The Lives of Saints Page 5

  As the king grew older, he worried that his death would bring chaos for the kingdom if each of his sons vied for the throne. He knew he had to choose an heir, so as he always did, he went to Lukin for advice.

  After many hours of holding forth on the various factors and possible outcomes each choice might imply, Lukin did something he rarely did—he paused.

  This resulted in the king doing something he’d never had reason to do before—he urged Lukin to go on.

  Lukin confessed that the king had sired three fools, each son more incautious and venal than the last. None of them were fit to rule and all would bring great misery to the land.

  “Well,” said the king, “if you cannot tell me who will make the best king, perhaps you can tell me who would make the least terrible king.”

  After much debate, during which the moon rose and fell and rose again, Lukin pronounced that the second son might possibly—under the proper conditions, with all due allowances for temperament, and given appropriate and judicious counsel—make the least disastrous ruler.

  The king called the court together, and before all his retainers, he decreed that upon his death, the throne would pass to his second son—on one condition. His son must vow to keep Lukin, the king’s oldest, wisest adviser, beside him, to offer sage counsel until the end of Lukin’s days. Before all the court, the second son gave his word, and a few years later, when his father passed, he was crowned with all due ceremony.

  His first act as king was to call for Lukin’s execution. As eager as many of the old king’s retainers were for a bit of respite from Lukin’s tongue, they had heard the second son give his solemn word. Such a vow could not be broken.

  “Ah,” said the second son, “but all I promised was to keep Lukin as my adviser until the end of his days. That end will simply come sooner than predicted.”

  The courtiers agreed that this did meet the letter of the vow, and some even marveled at the new king’s cleverness. Perhaps he wouldn’t need an adviser after all.

  Lukin was marched to the executioner’s block and went to his knees with prayers on his lips, for even in these moments before his own death, he had no use for silence. The executioner raised his axe and with a single clean slice cut Lukin’s head from his body. There was a thunk as it landed and rolled onto its side, and though the gathered courtiers knew they must not cheer a wise man’s death, they did heave a great sigh at the sudden, glorious quiet, broken by no dire predictions of disasters to come, nor instructions for the best way to prepare venison, nor disquisitions on the great earthquake of Vandelor.

  A bird chirped outside the window. In some distant corner of the castle, a woman laughed. The young king smiled.

  Then a voice broke the silence.

  Lukin’s head lay in the dust, but his eyes were still open and his lips had begun to move again. Having one’s head removed from one’s body was a most novel experience and brought to mind a great many lessons, which he was most delighted to share.

  The second son was forced to honor his vow or lose his crown. Lukin’s head was placed upon a golden platter, and from it, he dispensed advice to the new king for the entirety of his rule, which was long, just, and miserable.

  Sankt Lukin is the patron saint of politicians.

  SANKTA MAGDA

  There have been many bad years for Ravka, and in one of these bitter years, the crops failed and the cattle died off, leaving the people to starve. As so often happens in these dark times, a woman was accused of being a witch and bringing this desolation upon her village.

  Her name was Magda and she had long lived at the edge of town, offering cures and potions of all kinds, delivering babies and feeding them her porridges and tonics when their empty-bellied mothers could give no milk.

  She had never taken a husband and had no family to protect her, and her home was on a very nice plot of land much coveted by some of the most powerful leaders of the town. So Magda was not surprised when one of their wives pointed a bony finger at her and accused her of consorting with demons for the sake of making trouble for the good and righteous people of the town.

  Magda did not wait to smell the torches being lit. Before the mob could knock down her door, she fled to the woods where she had long gathered herbs and plants to make her cures, and which she knew better than any hunter.

  The town leaders congratulated themselves on having rid their village of a witch, and the people rested easier in their beds, sure that their troubles were now over. But rain did not fall in the spring, and frost came early in autumn, and the remaining cattle and sheep had no place to graze, so they sickened and died. Babies—some of whom Magda had delivered—wailed their hunger from their cribs, and mothers smothered their own children to end their suffering.

  The town grew restless, the people wild-eyed. As another terrible winter set in, people began to wonder. Perhaps Magda had not been the only witch in their midst. Two sisters were accused of making dark bargains with creatures from the other side—the cold woman who lives at the bottom of the river, the shadow man who is found behind doors.

  Lacking the courage to run into the darkness of the woods, the sisters took shelter at home. “Surely our father will protect us,” they whispered as they shivered in their narrow beds. “Surely our brothers will.”

  Instead, their brothers stole their sisters’ shoes and their father took away his daughters’ coats so they could not run from the house.

  The sisters went to their knees and prayed to the Saints for someone to help them, and to their surprise, a vision appeared at their window—it was Magda, though she looked younger than she had when she’d left the town.

  “Come,” said Magda. “Come with me now and live as free women.”

  “It is winter,” protested the elder sister. “You wish for us to run barefoot in our nightclothes, out into the forest, where we will surely die of the cold? You are a friend to demons, and no holy woman. Go back to the bottom of the river, witch!”

