Chapter 1.74 [The Caged Dove]

Chapter 1.74 [The Caged Dove]

Athis

The Caged Dove

Life in the Rosy Dawn Cult was miserable.

Athis knew it was an ungrateful sorrow. From the very beginning, her prospects had been hopelessly bleak. That she had survived a year and then half a year again without any scars to show for it was miraculous enough already. When an initiate of a greater mystery cult considered even the natural born citizens of their city to be a lesser existence, it went without saying that their slaves were worth about as much to them as a loyal dog. Sometimes less. The relative safety she had enjoyed from the whimsical cruelties of cultivators within the cult thus far was nothing short of a divine blessing.

Yet every day seemed dimmer than the last. It felt to Athis like the sun rose later each morning, and every evening earlier it fell. Pervicas had assured her that that was impossible the one time she had spoken of it, promised her that winter was behind them rather than up ahead. Somehow, Athis didn’t believe her.

Her duties came easier to her now. The Rosy Dawn Cult was an institution built upon natural mystery, but it was still an institution - and thus cyclical in its ways. Athis had experienced the various holidays and traditions that the cult observed in her first year as a slave, and the work was much the same as she entered her second year. It was something they whispered like a prayer on the truly bad nights, when one of the new additions was sobbing too loudly for the rest of them to sleep in their shared quarters.

It will pass. Some chores were universal - laundering clothes, preparing meals, gathering water.

It will get easier. Others sprang up around holy days - the planting of lettuce and fennel seeds for the Adonia, the brewing of tonics for young men participating in the Heraclaea, the decoration of doors with laurel and olive branches bound by wool for the Pyanopsia, and on and on. All of them pleasant enough but for the Thargelia.

Athis despised the Thargelia.

The first time is the worst, their seniors within the female slave class would promise, grave as any priestesses. The first year, the first punishment, the first night in a mystiko’s bed. Nothing hurts quite as bad the second time.

All things will pass. Even this.

They all offered that prayer up to heaven every morning when they woke and every night before they slept. Athis was beginning to wonder if anyone would ever listen.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

Athis crept silently around the perimeter of the training in progress, collecting discarded piles of scarlet and white silks as she went. Pervicas was stuck in the kitchens for the afternoon, but Athis was still far from alone in her work. Working women followed behind her, laying down clean cult attire to replace what had been discarded. Others collected empty jugs and replaced them with full containers of clear water or diluted spirit wine.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

In the center of an enclosed courtyard accessible only to the women and girls of the Rosy Dawn Cult, the Young Miss Lydia Aetos was conducting martial practice with her junior sisters.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

The young women of the Rosy Dawn stood in orderly ranks, eight to a row and eight columns deep. Each of them carried a spear, each one unique to the initiate holding it. Some were plain by a cultivator’s standards, competently made but otherwise unadorned. Others were more art than armament - beautifully carved poles decorated with paint, some tied with ribbons and others topped by exotics spearheads. And others still were notched and weathered, distinguished by their visible use.

In the pre-training chatter and over the course of all of her shifts in this courtyard, Athis had overheard the stories behind most of those spears. The ones that had seen use were heirlooms, treasured relics passed down from the mothers and grandmothers that came before them. The flashier spears were nearly all tokens of favor, either from suitors within the cult or wealthy citizens down in the valley city. The unadorned weapons were the product of first generation initiates, a final gift from their proud families or one of their first purchases as cultivators of virtue.

As with everything else, the equipment an initiate brought with them was as much a declaration of their value as what they did with it. The order in which they formed their ranks reflected this. First generation to the rear, martial heirs and favored daughters to the front.

“Pivot! Brace! Thrust!”

“HAA!”

Lydia Aetos stood apart from the eight-by-eight formation, facing them and calling out the pace. Pivot, and each girl spun to face her right side. Brace, and she set her feet, calves and thighs tensing. Thrust, and every young woman in attendance jabbed her spear forward, shouting in perfect unison. The next pivot brought them back to center, and the one after that took them left. Then back to center again.

It was one of many martial drills, and every bit as taxing as the rest despite its simplicity. The mystikos in attendance were all dripping sweat by this point, their pale skin shimmering like they’d oiled it. In the privacy of the courtyard they trained as their male counterparts did, entirely nude. Those carrying greater burdens followed the Young Miss’ example and bound their chests with strips of linen, but nothing more than that was worn.

