Prologue — Lirael

The gods have been dead for centuries.

Nobody told the garden.

The Fallen Temple of Elyria sits in a fold of the hillside, ringed by a grey stone wall far too high for anything it needs to keep in, and inside it there's a garden that is the most beautiful thing I know of in the world. Old fig trees along the south wall. Herb beds in rows the sisters replant every spring. A well in the middle, its rim worn smooth by hands.

In the morning the sun comes over the east wall and lights the tops of the figs first, then the well, then everything else. That order, every day. I know because I spent years watching through the same gap.

This place smells of wet earth, wax and bread. The bells ring at fixed hours and you learn to live by them before you learn to read. The sisters' sandals make a dragging sound on the gravel that you can recognise from far off — who's coming, and in what hurry.

We are twenty-two novices when I arrive.

And there are the old servants, who were already old when the old women of today were girls. Sister Corvel, whose hands are twisted with arthritis and who still kneads better bread than any of us. Sister Tama, who sleeps sitting up in the chapel and swears she's praying. They call us "the little ones" and scold us without anger.

And there's the bishop.

I have to say this, and it's the part nobody believes when I tell it: he was good.

Not good as a performance. Good the way that costs you something. He knew all our names — all twenty-two, without fail, and from any distance we looked the same, all in white, all with our heads down. He'd stop in the corridor to ask after somebody's cough. He kept figs in the pocket of his habit and handed them out in secret, because sweets outside of mealtime were a fault, and he was the one who'd written that rule.

He laughed. That's the part I have the most trouble fitting in afterward: I remember his laugh.

I can't tell you the day it changed.

That's what still bothers me, because I notice everything, and even so I can't put a finger on the day.

But I know what he did, and nobody outside this place knows it.

People came looking for the bishop. From far away, and almost always at night. Carts that came through the back gate without crossing the courtyard, and now and then you could hear something screaming inside before the door shut. The sisters sent us to the dormitory on those nights, and we went, and nobody slept.

I didn't know the name of what he did. I learned to call it what the old women called it: he helps. Somebody arrived wrong and left right. Sometimes it took days. Once it took a whole month, and at the end of it the man who'd arrived tied up walked out through the gate on his own two legs in the morning, and wept when the bishop put a hand on his head.

That's what he was. The man who took things out of people.

And he was the best there was at it — you could tell by how far they came. Nobody crosses three days of road with a tied-up relative in the back to go looking for the second best.

The cart I'm talking about came after curfew, in winter, and it didn't bring anyone.

It brought a chest.

Small. The size of a sewing box, and four men who weren't from the temple carried it down with a rope slung underneath, and the effort it took didn't match the size of it. I saw from the gap. I saw the bishop waiting at the top of the crypt stairs with both hands folded, and I saw his face when the chest passed him.

He wasn't afraid.

He was pleased.

The following week they changed the locks on the crypt. After that the candles down there stayed lit late, then until dawn, then all night — you could see the light coming through the vent grate onto the corridor floor, a yellow rectangle that stopped going out.

He stopped coming up for morning mass. Then he stopped coming up for the midday meal.

When he started walking among us again, he was something else.

He didn't shout. Didn't strike — not at first. He simply stopped looking at us the way you look at a person and started looking the way you check on stock. He got thinner. He began to sweat cold at mass, with that sour smell of wine and wax I carry with me to this day. And sometimes, when he was speaking, there was a half-second where the voice came out of him late, as though whoever was saying it wasn't the one moving the lips.

And he stopped knowing our names.

We all became "girl".

The first statue arrived the following summer.

They put it in the great hall, where a bench used to be, and the stone of it is dark and smooth in a way that doesn't exist on this hill. It came from outside, like everything that rotted here.

It's a man. Or it has a man's body: broad chest, hard stomach, thighs made for carrying weight.

And four arms.

The upper two are open and raised, palms up at shoulder height — the gesture of someone receiving you. It's welcoming. That's the part that takes a while to bother you and then never stops: the gesture is genuinely welcoming.

The lower two meet in front of the belly, fingers laced backwards — palms turned outward, the wrists twisted at an angle my hand doesn't make no matter how hard I try, and I tried. It's a prayer turned upside down. Somebody carved that knowing exactly what the right prayer looks like, and inverted it.

The head is a bull's. Four horns: two rising from the temples and curving forward, sharp, at the height where they'd go through you; two set further back and falling behind, heavy, wide at the base. The eyes have no pupils. The mouth is closed, and even closed you can see that the teeth behind it don't belong to anything that eats grass.

And he's naked.

I was old enough not to know what to call it, and even so I understood it was the centre of the sculpture — that everything else had been made to frame it.

And it was big. I had nothing to measure it against, I'd never seen one, and even with nothing to measure it against something in me understood that size was not supposed to be possible.

The sisters told us to look away. Every one of us looked. It's the first thing I ever saw in my life that resembled a man, and it wasn't any man's.

And what turns my stomach to this day isn't the size.

It's the detail.

