The Priestess and the Thief Kindred Tales 30 - Evangeline Anderson Page 0,96

the Ascending Priestess Superior swept into the room, her pure white robes swishing around her dramatically. She came to sit on the side of the old Priestess Superior’s bed and shook her—none too gently—by the shoulder.

“Wake up!” she demanded as the old woman opened her eyes tiredly. “Time for your medicine!”

“I don’t want it.” The old Priestess Superior shook her head. “It tastes so bitter—can’t we skip it just this once?”

“Certainly not!” The Ascending Priestess Superior scowled as she drew a tall, bright green bottle out of her pocket. It had a dropper on one end and some strange writing on the side of it that Elli couldn’t read. Beside her, she felt Beedra stiffen.

“Oh my Goddess!” the other priestess murmured.

“What? What’s wrong?” Elli breathed, turning to look at Beedra’s stunned face, which was barely visible in the faint glow coming in from the crack.

“That…that’s not medicine!” Beedra whispered. “Those are Altherian Dreaming Drops!”

“What?” Elli shook her head in incomprehension. “What do you mean? What are Altherian Dreaming Drops?”

“A type of anxiety medicine—my mother used to take them,” Beedra breathed. “But if you take too much, they drain your energy. And large doses can be fatal!”

As she spoke, the Ascending Priestess Superior was filling the dropper of the bright green bottle with a dark purple liquid.

“Just take your medicine like a good girl,” she was saying to the old Priestess Superior. “I’m going to give you an extra big dose today and then I promise you’ll never have to take it ever again, all right?”

“Never again?” the old Priestess Superior quavered hopefully.

“Never again. In fact, you’ll never have to do anything ever again after this dose.” There was a cruel smile on the Ascending Priestess Superior’s thin lips. “I think it’s time your suffering was over and you went to meet the Goddess, don’t you?”

“I…I don’t know.” The old woman’s eyes were clouded with pain and uncertainty. “I suppose that would be nice.”

“Then open your mouth, dear, and take your medicine,” the Ascending Priestess Superior urged.

Obediently, the old woman opened her mouth.

“She can’t take that much!” Beedra whispered to Elli, her eyes wide with horror. “It will surely kill her! My mother only took a drop a day and even that turned out to be too much for her in the end!”

“We have to stop her!” Elli whispered back but Beedra shook her head, her eyes wide with fear.

“We mustn’t cross the Ascending Priestess! You don’t know her, Ellilah—she’s deadly.”

“I don’t care about that,” Elli argued. “We can’t just let her kill the old Priestess Superior!”

She couldn’t stay silent in the closet anymore. With a wild cry, she burst out and knocked the dropper of “medicine” out of the Ascending Priestess Superior’s hand.

“What in the Seven Hells?” The Ascending Priestess’s eyes flashed with anger as she turned to Elli. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Keeping you from poisoning the Priestess Superior!” Elli glared at her. “Did she ever have a wasting sickness at all, or have you been giving her those Dreaming Drops for months to make her ill?”

“What?” The Ascending Priestess Superior rose from the bed in one fluid motion to tower over Elli. “How dare you accuse me? And what are you doing back here, anyway, Novice? You’re meant to be at the Priory of Extreme Atonement!”

“I decided to go to the Palace of the Tenebrians to get a piece of the Healing Lattice to cure the old Priestess Superior instead,” Elli snapped. “But now I wonder how she got sick in the first place!”

The Ascending Priestess Superior arched one thin eyebrow at her.

“So you think I have been poisoning her for the past six solar months in order to take over her position?”

The glare she was giving Elli was so foreboding that Elli was tempted to tuck her head and apologize to the woman who was in authority over her. But one glance at the wasted form of the old Priestess Superior in the bed let her know she couldn’t do that.

“That’s certainly what it looks like,” she said, lifting her chin.

“Well, as a matter of fact…you’re absolutely right.” To Elli’s surprise, the Ascending Priestess Superior nodded her head. “I’ve been giving my predecessor there, Dreaming Drops in her tea from the minute I came aboard the Mother Ship. Once she was confined to her bed, I was able to give them to her straight from the bottle as ‘medicine’. The Dreaming Drops made her look like she’s got a wasting disease so nobody will be the