Eternal Sapphtember writing prompt — Girls who expunge sins
Jessie hangs over the draughty hole of a garderobe, hands braced on the cold stone of the walls, and her stomach heaves.
She didn’t want to come to the Laird’s castle in the first place. Of course, she doesn’t want to do much of anything, these days; she’d had a sunny disposition, once, but then she’d merrily marched off with a recruiting sergeant, off to do righteous battle with Things What Ought Not Be, and she did battle indeed, and Saw Things, and was one of considerably fewer to ever come back.
The black dog, her old blind granny says, a dark shadow on her that stalks and puts its paws on her shoulders and weighs her down. Jessie wonders, sometimes, when she can’t sleep; she’s Seen Things What Ought Not Be, and perhaps it’s not a dog, nor even a metaphor. Perhaps something tainted her, and her inability to love life is because there’s some invisible caul of wrongness slicked over her, a sack over her head she can’t wriggle out of, drear-tinted spectacles before her eyes that she can’t remove. Perhaps she’s mulch in which the seeds of new Things Which Ought Not Be are slowly germinating. Perhaps, one of these sleepless nights, she ought for the best take down her old claymore and—
But the Laird had been looking for clerics, and Jessie’s still one of those, technically. She’d protested feebly, when the liveried man came to the door and asked after her; she’s not the right kind of cleric, surely, he’ll want a births-marriages-and-deaths sort, or a revile-the-undead sort, or a tells-the-bees sort, or perhaps a midwifery-and-abortions sort, or even a brews-fifty-kinds-of-booze sort? Or a Tithenite, if he’s got an ooze problem?
“They say there’s a darkness on his lady wife,” the man had said gravely. “Not wanting to gossip — but he’s at his wits’ end, and calling up every kind he can, in the hopes they might relieve her.”
And, well, Jessie’s the right kind for that, maybe. If nothing else, she knows darkness. The money on offer helped, of course.
She’s not certain what it is that’s wrong in the Laird’s household. Something, to be sure; but something, however bleak, that’s ordinary. Nothing here that Ought Not Be, nothing here uncanny. Merely human, and unhappy; the Laird’s lady wife is young, healthy — but listless, withdrawn, melancholy.
“What manner of cleric are you?” the woman had said wearily, on Jessie being shown in to her for the first time. “I’ve had men of thunder and and men of books, priests of beast-spirits and priests of medicine, clerics of—”
“Oh, aye,” Jessie had interrupted. “Yer man on my doorstep said yer husband’s been busy. I don’t know that I’m much any kind any more, milady; I went to war, and I came back…grim. Grimmer than a young lady should be, they tell me. Thought you might benefit from like company without being pestered to be fixed, if nothing else,” and the lady looked at her hard and suspicious, but allowed that not being pestered might be a relief.
So Jessie stays at the castle, ostensibly one of the crowd of folk here to attempt to treat the lady’s malaise. She doesn’t actually try, but the lady deigns to take tea with her in the afternoons, and it really does seem a relief to her to have someone to talk to who’s not pouncing on every chance remark as a symptom, or a signpost toward the root of her troubles, or evidence that she’s progressing or relapsing or whatever, and so she shines in the Laird’s eyes. The others are not making discernible improvement, and lavishly draining the Laird’s purse all the while; Jessie seems to at least be a friend to the lady, and calls for no imported incenses or daily offerings or any of it.
“There was one,” the lady shares over nettle tea and oatcakes, “called for me to bathe in the just-slaughtered blood of a ram every day. The blood of a ram. Would that make you feel better, if you were me?”
“I shouldn’t think,” Jessie says.
A few weeks later, she puts her hand on the lady’s sleeve as she reaches for the pot to top up Jessie’s cup.
“I’ll not ask you to put the whole of it in words,” she says. “Goodness knows, I couldn’t, if you asked me — but if you told me one thing, however small, that makes you feel badly, telling me would make you feel better. I promise.”
The lady looks at the teapot for long seconds while she considers it, then at Jessie’s face, then at the teapot while she tells her something small and secret and painful.
Jessie is not a cleric of thunder or book, beast or sky or health or numinous light. Jessie is a Sin-Eater. The lady recounts one of the little weights on her spirit, and Jessie, oatcake held delicately between her fingers, binds it into the morsel, then nods and pats the lady’s arm, and eats it.
It goes the way it always does: fever-sweats and shakes, night terrors — quaint company for the virulent ones she brought back from war. And now, hanging over the shit-drop, she regurgitates what her body’s made of the badness: a handful of cold, black, irregular pearls.
Talking to a cleric really can help rid you of things.
