who come to the cathedral, her gift permeates the Sanctus text with excruciating beauty, piercing her listeners’ hearts with the glory of the One True God. She’s everything I wish I could be.
“I think you’ve grown another inch since I’ve been gone,” she tells me.
“Holy Father, I hope not. I’m going to start knocking into the ceiling beams soon.”
But Zofia’s eyes have already found the rubbing on my desk, and she frowns. “What are you working on?”
I touch the new sore spot on my head, suddenly nervous. “It’s nothing.”
Zofia crosses her arms over her chest and levels me with a no-nonsense stare. She may be my best friend, but she’s also my older sister and mother and mentor, all rolled into one imposing package. “That’s funny. Your ‘nothing’ looks remarkably like something that is completely unrelated to The Songs of the Saints.”