Dumped the Oathbreaker for His War God Uncle novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Temple Lit

I didn't take his hand.

I stood up instead, with the keys, and he stayed where he was on the step and let me.

"Wait there," I said.

"Is that an answer?"

"It's an instruction."

The biggest key was the one for the bronze doors.

My mother's hands had worn it smooth.

It turned the lock on the first try, and they swung in on the long dark hall.

It smelled of cold oil and dust.

Thirty days without a flame, and the temple smelled like a house where someone had died.

I picked up the lamp and carried it in.

My priestesses came behind me in their grey, two by two, without being told.

The faithful came behind them.

I heard their sandals on the stone, hundreds of them, and nobody spoke.

I walked the length of the hall to the altar and set the lamp down where it had always stood.

The flame leaned once, like a dog turning round before it lies down.

Then it caught.

It ran out of the bronze lamp along the altar and up the old iron brackets on the pillars.

It went into every cold lamp on every wall.

It went down both sides of the hall at once, lamp after lamp, all the way to the doors.

The whole temple filled with light at the same moment, gold and steady.

Somebody behind me started to cry.

My head priestess leaned on her cane and said nothing at all, which was how I knew.

The faithful came up to the altar one by one with their offerings.

Bread, and oil, and the little clay tablets with promises scratched in them.

A soldier's vow to come home.

A girl's promise to her mother.

They laid them on the altar stone, and I felt every one of them tie itself into me, small and bright.

There was a basket of blank tablets at the altar's foot, for anyone who came without one.

I took one out.

I drew my husband's black-handled dagger from my belt, the one I'd won off him at dice, and used the point.

It took me a while.

I'd never been good at letters on clay.

Then I walked back down the whole length of the lit hall, between the faithful, and out through the doors.

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