Because no sculptor invents that. The veins are in the right places. The skin underneath pulls a specific way. There's a small asymmetry in the weight of the thighs that only exists in a body that walks.

That wasn't imagined. It was copied.

Somebody had the original in front of them and worked from life.

In the months after, the others came. One in the novices' corridor. One at the chapel door, smaller, with the same twist in the wrists. Then they stopped arriving by cart and started being made here — we'd hear the chisel before dawn, and nobody said where the stone was coming from.

The last one I saw arrive went in the garden.

They set it between the fig trees, facing the well, at exactly the spot where the morning sun lands after it clears the tops of the trees. Whoever chose that place knew about the light. They studied it.

And that's how I lost the only beautiful thing I had. They didn't break it, didn't close it, didn't forbid me from going in. They just put a four-armed thing looking at the well, and the garden stayed beautiful, and I stopped being able to be there.

The back rooms started that same year.

They used to be storage. Sacks, broken chairs, stacked roof tile. Somebody emptied them out, put straw on the floor and a bolt on each door — and the bolts went on the outside, and nobody said out loud that this was strange. In one of them they put a small statue, the length of a forearm, facing the bed.

Then the girls started changing rooms.

That's how we say it, and notice the care in the phrase, because the phrase was chosen: she changed rooms. Not disappeared. Not taken. Changed rooms — and the next day her place at the refectory table was empty, and the sister in charge cleared the plate without a word, and the twenty-one of us ate.

Then twenty. Then eighteen.

Nobody asks. That's the first thing this temple truly teaches, and it teaches it well: asking costs.

I watched, and that's what I have to say about myself back then. I watched when they took Iselle by the arm, and she looked back, and I lowered my eyes. I heard what you hear at night when the back corridor is on the other side of your wall. I did nothing, because there was nothing to do, and I still don't know whether those two are the same thing.

And there are the rites.

Those are in the crypt, before dawn, and we go down in a line holding hands. And our part is to watch. Kneel, watch and sing.

I know the song by heart. Still do. If I open my mouth now it comes out whole, in the right key, with the right pauses — and I have no idea what it says. It isn't our language. It isn't any language a single sister could name. We learned it the way you learn a lullaby: by repeating it until you don't need to understand.

What I did understand, in time, was something else.

I started noticing the prayers. The words that had gone out of them. Our god's name came up less and less in the bishop's mouth until it stopped coming up at all — and the shape of the prayer stayed whole. The asking, the offering, the promise of obedience. All of it in place.

Only who it was addressed to had changed.

And the new name nobody ever said in front of me. They didn't have to.

Because there's one word in that song — one, in the middle of everything I don't understand — that's in our language. Always on the same beat. Always on the same note. We'd been singing it since we were small without knowing we were calling somebody by name.

Mhorgaal.

And it was there, kneeling on the cold stone with my mouth singing something I didn't understand on its own, watching what they were doing to a girl who slept two beds down from mine, that I finally understood where I was.

I'm not a novice of a temple.

I'm the property of a place.

With me, though, it was different. And it took me years to understand that different didn't mean better.

They call me the promise.

In their mouths the word comes out soft. It comes in the prayers, along with the other beautiful words, and it took me far too long to learn that soft doesn't mean gentle.

The promise means a cell. Fasting. Vigil before dawn with my knees on stone.

And the whip.

Across the back when I raise my eyes. Across the ass when I'm slow to obey. He doesn't call it punishment — punishment would be easier to swallow. He says he's teaching me submission, because something larger than me is coming, and the only way to learn to receive it is to be beaten until the body stops arguing.

Chaste until the right day. That's the phrase. Repeated like a lullaby, with a hand on my head.

They kept me the way you keep a knife. Clean, sharp, and far from the wrong hands.

Nobody ever told me what for.

Only the bishop has the keys.

And tonight it's fucking freezing.

It comes up through the floor, through the straw, into the bone. The blanket is short — cover your feet, uncover your shoulder; cover your shoulder, uncover your feet. I lie on my side, pull my knees up, and do the maths.

Three lashes would sort it out.

It burns for hours. The skin stays warm till morning.

I laugh.

Wait. What the fuck did I just think?

It was a joke. It was a joke, it's the cold, it's this straw, it's the hard bed. What kind of person makes a joke about something like that?

Me, apparently.

Either I'm losing my mind or I'll take anything now to not be cold. I don't know which is worse.

What difference does it make. I don't decide anything here.

He comes when he wants.

Wait.

Somebody's coming.

Heavy step on the right, dragging on the left, the hem of the habit hitting the leg on that beat. Four doors. Three.

It's him.

Great. Prayer answered. Lucky me.

I'm up before I decide to be up. By the time the key goes into the lock I'm already kneeling in the middle of the room, facing the door, hands on my thighs, head down.

Nobody ordered it. Nobody's had to order it in a long time.

He comes in with the candle in one hand and the whip in the other.

The short one. Braided leather.

He sets it on the bed. Straightens it with two fingers — lays it flat, turns the handle outward, gives it a small pat, like a man settling a piece of cutlery on a table.

