Martyr's Day

Shahid is the Martyr’s day, and it comes once in four years. It belongs to no month: it falls between the sixth and the seventh and is counted in neither, one of two days the common calendar sets outside its own reckoning. The other is Eravilia, at the turn of the year.

Most of Erôth keeps it, for the plain reason that most of Erôth trades on the Peren calendar. The day itself is far larger in Idir than in Peredhel, where the Martyr is honored in name and the holiday has worn down into an excuse: the streets lined with people drunk from eight in the morning, and a confession nobody is permitted to hold against you afterwards. The Free Folk mark it loosely and have no businesses to shut. Further out there are nations on other calendars who do not know who she was.

In an Idiran town nothing opens. Every business is closed for the day and the market fills anyway, everyone in it and nobody selling: food is carried out of the houses and shared around, and good luck charms are made at home and handed to strangers. Red wine is customary, for the sacrifice. There is a dance customary to the day, choreographed and performed by six or seven together on a raised platform, and a Dhel who has never kept the festival in Idir may still know the steps. People greet one another with happy Shahid, and the masked of the Chantry come out among the rest. Thieves and hooligans work the crowds, as they work any celebration.

The custom that carries the meaning is the bracelet. Colored twine is woven at home and tied around the wrist of whoever is nearest, stranger or neighbor, with a red strand in it for the blood the Martyr gave for her people. You break yours off and throw it down to forgive somebody, or to be done with something that has been holding you.

The whole day is meant to run that way. Transgressions are forgiven, quarrels are set down, and prisoners held for the smaller crimes are supposed to be released, though how far a town takes that last is a matter for the town. The license expires with the day. On the morning after, a man may tell you to your face that he could have forgiven you yesterday and will not now.

When the festival began, who instituted it, and why the interval is four years and not one were never recorded. The bracelet has no name anyone wrote down, and neither does the dance.

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The Valiant Few kept the last one at Harad, coming down by boat from Forven and landing on the evening before. Koa had kept exactly one Shahid in his life, at fourteen and among the Free Folk, and said this one was a great deal less tame. Aldo let a stranger tie a bracelet on him, wore it long enough to tell a man he forgave him, and tore it off in the street.

Elsewhere in that same festival Baku was let out of a cell in the Crack, by the grace of the goddess and the celebration as she tells it, adding that she should never have been detained to begin with.