Page 11 of The Gilded Ones

“Look at me.”

I squeeze my eyes tighter.

“Look at me.” There’s iron behind the command now.

I look.

White Hands is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. My jaw drops nearly to my chest when I take full stock of her. Small of stature, she has short, tightly curled hair and glowing skin that gleams a smooth bluish-black, like the night sky at midsummer. Her most striking feature, however, is her eyes, deep black and fathomless, as if she’s seen the worst of humanity and survived to laugh at it all.

I thought I’d endured tortures, but something tells me White Hands has not only endured but thrived, become stronger for her pain.

She’s monstrous… The realization shudders through me, along with another. This is why the Infinite Wisdoms cautions against talking to unmasked women, against even looking at them.

They may be demons in disguise.

White Hands moves closer. “Now, then, tell me – what have you decided? You have only two choices, after all: remain here, where the elders can bleed you while pretending to enforce the Death Mandate, or come with me to the capital and make something of yourself – something even those greedy bastards upstairs cannot sneer at.”

“I’m impure,” I say slowly, pushing back the futile hope that surges at her words. There’s no reprieve for me, no freedom. Nothing will change that.

Oyomo, give me grace. Oyomo, forgive me my sins. Oyomo, please absolve me.

I turn my head away, but White Hands’s gauntlets immediately return, digging into my skin. She forces my eyes to meet hers. “You can decide your fate, alaki, an option that was not given to your predecessors.” Her tone is pleasant enough, but there’s pure steel behind it. “However, if you do wish to have the Death Mandate enforced—”

“Death Mandate?” This is the second time she’s mentioned it.

“‘Never allow an alaki to live, nor anyone who aids her,’” White Hands recites, as if reading from a scroll. “Those are the exact words of the Death Mandate for your kind – the words that ensure that every girl in Otera undergoes the Ritual of Purity so that all your kind are found and executed without delay.”

The ground falls out from under me. So that all your kind are found and executed… The elders suspected all along what I was, were just waiting for the Ritual to confirm it so they could finally end my life—

“Listen well, alaki,” White Hands says, moving so suddenly, I feel the sting on my chest only after she’s sliced it open with her gauntleted claws. Unease shudders through me when I look down and see she’s made a cut in the same place Elder Durkas would have, had I gone through the Ritual of Purity.

Gold is already welling up, staining my skin with its evil. I jerk away, cover the wound, but White Hands lifts a droplet and rubs it between her fingers.

“This is the cursed gold.” She extends gold-stained fingers towards me. I watch them, mesmerized.

Cursed gold?

Such awful words…

“It’s what marks you as inhuman, demonic.”

Tears prickle my eyes, a mixture of horror and futile humiliation. White Hands doesn’t have to remind me of what I am. I know I’m a demon, foul and unclean, despised by Oyomo. No matter how much I beg, no matter how absolutely I submit, He never listens, never even hears me.

Why won’t you hear me?

I’ll try harder, I won’t scream, I won’t cry, not even if they dismember me again, knives slicing through fat, cutting past bone and—

White Hands grasps my chin, claws digging in deep, and my thoughts still once more. “It also marks you as a precious commodity.” She rises to her feet. “The deathshrieks have begun migrating, and the southern borders are nearly overwhelmed. The jatu there will not be able to withstand the attacks much longer. Every day, those…creatures come closer and closer to the empire. It is only a matter of time before we are overrun, defeated by them.”

I shudder from the memory, remembering the predatory look in the deathshriek leader’s eyes as they met mine. “What does that have to do with me?”

White Hands shrugs elegantly. “Who better to fight a monster than another monster?”

Shame wells up again, and the tears burn hotter in my eyes. I can’t even watch White Hands any more as she continues: “You have died, what, seven, eight—”

“Nine,” I tiredly correct, the methods flowing through my head. Beheading, burning, drowning, hanging, poisoning, stoning, disembowelling, bloodletting, dismemberment…

Several dismemberments, only one of which actually killed me.

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