At exactly the height of my eye.

I look. Of course I look. That's what it's there for.

That one burns worse than the others and has never left a mark on me. Not one, in years. It took me a while to work out why, and when I did it was worse: it isn't kindness. Something is going to need me whole.

His hand touches my hair.

Tucks a strand behind my ear. Slowly. The way you do when it's affection, and it is affection, and that's what turns my stomach — the touch is never violent, not once.

Down my cheek. My jaw. My throat.

He opens the front of my habit with both hands, unhurried, like a man uncovering a dish.

His hands are cold. They always are.

He takes my breasts and squeezes with appetite. It isn't a squeeze meant to hurt. It's the other one — it's the one from a man who's enjoying himself, and he breathes in deep through his nose when he does it, and the smell arrives.

Sour wine. Wax.

Thirty-seven stones between the kneeler and the door. Twenty-two whole. Nine cracked. Six…

The hand goes down my back, opens flat, comes up again.

And takes my chin.

Adjusts it.

Two centimetres up. Always two. As though there were a correct angle and he were the only man alive who knew what it was.

There. It's now.

I raise my hands and pull his trousers down because that's what I have to do, and I do it fast so it'll be over fast. It's never over fast. I try anyway.

His cock is fat and pale. I move my hand slowly, the way he likes, and he goes hard far too quickly for a man that age.

The voice has already started. It never stops, that voice. That this breaks no vow. That my purity lives somewhere else. That it's sacrifice, and sacrifice accepted is not sin.

Shut up. Just shut up and get it over with.

Both hands close on the back of my neck.

And he fucks my mouth.

Deep. Stays there at the back of my throat, and my throat closes around him on its own, trying to force him out, and the sound that comes out of me isn't crying and isn't a scream — it's an animal sound, low and short, and he likes that sound. You can hear that he likes it.

The air runs out. The hands on my neck don't let me back off a finger's width.

Don't close your eyes.

Don't close your eyes, Lirael.

I learned that one the hard way: if I shut my eyes or look away, afterwards is worse. So I look. I look at his face while he fucks my throat, with the water running out of my eyes and the spit going down my chin.

And this is the part nobody believes when I tell it. It isn't the cock.

It's having to look.

I try to leave from inside myself. I try every time. It never works all the way through — I'm still here, behind my own eyes, watching all of it.

Then it starts to pulse against my tongue.

Oh no. Not now, not now —

Swallow. Swallow all of it, don't spill, don't spill.

If I spill, the night doesn't end here.

There's a lot of it and it comes fast and he holds my head in place. I swallow. Swallow again. I choke halfway through, cough with him still in my mouth, and some of it escapes at the corner and runs hot down my chin.

He saw.

He doesn't say anything. He pulls out of me, straightens his habit, takes the whip off the bed and leaves with the candle. The door bolts from outside with the same click it always makes.

I stay kneeling in the dark, wiping my chin with the back of my hand.

And that's when I understand what I saw.

Because while I was down there, made to look, unable to turn away — there was an instant when there was something looking back from inside his pupils.

It wasn't the bishop.

Deep. Still. Hungry. And old in a way that doesn't fit inside a man.

It saw me see it.

And it understood that I understood.

God. What is inside him?

The footsteps come back.

No, no, no. Four doors. Three.

The key goes into the lock and I'm already on my knees again before the door opens, because my body is faster than my head and my body already knows.

He's smiling. And he speaks softly, the way he speaks in prayer.

"You were so good tonight, girl, that I almost forgot your lessons."

The whip is in his hand.

"Lift the habit."

I lift it. I turn my back without being told, because being told twice counts as a fault.

"Count for me."

Of course. Always me.

I count stones all night to not be here, and he worked that out a long time ago — worked out that I'm good at it, that counting is the one thing that still belongs to me, and took that too.

The leather touches first. Cold, light, dragging slowly across my skin like something choosing its spot.

Then it leaves.

The second when it comes off my skin is the worst one of all. It's the only one where I can still get ready, and it's never enough time.

The whip comes down and opens a thin line of embers across my back, and the scream is out of me before I decide to scream. It hits the wall and comes back to me.

"One," I say.

The voice comes out whole. It still comes out whole.

I don't move. Don't reach back. If I move, or if I lose the count, he starts the whole thing over — and once he started over three times, and that night I lost the count on purpose just to see what would happen.

I never did that again.

The leather touches again. Chooses.

Leaves.

The second one lands on top of the first. On purpose. The skin is already alive there, and he knows exactly where he hit.

"T… two."

Louder this time. And I hate myself for it, because the noise is what he wants, and he goes slower when I make noise.

"Submission," he says, in that mild voice, in no hurry at all. "This isn't punishment, girl. It's training."

The leather touches.

"Something larger than you is coming. And you will have to know how to receive it."

Leaves.

"Th… three—" three, it's three, I counted right, please let me have counted right.

"Good," he says. "Keep going."NEXT CHAPTER - THE SCAPE