Which was not to say that service was easy. Service to Hyrea took one into dangerous places, and dangerous work. A dedicate of Hyrea went into war, and plague, and famine. Risked death a thousand ways, over and over again. And yet it wasn’t difficult to serve her, if you were the right kind of person. For a person who looked at the sick or wounded or starving and longed to help, it was the easiest thing in the world.
Hyrea marked her devotees in a way impossible to disguise or to mistake. It was possible to replicate the blue tattoos, to an extent, though the ‘blindfold’ was hard to do, eyelids being difficult. The bands around the wrists were easier. But only Hyrea could make them glow with that faint, spectral light. No-one could look on that light, and not know exactly who they were looking at. There were stories about it – about the six healers who had walked onto a battlefield and stood between the two armies, and stopped the battle cold, for neither side had dared to lift a hand against the healers. About proud gods who drove out the humble Hyrean healers, so that only their own priests could heal, and cities emptied by disease spreading from the poorest quarters, where the proud priests would not go. About the warlord who, having struck his enemy down, saw a Hyrean healer kneel to help the man, and in fury struck the healer down as well – and died the next moment, with a dozen arrows in his back, fired by his own men. About villages struck by plague, who saw the blue lights approaching through mist, and opened their barricaded gates to hope. About terrible battles that lasted from dawn until dusk… and then nights full of pale blue lights, moving among the fallen, and a hundred or two hundred or five hundred men found living on the field the next morning.
Temples of Hyrea rose in odd places. In busy cities, in border towns, in little villages, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Only a certainty, in the part of some priest or priestess, that here there would be need of them. They were good at predicting need.
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