Livia's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

The afflicted woman slept now, healed. Livia carried the cure to the camp and returned at dawn to the shrine. Three days until the trial of fangs. She knelt before the goddess figure wreathed in serpents and admitted the truth. She did not know what the trial would demand. No one living had told her. She did not know how to train for a test she could not name. She searched the shrine for answers. Dust coated the old carvings along the steps. Her snake tightened once on her shoulders, then loosened, pulling her gaze down. At the base of the stairs sat a carved stone serpent, its hood raised, its coils worn smooth by generations of hands. She had passed it a thousand times. She had never truly looked. Livia knelt and brushed the grime from its scales. Faint lines ran beneath the dirt. Not decoration. Marks. She traced them with her thumb. The old picture-script her grandmother once taught her, half remembered. She read slowly, guessing at the worn parts. "The fangs ask three," she whispered. The snake on her shoulders lifted its head, listening. "The first asks what you carry. The second asks what you hide. The third asks what you will give." Her stomach dropped. The trial would not test her strength or her dancing. It would strip her bare. The carvings named no sword, no herb, no prayer she could rehearse. The test demanded she face the thing she had buried. She thought of the night her sacred ground was breached. The person she had trusted to guard it. The person she still would not name a traitor, only gone. Her snake went still against her skin. Not tight. Not afraid. Still. The stillness that came when she herself was the problem she had not yet seen. Livia pressed her forehead to the cold stone serpent. "I left them to receive my honors," she said aloud. The words hurt. "I chose the ceremony. I let the gate stand open." She had carried that guilt for years and called it grief. The second question would ask it of her, and she had no false answer ready. She stood. Her hands shook, but her mind was clear. She could not train her body for this trial. She could only tell herself the truth before the fangs forced it. Three days. She would spend them not practicing strength, but naming what she carried, what she hid, what she would give. The stone serpent's blue eyes caught the lamplight. Livia met its gaze without looking away. For the first time she understood what she walked toward. The relief lasted only a breath. If the trial revealed hidden things, then her rival would enter it too. Whatever that woman had buried would surface in the pit beside her. Livia now knew the shape of the test. She did not yet know which of them it would break.