  But the younger sister knew that salvation must sometimes come with sacrifice. She recognized Magda as a messenger from the Saints. She begged her older sister to come with her, but when she would not, the younger girl climbed out of the window alone and followed Magda into the night.

  The forest floor was damp and hard, and the branches and stones cut into her bare feet. The wind sliced through her nightclothes and she wept for the misery of it.

  At last Magda spoke to her. “You weep and your feet bleed. Your skin is blue with cold. Do you wish to turn back?”

  The girl shook her head. “I will die in the woods, a free woman in the company of the trees. Better that than the pyre.”

  As soon as she spoke these words, she felt herself lifted and sped along, her feet no longer touching the forest floor. Before she could blink three times, she was seated inside a hut, beside a fire, wrapped in furs with a pot of soup before her. There were women all around, stoking the coals in the oven, drying herbs, tending to the garden in the light of the moon—a garden that had no business blooming so late in the year.

  The girl knew she had come to a place of salvation. She said prayers of thanks and drank her soup.

  As for her older sister, the mob came to the house the next morning, and neither her father nor her brothers barred the door. She told them of the witch who had appeared at their window and taken her younger sister away. She pled her purity and righteous soul, but she was still tied to a stake and died upon the flames.

  Her father and brothers went into the woods to hunt for Magda and the sister she’d stolen. When night began to fall they smelled baking bread, meat roasting over a fire, figs stewing in wine. They went mad with it, stumbling deeper into the trees, and have never been heard of since. The same fate has befallen many a hunter in those woods.

  The village continued to starve no matter how many girls they put to death. But the girls who prayed to Magda would often find themselves swept up and carried into the heart of the forest, and so she is known as the patron sai
nt of abandoned women, as well as bakers.

  SANKT EGMOND

  From the time he was a boy, Egmond had a gift for drawing and building. When the church tower in his village began to slump to the side, he found a way to reinforce the foundation beneath it. The next morning, a massive ash tree was found growing beside it, and ever after, Egmond was known to be favored by the Saints—though those who worship Djel like to claim the ash and Egmond as their own.

  Egmond could forge metals that never rusted, fashion nails that would never bend, carve stone into fantastical shapes—slender columns that somehow supported mighty beams, spheres of smooth perfection that balanced as if suspended in the air, magical beasts so detailed they seemed about to snarl or take flight. He was called upon by wealthy men and nobles to build their homes, but the results were never what they had commissioned.

  Someone would order the construction of a winter palace to be three stories high, at least twelve feet taller than their neighbor’s, and with twice as many rooms. Egmond would deliver a house of one hundred rooms, built to look like the thick-tentacled arms of a kraken crushing a ship.

  Instead of a silo, he would build a tower of stone branches hung with impossible gems.

  Instead of a sensible rectangular schoolhouse, he would build an orb of glass and stone with windows for each student to gaze through that made the surrounding landscape seem alien as a faraway land.

  Eventually, one of Egmond’s frustrated clients decided he’d had enough. When the grand summer home he’d commissioned turned out to be an orchard of residences built to look like hollowed-out trees—all of them hidden behind an immovable wall of mist—he accused Egmond of fraud. Egmond was thrown into the dungeons of the royal castle, high on the cliffs above Djerholm.

  If one had to stay at the castle, the dungeons were actually not a bad place to be. The cells were cold and damp but protected from the wind that blew through the cracks in the walls of the rooms high above.

  As the ruthless storms of the Fjerdan coast roared, the princes and princesses, kings and queens huddled by fires they could not keep burning. The storms never paused for breath; they howled and howled, beasts that would never tire. The castle’s watchtower toppled. Water poured through the beleaguered roof, pooling in the royal chambers, and the queen woke to see her crown floating down the hall.

  The royal family brought engineers and architects to court, but they all had the same thing to say: This place is cursed. Leave the high cliffs and relocate the capital.

  The night of Hringkälla, when its rooms should have been full of people drinking and dancing, the castle was nearly empty. All the courtiers who could flee had done so, seeking sanctuary in the town below. All the guests who had been invited had regretfully declined. The wind came wailing off the sea like an infant torn from its mother’s breast, and the castle walls swayed to and fro.

  “Can no one save us?” cried the king.

  “Will no one help us?” wept the queen.

  Down in the dungeon, Egmond placed one hand in a puddle of rainwater and one hand upon the castle wall, where the tiniest tendril of a root had begun to find its way through the gaps in the stone. A great rumbling was heard, and for a moment, it seemed the whole building would fly apart. Then a final thunderous roar echoed through the night, and a massive ash tree shot from the ground up through the very center of the castle.

  Silence fell. True silence. The wind had stilled. Rain no longer dripped from the roof. The ash tree’s roots had sealed up the floors, crowded through the cracks in the stone, and buttressed the castle walls. Its bark was white and shone like new snow.

  A guard had seen what Egmond had done in the dungeons, and he had the prisoner brought before the king and queen.

  “Are you the boy who saved our castle?” asked the king.

  “Yes,” said Egmond. “And if you let me, I will build you a great palace that will stand for all eternity, never to be breached.”