Athis had needed a few sessions to acclimate herself to the view. She didn’t know much about cultivating virtue, but the term refinement was all too apt as a description of the process. In her experience, even the least attractive cultivator in a courtyard full of them was a sight worth admiring.

Pervicas had teased her relentlessly that first afternoon, pinched her flushed cheeks and asked if she should be worried that the bonded girls all shared a bath. But she had understood. They all had. None of them had been untouched by awe the first time they laid eyes on an initiate of greater mystery, exposed in all their glory. Well, none of them but-

“Quickly now,” an older girl whispered in her ear. Athis sighed shakily and moved on to the next discarded pile.

Lydia Aetos was no different from her siblings and cousins in that regard. She was distant, even at times to her own junior sisters, but Athis had never heard of her doing anything untoward to a slave - especially not a woman. None among the young pillars were prone to excessive cruelty, not even the Young Aristocrat-

Athis clenched her eyes shut.

The former Young Aristocrat.

“Tell me then, if I’ve never done so before, why do you look like you’re about to be struck down?” The Young Miss asked her. She slid slowly into the pool until the steaming waters were up to her neck, rinsing her face and hair. “I have no reason to hate you.”

“Not me, no.” The words came, and from the corners of her eyes Athis saw eavesdropping servants seize up in alarm. They urged her to shut her mouth with silent looks.

“The Roman,” Lydia said flatly.

She supposed it was too late now.

“Sol-”

“Don’t,” she snapped, and the only mystikos that didn’t look their way were the ones that had already been pretending not to listen. Athis knew, deep in her bones, that she would be tempting the Fates if she voiced the word on her lips.

“Solus.” She met Lydia Aetos’ wrathful stare. “His name is Solus.”

It was the smallest possible defiance she could have offered. It was all a caged dove could do.

For a long, terrifying moment, Athis awaited death. She had no cultivator sense like what Solus and some of the other slaves in iron chains had described. She had no way of knowing if or when the Young Miss would strike her. All she knew was that if it happened, she would have no chance of stopping it. Lydia Aetos glared at her for her cheek, and all she could do was stare right back.

“You love him,” Lydia finally said, her voice deathly soft. “As I love him.”

Athis knew that the first and second ‘him’ were not the same person. Even the lowest servants in the Rosy Dawn Cult knew the story of what had taken place the night of Nikolas Aetos’ wedding.

“I don’t,” she said anyway. Shook her head and pressed the dull edge of her scraping tool against her thighs.

“Liar,” Lydia Aetos condemned her. In all her life, Athis had only suffered scorn of such intensity a few times. And of those few painful memories, this one hurt the worst by far. Because it was earned.

“I don’t,” Athis insisted again, even so. To her quiet horror, she heard the promise of tears in her voice. “E-even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. He’s gone now.”

“No.” The Young Miss shook her head once. “He was never here in the first place.” A different ‘he’ again. Whatever it was the other girls felt in her pneuma or heard in her voice, even the most brazen of her junior sisters turned their heads away. Offering what privacy they could.

“What do you mean?” Athis asked, though she knew she didn’t want to know.

Lydia Aetos reached up and pressed a single finger to Athis’ chest, directly over her heart.

“His heart was somewhere else from the very start,” she said. “There’s no capturing what wasn’t present to begin with. You never had a chance, and you never will for as long as you live here. Because you had the misfortune of falling in love with a great man, and great men follow their hearts unto death.”

Athis blinked rapidly, the bathhouse steam obscuring her vision.

“Tell me that I’m wrong.”

“No,” she choked out. “You’re not.”

“You never had a chance, because the you that exists here in this moment could not possibly survive the life he intends to live. There is no place for you in his heart. Not as you are. Tell me, slave - are you content with that?” Lio Aetos’ disgraced fiancé asked her quietly. For the first time in over a month, maybe in all her life, Athis admitted to herself the truth.

“No.”

She wasn’t.

A chorus of gasps and exclamations flooded the bathhouse, along with a sensation that was like dozens of breezes of differing intensity brushing across the surface of her skin and deeper at the same time. Athis inhaled a shuddering breath while tears crept down her cheeks, and it filled her lungs to the point she thought they’d burst.

Lydia Aetos stood from the bath and started walking, beckoning her to follow.

“Good. Neither am I.”