The Sleeping Prince - Melinda Salisbury Page 0,109
I have to try.”
“If you hadn’t let Maryl die, you’d have her.” There is an edge to Twylla’s voice, one I recognize. Grief. Tucked away tightly.
“I tried,” the Sin Eater says, letting go of Twylla’s wrist.
Twylla turns and I see her profile in the light, carved and cruel. “Am I supposed to believe you? I remember, Mother, a time when she was a baby, burning up in that awful room. And you left her to die. And when I saved her, you killed the goat. So do not tell me that you tried.”
The Sin Eater looks up sharply. “Do you think me so cold? I knew you’d save her. I knew the moment I left that house that you would run to the village and beg for herbs. Why do you think I left you with her? I couldn’t ask the withwoman for the herbs, because I am the Sin Eater – I cannot intervene. But you could. And I hoped in my secret heart that you would.”
Twylla’s eyebrows rise. “Then why kill the goat?”
“A life for a life, that is the rule. The withwoman knew what you’d done. Everyone she told would have known too. So I had to make a sacrifice. I had to obey my own laws.”
Twylla blinks, turning to look out into the ossuary at the bone murals. Without a word she sits back down. The relief on her mother’s face is naked.
“Forgive us, Errin,” she says. “I’ll come to your part in this.” She looks back to her daughter. “You never asked why we were the ones who Ate sin. I thought of anyone you would, yet you never did.”
“You told me why. I was perhaps six; you summoned me and you told me that we existed before Gods and kings, but it wasn’t for them that we did it. That someone had to do it, because there had always been sins.”
“You remember that?”
“I had cause to, recently. When I discovered the Gods were a lie. Now you say they’re not a lie, but a twisting of truth.”
“When we came to Lormere, there were no Gods, no kings or queens.”
“When we came there?”
“From across the sea.”
Twylla leans forward, as though to better hear what her mother has said, and I stare at the Sin Eater of Lormere, a tickling at the back of my neck as the skin there tightens. When the Sin Eater leans forward too, I do the same, three points of a triangle curving in.
“The truth of it is that the poison in the wine that the prince and his family drank, the poison that made him sleep, that killed his father and later his lover … our ancestor made that poison. Our ancestor was betrothed to the rat catcher’s son. When he learned the Sleeping Prince had defiled his daughter, he sent for his son’s bride-to-be to come with her skills, and her draughts, and kill them all for the shame they had wrought. Under the light of the solaris she did, brewing a deadly poison.”
I look at Twylla, who is staring at her mother, open-mouthed. “That’s impossible.”
“She didn’t know there was a child. She laced the food for the feast with her poison. As it was carried up the stairs, she overheard the kitchen maids gossiping about the rat catcher’s daughter and her condition. Her family creed was to harm no innocent. So she went to Aurelia and confessed. By the time Aurelia got to them with the Elixir, the king was dead, Aurek and his lover a breath away from dying too. Aurelia tried to save them. But the poison contained blood – her own blood – and had an alchemy all of its own. The battle between Aurelia’s blood and the witch princess’s raged inside both lovers, until childbirth weakened the rat catcher’s daughter and she died.”
At some point during this tale I’ve covered my face with my hands, desperate to block it out. Alchemy, poison, magic. Lormerian superstition. Yet real. I feel a pang at the base of my spine, a reminder of how real it is.
“The rat catcher fled with the child, which lived a normal life, but was cursed to rise from the grave every century to feed his father a heart. The Sleeping Prince lay locked inside himself, the battle ever-waging. And our ancestor threw herself on the mercy of Aurelia for her crime. It is in her name – Næht’s name – that we live as outcasts, burdened openly with sin to shame