  “Do this and you will be rewarded,” said the king. “Fail us and you will be put to death as a thief and a fraud.”

  The palace Egmond built was unlike any seen before it. A stone serpent guarded its high towers, its bridge of glass and moat of floating frost, its silver clock tower, and the sacred ash at its heart. Ever since, the Ice Court has stood, its walls unbreached by any army.

  Sankt Egmond is the patron saint of architects.

  SANKT ILYA IN CHAINS

  There was a gifted healer and inventor who lived on the outskirts of a farming village. Ilya was a recluse, happiest to remain in his workshop and keep to himself, but he could be counted on for a tonic or help with a plow when asked. He was only seen in the village when trading his cures or the pelts of animals he had trapped for food. On these rare occasions, he was usually scribbling away frantically in an old leather book.

  Once a man asked him, “Ilya, what great wonders are you imagining in those pages?” But Ilya only scowled and continued down the road, eager to return to his experiments. What he hoped to accomplish in his workshop was a mystery, and many suspected that Ilya had long since passed from ambition to madness.

  Then, one day, deep in his books and potions, Ilya heard screaming from the fields beyond his home. He followed the terrible sound and found a farmer and his wife wailing over the body of their young son. The child had been nearly cut in half by a plow blade and his blood had soaked into the soil, making a red halo around his body. His eyes were gray and glassy; no breath stirred his chest. No one could recover from such a wound.

  But Ilya knelt and, head bent, placed his hands upon what should have been a corpse. To the shock of all who stood watching, the wound seemed to knit together. Moments later the boy’s eyes cleared. He blinked. His chest began to rise and fall—in hitches and gasps at first, and then in steady rhythm. The boy sat up and laughed and called to his mother and father to embrace him.

  But the child’s parents did not go to him. They had seen the extent of his injury. They had seen the life leave his body. Whatever thing smiled and held its arms out to them was not their son.

  The villagers who had come running when they heard the mother’s cries now stared at this child who should not breathe and the man who had somehow drawn air back into his lungs. It was not natural to make life from death. And they wondered, where had Ilya been when their wives and children and loved ones had suffered? Where was this great healer when Yana’s baby was born blue and cold? Or when the firepox had carried off half the village only a few years past? Why had he not appeared when Baba Lera wasted away to nothing, growing weaker with each passing day and praying for death that didn’t come until she was little more than a heap of sticks rubbing together her prayer beads?

  They seized Ilya and clapped him in heavy chains, a collar for his neck, and fetters for his wrists and ankles. They dragged him to the bridge that overlooked the river, where the water foamed white around the jagged rocks, and they cast Ilya over the side. It is said his corpse emerged on a sandbank many miles south, perfectly preserved and guarded by a white stag, who stood vigil over the body for three full months.

  The child Ilya had dragged back from the next world wandered the village, asking for his mother and father, begging for a place to sleep. Every door was closed to him, and so he was left to the woods, where he can still be heard crying.

  Sankt Ilya is the patron saint of unlikely cures.

  SANKTA URSULA OF THE WAVES

  In the northern reaches of Fjerda, a young princess called Ursula found her way to the worship of the Saints and prayed each day to them. Those who knelt at the ash altar of Djel deemed this worship unlawful and demanded she give up the practice.

  She would not. Convinced that her stubborn refusal was a sure sign she was possessed by some demon, her family hauled Ursula down to the shore, determined to drive out the evil spirit that had taken hold of the girl’s soul. There, in the shallows, surrounded by townspeople muttering prayers to Djel, they held her beneath the water as they beat the surface of the
sea with ash boughs. But as many times as they dunked her under the waves, and as long as they held her there, she did not drown or even sputter for breath.

  The Fjerdans took this as proof that she had become host to some unholy power. They claimed she was no longer a natural girl, but surely half fish, and that she should be cut open to see if she was truly human.

  A knife was brought to shore and given to a priest of Djel, but before he unsheathed it, he begged Ursula to renounce her faith and once more honor the Wellspring. Ursula refused.

  Prepared to split her in two and prove she was no longer a human girl but some malevolent scaled thing, the priest placed the blade of the knife to the hollow of the princess’s throat, when suddenly a cry rang out from the city’s watchtower. The crowd that had gathered on the shore looked far out to sea, and there they saw a wave rushing toward the city, so wide and so high that it blocked the sun. They turned and ran, but there was no escape.

  The great wave consumed the city. Just as the priest’s blade hand had sought to split Ursula in two, the ocean cut into the shore, sundering it from Fjerda’s northern coast and creating the islands known as Kenst Hjerte, the broken heart. Ursula, who had clung resolutely to her faith, survived and lived to an old age in a rock cave on one of the islands, eating nothing but the mussels and oysters she collected from the tide pools, and drinking nothing but salt water.

  A chapel was built into the rock on her island, where sailors’ wives still come to pray to Ursula, patron saint of those lost at sea. They leave offerings of bread baked into the shape of fish, and wish for their lovers’ swift return. When they leave, some find bones or sea pearls in their pockets, though no one is sure if these are ill or good omens.