Page 7 of The Gilded Ones

The other men have gathered around him now. The women have begun to spill out of the houses, Elfriede among them. There’s an expression on her face, one I’ve never seen there before. Fear.

“Your eyes, Deka. What’s happened to your eyes?” she whispers, horrified.

Her words melt a bit of the haze surrounding me. My eyes? I turn to Father, about to ask what the men are saying, but he nods to someone behind me. When I look, there’s Ionas, a sword gleaming in his hand. I frown at him, confused. Has he come to protect me, as he did earlier today?

“Ionas?” I ask.

He thrusts the sword into my stomach. The pain is so sharp, so exquisite, I barely notice the blood spilling into my hands.

It’s red…so very red at first, but then the colour begins to change, to glimmer. Within moments, the red has turned to gold – the very same gold now racing across my skin.

Shadows cloud my vision as the blood in my veins slows to a trickle. The only thing that remains moving is that gold, pouring into my hands like a river, slowly gliding over my skin.

“As I always suspected,” a faraway voice says. When I look up, Elder Durkas is looming over me. His expression is dark with satisfaction. “She’s impure,” he declares.

That’s the last thing I hear before I die.

It’s dark when I wake and strangely quiet. The noise and crowds of the village square have disappeared, replaced by shadows, cold, and silence. Where am I? I glance around, my breath coming in short, laboured spurts, and discover I’m in what looks like a cellar, with neatly stacked casks of oil lined against dark stone walls. I try to rise, but something stops me: rough-hewn iron shackles, one set for my feet and a matching pair for my wrists. I tug and twist, breaths heavier and heavier now, but the shackles still don’t move. They’ve been hammered into the wall behind me. A scream builds in my throat.

“You’re awake.” Ionas’s voice slices through my panic. He’s standing in the darkness, examining me with the cold intensity he usually reserves for beggars and lepers. The expression is so harsh, I jerk back, frightened.

“Ionas,” I say, tugging at the manacles. “What’s happening? Why am I here?”

Ionas’s mouth turns down with disgust. “You see me?” he asks. Then he adds, as if to himself, “Of course you can.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, sitting up. “Why am I here? Why am I chained?”

Ionas lights a torch. The brightness is so overwhelming, I have to shield my eyes. “You can see me in complete darkness, and you dare to ask why you’re here?”

“I don’t understand,” I repeat. “My head, everything is all confused.”

“How can you not remem—”

“Don’t speak to it,” a cold voice commands.

Father rises from the corner, a harsh expression on his face. A pillar concealed him before, but there he is now, clear as day, despite the shadows cloaking his corner. Why can I see him so clearly? Ionas only lit one torch. A fearful twinge shoots through my stomach as I remember Ionas’s words: You can see me in complete darkness…

Father nods curtly to Ionas. “Summon the others.”

Ionas hurries up the stairs, leaving Father, a wraithlike figure in the darkness. His eyes burn with a strange emotion as he approaches. Anger? Disgust?

“Father?” I whisper, but he doesn’t reply as he crouches before me, his eyes flicking over my body until they land on my stomach. There’s a jagged hole in my dress, revealing a stretch of unmarked skin. I cover it self-consciously, something niggling at me.

What am I forgetting?

“Not even a scar,” Father observes in a strange, removed sort of way. He has something clutched in his hand: Mother’s necklace.

He must have taken it from my neck as I slept.

A tear slides down my cheek.

“Father?” I say. “Father, what is this? Why am I here?”

I reach out to him, then stop. There’s a harsh, forbidding expression on his face. A simmering disgust. Why won’t he answer me? Why won’t he look at me? I would give anything for him to embrace me and tell me how foolish I am for being so frightened, his sweet, silly girl.

He does none of these things, only looks into my eyes with that awful, removed disgust. “It would have been better if you had just died,” he spits.

And then I remember.

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