Sankta Anastasia is known as the patron saint of the sick and is celebrated every year with tiny dishes of red wine.
SANKT KHO AND SANKTA NEYAR
Long ago, before the reign of the Taban queens, Shu Han was ruled by a cruel and incompetent king. His many wars had left the ranks of his troops depleted and his country vulnerable; the draft had been exhausted and there were no more soldiers to fill the army’s ranks. The king gathered his advisers, but all they could do was prepare for the enemy to descend.
A clockmaker named Kho lived in the shadow of the palace and he vowed to use every ounce of his skill to help protect the kingdom. He worked through the night, binding bone to metal, stringing sinew over cogs. In the morning, arrayed in neat lines, their boots and buttons shining, a battalion of clockwork soldiers stood at attention. When the enemy began their assault on the capital, the clockwork battalion marched into the fray. These soldiers never tired. They never grew hungry. No wound could break their stride. They fought on and on until the last of the enemy soldiers were dead.
But the king did not let them stop. He sent the battalion to claim territory to which he had no right, and if the people there protested, he ordered his clockwork soldiers to silence resistance to his rule. On the battalion marched, slaying all who dared offer challenge, laying waste to cities at the king’s command. They marched until their clothes frayed and their boots wore away to nothing, yet still they did not stop.
At last, even the king grew tired of conquest and ordered the clockwork troops to halt. They did not. Maybe the clockmaker had not crafted them ears fine enough to hear the king’s orders. Maybe the soldiers simply didn’t care. Maybe their cogs turned more smoothly with blood to moisten their teeth. Or maybe, they could not stop. They had been made for destruction and had no choice but to see it done.
High on a hill, a nobleman’s daughter watched the battalion approach her city, and like Kho, Neyar vowed to use every bit of her skill to protect her people. She went to the family forge, and there she fashioned a blade so sharp it could cut shadow and so strong it laughed at steel. Neyar whispered prayers over the metal and walked the long road down to the city walls. There she met the clockwork battalion. For three days and three nights, Neyar fought the unstoppable soldiers, her blade flashing so brightly the people watching swore she had lightning in her hands.
At last, the final soldier fell in a heap of blood and broken clockwork, and Neyar laid down her weapon. Then she demanded that their irresponsible king lay down his crown. A coward to the last and without soldiers to defend him, the king fled the country, and Shu Han has been ruled by queens ever since. The sword was dubbed Neshyenyer, Relentless, and can still be found in the palace of Ahmrat Jen. Its blade has never rusted.
Sankt Kho is known as the patron saint of good intentions and Sankta Neyar as the patron saint of blacksmiths.
SANKT JURIS OF THE SWORD
In one of Ravka’s many wars, a general marched his army into enemy territory, sure of a swift victory. But the weather had other ideas. The wind shredded through his soldiers’ thin coats with cold claws. The snow crept through the leather of their boots, and their supplies dwindled. The enemy didn’t bother with battles, but hid amid the rocks and trees, picked off the general’s men in bursts of gunfire, and waited for winter to have its way.
Soon the army was less a body of men than a loose-limbed skeleton, staggering from dawn to dusk. The general abandoned his pride and called for a retreat. But by then, the final mountain pass that would lead them home was blocked with snow. The soldiers made camp as best they could. Night closed around them like a fist, and their fires sputtered as if struggling to draw breath.
The general railed against his luck. If only the winter had not come so soon. If only the enemy had not been ready. If only the pass had not been blocked. He cursed fate and told his men that if they died this night, taken by the cold, it would be because they had been abandoned by cruel and merciless Saints.
“Where is Sankta Yeryin to feed us? Where is Sankt Nikolai to guide us home? They’re safe and warm somewhere, laughing at their wayward children.”
Some of the men agreed. They sneered at the Saints’ names and spat into the snow. But in one tent, six soldiers gathered. They bent their heads and prayed to the Saint who they believed had kept them alive thus far: Sankt Juris, patron saint of the battle weary, the warrior who had bested a dragon through cunning and strength, who knew the suffering of long nights in siege, and who might hear the pleas of common soldiers.
Shivering in their frayed blankets, the six soldiers heard a distant flapping of wings and felt the earth rumble gently beneath them. Then, up through the ground, they felt a warm gust, an exhalation of heat, as if the mountain were no longer rock and snow but a living beast, a dragon with breath of fire. They fell into a deep slumber, their battered bodies warm for the first time in months.
When they woke, they found the general and the other men had frozen to death in the night. The snow had melted away from the mountain pass, and flowering amaranth lined the path, its long leaves like tongues of red flame, guiding the faithful soldiers home.
Every year on his Saint’s day, the people honor Juris by placing bunches of red amaranth over their doorways and welcoming soldiers and veterans into their houses.
SANKTA VASILKA
Vasilka was a gifted weaver who lived in a high tower at the top of a winding stair. The chamber where she worked her loom was surrounded by windows that filled the room with brilliant sunlight at every hour of the day. There, she wove cloth weightless as smoke in patterns of infinite complexity. Any thread she touched seemed to brighten in her fingertips.
A man who claimed to be a sorcerer heard of her gifts and suspected she wielded some kind of true magic he might steal. He traveled to Vasilka’s tower, and at its base he met her father, tending to the garden. The sorcerer spoke not of Vasilka’s talent or what fine tapestry he hoped to commission from her, but of his loneliness and his wish to just sit and talk awhile with this mysterious girl.
Vasilka’s father had long since given up hope of anyone wishing to marry his strange and solitary daughter, and though her weaving kept them both well provided for, he wished that she might find a partner and have a family of her own. So he led the kindly seeming man up the winding stair and let him sit with Vasilka while she worked at her loom.
The sorcerer talked of the weather, of his travels, of what plays he had seen, an easy flow of conversation like the murmur of a brook, designed to lull Vasilka into giving up her secrets. Every so often, he would slip a real question into the gentle current of words.
“How is your thread more vibrant than any other weaver’s?” he would ask.
“Do you think it’s brighter?” Vasilka would reply, adding a skein of copper into the cloth she was working, its color so brilliant it seemed to burn itself into the pattern.
After a while, he’d try again. “How do you fashion the patterns of your cloth with such charm?”
“Do you find them charming?” was all Vasilka answered, finishing a neat row that might have been the silky edge of a feather.
The sorcerer hummed a bit, looked out one of the many windows. He filled Vasilka’s glass with water, filled her ears with amusing gossip and tales of talking animals. Then he said, “Why do the colors of your tapestries never fade?”