Chapter Seventeen
The Young Priestess
**
The Young Priestess has no name.
I surrendered when I was born to the Witches long, long ago. The Witches are ancient, but not as ancient as the Midnight King.
He to us is a myth, a legend.
The Midnight King has ruled under many different courts, and many different names, but all in the same place. The lands of mountains and forests and stars.
No one truly knows what he’s capable of. Or where he came from.
All we know is that even the Witches fear him, and we must complete the ceremony every year to nullify his powers.
But of course, Kieran doesn’t know that.
I’m not supposed to know that.
“Don’t you ever think it’s wrong?” I ask my fellow young Priestess as we walk along the Temple of the Sisters. She dresses exactly as I do, in blood-red robes that block out individuality from our faces to our toes.
I don’t know what any of my sisters look like, nor do they know what I look like.
“Don’t say such things,” my friend scolds, but only because we pass Mother Braxis.
Mother Braxis is the cruelest, almost as much as the witches.
“We’re set to worship the Midnight King falsely, then deliver him to a false salvation through Daemetai tomorrow–”
Two more of our nearby sisters, also clad in red, shush me harshly.
I am so sick of being shushed.
“It is the way of things,” my friend replies, lifting the pitcher of the Holy Sacrament and pouring it into the fountains of blessed water that surround our temple, “the Midnight King must be destroyed.”
“And the girl's bloodline along with it?”
My friend stiffens at my boldness. At the truth in my words. We’ve all been groomed into such religious submission since our birth, robbed of a life of choice.
“Don’t you think the royals deserve to know their place in all this? That the Midnight King deserves to know we’re murdering his–”
“Mother Braxis!” My friend calls, and my face drains of color. “The young priestess is doing it again!”
Images of cruel torture come forward, and I collapse into terror. It is not my friend's fault I am disobedient and curious, it is only my own.
Mother Braxis comes over to us, cold wind follows. She looks me over once, twice. Her face is slightly visible, she has earned that privilege.
The punishment is a knife’s edge. “Take her to the Witches.”
The Witches' torture breaks me. Breaks me every time.
“N-no, please!” My voice is drowned in my own sobs, but my friend, who is not my friend, grabs my arm with another and drags me off.
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