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Emotions I was forced to keep hidden for fear of looking possessed by evil, as girls were often perceived when they felt too much.
Though some may have been inclined to fault the defectors for father’s murder, I didn’t. I blamed the god who demanded blood. The revered god who ripped families apart and banished the innocent. An invisible entity, feared more than the creature that dwelled in the woods. The one to whom my father had pledged his undying devotion.
I’d written The Red God isn’t real. They were words that scratched at my skull every time I knelt to pray. The same words that nearly spilled from my lips with every lashing I’d suffered for some obscure offense I’d committed against Him. To utter such a phrase would label me a heretic. A witch.
Of course, I could’ve burned it, and all traces of my blasphemy would’ve disappeared. But I longed to cast those words into the wind and see them carried to a place from where no one would be brave enough to retrieve them.
The men of our parish believed the birds to be an omen of death. They believed the same of me, too, so maybe I shared a kinship with the foreboding creatures.
At my throat, dangled the signature black choker bearing the trinity cross that the governor had long decreed I should wear as a reminder of the mercy granted by our Red God. The same symbol my father would have been wearing when he was slaughtered in the name of the Sacred Men.
How tragic that a woman’s worth equated to the depth of a man’s pockets.
“I also know that the delicate black rose doesn’t grow well in these parts. Our winters are far too cold for its fragile roots.”
“What do the dead have to do with the raven?” “They guide the soul to the after, and you share its blood now,” she explained, shoving barley straw into a netted bag. “You walk between realms of the dead and living. The world you’ve known, and the one that has remained hidden from you.”
“I find it interesting that any time a girl is unusual, or dare I say, unique, she’s deemed evil, or cursed.”
My sister had always feared the dark, but I was the opposite. I’d always found the light far too scrutinizing.
“I felt like it was seducing me. The flame itself was pulling me toward something.”
“He’s handsome without being grumpy.” “If you like boys who can barely lift their own swords,” he grumbled.
She was chaos wrapped in fine silk. The embodiment of trouble that’d nearly brought him to his fucking knees when he’d first laid eyes on her across the ballroom. So achingly beautiful, his chest hurt.
“You look like a goddess right now,” he whispered, burying his face in my neck, kissing me.
The girl with the moon in her eyes and fire in her soul.
“My body belongs to you, Maevyth. It is yours.”
“You are mine, moon witch. For all eternity and whatever lies beyond it. No soul has ever been more intricately woven into mine than yours.”
“I have killed in a variety of ways, Maevyth, but anything that dares attempt to harm you tonight will suffer the most violent of them all,”
"They'd be fools to tempt such fate. Not a single creature would be spared when I burned it all to the ground."
“If preventing this plague means sacrificing your life, then I’ve no interest in saving everyone else. The whole world could perish of disease and famine, for all I care.”
