When you can daily play with the stuff of miracles, the gods somehow become superfluous.
In the week he’d been in Caledo, he had come to modify that initial opinion of the ritual. Prince Murfin had showed him how to do it—clearly skeptical that anyone from Vilwan would see value in it. Kerrigan, who was well used to learning from all manner of tutors, listened to the instructions carefully and followed them exactly.
And he had repeated the ritual each morning for the last five days. Heading down into the chamber beneath the palace the day he was to ride out with Princess Alexia and her force toward Nawal, he felt the need for the ritual especially keenly. While he had never felt cleansed, he did draw a certain amount of calm from it.
In a small alcove he stripped himself naked and looked down. Because of his girth he’d never been comfortable naked. While he’d not had much contact with others his own age as he grew up on Vilwan, he could still hear sniggers and laughs when he wandered past. No one dared confront him directly, since they knew enough about his power to be afraid, but children still will be cruel to those who are different. Never having a chance to befriend them or change their minds, he had lived with his shame.
And to console himself, he ate.
He smiled to himself. He had learned, very early on, that his tutors would spend a lot of time with him, including at meals. He would be indulged in whatever he desired as far as food was concerned, since it would be used to reward him, or its withholding to punish him. By learning what his mentors wanted, he could reward them for rewarding him by selecting that sort of food, all the while enjoying it himself. Food became power for him, and his girth became a reason he needed more food.
Fat also gave his enemies an obvious target. Kerrigan had inured himself to criticism about his size—at least he hid the pain from his face, so no one outside could see they stung him. Such an obvious target satisfied most folks, however, so they did not probe any deeper for other vulnerabilities—ones with which he had not come to grips.
He ran his hands down his chest and confirmed again that some hair was growing in on it. He wasn’t going to be as furry as Crow or Dranae, but no longer would he be as bare as a baby. While on Vilwan he had continually been treated as a child, but once away, once traveling with others, he had been accorded more adult status. And my body agrees.
Hair growing in on his chest was not the only change. He had indeed lost weight. He couldn’t tell how much, but he did know he was smaller. By no means could he see his toes all the time, but he did catch glimpses of them a lot more often, and the belt on his trousers had been tightened a couple of notches.
Kerrigan moved from the alcove into the first of the ritual stations. The Caledo Academy, he had noticed, was fond of blending things in their spells and rituals. He knelt in a small box roughly a yard by a yard, and six inches deep. The sand and ash it contained crunched ever so slightly as he dropped to his knees. He scraped up huge handfuls of the gritty black mixture—the ash and sand representing the elements of earth and fire—and began to scrub it over his body. It packed dark beneath his fingernails and stained his flesh a light grey. He worked it into his hair and all over his body, dusting what he couldn’t reach and working it into what he could until his skin tingled.
He smeared the last of it on his thighs, then stood in a tiny cloud of dust. There was no doubt about it; he definitely felt dirty and in dire need of a cleansing. He twisted his feet, burying them to the ankles just to make sure they were covered, then stepped from the box and moved to the next station.
Ahead of him lay a steaming pool of water, which had stepping-stones arranged in a spiral pattern. Four trails, each beginning from a spot designed with a rune for an element, curled out, the stones getting larger as they went.
A central stone stood a step away from the final stone on each spiral. Steam licked up in vaporous tongues and Kerrigan could easily feel the heat as he approached.
Steam: air, fire, and water. With the stones, we get earth, too. He started on the fire spiral just because he’d not walked it before. With each of the eight steps he took a deep breath and called to mind a specific thought. On the first stone he was supposed to recall his last meal, which he did with great ease, though it was not pleasing. Caledo had already begun to ration food, so he’d not been given much.
Once he recalled it, he sought to put it out of his mind. When he accomplished that, he moved to the next step, and the next, remembering things that went from the mundane to the exotic, physical to emotional to philosophical. Each time he put something out of his mind and moved forward, he shed concerns and let his mind become quiet.
At the penultimate stone, the largest on the fire path, he lowered himself to his knees. The stone was not soft, but as he sank back onto his heels and settled in, it did not feel all that hard on his knees and shins. He let his arms hang limply at his sides and closed his eyes. As he shut out the visual world, he could feel wisps of steam caressing and teasing him. In their wake came cooler air, which sent a chill through him, but soon the heat and steam coaxed a sweat from him.
When he knelt on the fire stone, Kerrigan’s overwhelming sensation was that of being filthy. He wanted to be clean. He wanted his skin to stop itching. As he broke into a sweat and as the moisture began to ooze out of him, it eroded the dust and dirt. He could feel it dripping down him, dropping from his chin to his chest, running down his neck and collecting beneath the fold of fat that covered his lap. Sweat stung his eyes and tasted salty on his lips. It flowed into his ears and burned in the abrasions he’d created by scouring himself with the sand.
As the sweat ran, Kerrigan saw influences and evils, toxic thoughts and attitudes, the taint of the DragonCrown, flowing out with it. In wanting to be clean physically, he created linkages with things he wanted to rid himself of mentally. He just let them pour out of him with the sweat. Not all of them made it all the way, but enough did that he felt a growing relief.
Then, at some point, when he felt he had progressed far enough, he rose and stepped onto the central stone. It was the stone that Prince Murfin had called the birthstone. When Kerrigan had first stepped on it, the prince had told him to brace himself and Kerrigan wondered what for.
Now he knew.
He readied himself and raised his face toward the ceiling.
The icy water began as a slow trickle that played over his face as softly as a spring rain. Kerrigan moved his face, letting it wash sweat and dust from his eyes, then brought his jaw down and hunched his shoulders defensively, for what had begun as a trickle became a torrent. Frigid water splashed down over him in breathtaking sheets. One after another, they washed away all traces of dirt and sweat, puckering his flesh and leaving him sputtering. His skin burned and tingled. A huge shiver shook him, and water droplets sprayed from his hair over the pool.
Letting air hiss in through his teeth, he moved off along the earth spiral and reached another alcove, where he found a blanket that he wrapped around himself. Murfin had explained that the water used on the birthstone was cut as ice from Lake Calessa, then was melted by sunlight, so that Father Sun and Mother Lake would be the ones to welcome the newly cleansed back into life.
He let his hair drip and seated himself. The symbology was not lost on him, but just seemed overkill. He felt clean, and the cold water had certainly revitalized him. In the wake of the ritual he also found some peace and, better yet, was able to identify some of the elements of taint the DragonCrown fragment had left on him. They were certainly less than they had been when he had started the rituals, as if each cleansing eroded a bit more of it.