A boy – a young one, too. Perhaps seven or eight.
Very,veryyoung to be a saint.
He stared back with a reckless gleam in his bright blue eyes. Something about him looked familiar, but Maeve couldn’t place it. The shade of his eyes, maybe, or his sandy curls. Flakes of paint were missing from the gilded halo behind his head. She’d never seen an icon show any kind of age; even the oldest paintings in the basilica were pristine.
An illegible signature marred the left corner of the painting; the boy saint was just as anonymous.
Did Brigid know him? Was that why she wanted his icon burned?
Maeve’s throat convulsed, fear gripping her before she forced it back, reaching for the next icon. Its frame was made of rough-hewn wood, the paper backing newer and mould-free. She flipped it over.
For a heartbeat, she could only gape.
Her face stared back at her.
She gently touched the tip of her forefinger to a peak of dusty grey paint in the corner, rubbing it between her fingers. Still wet. The icon was recently finished. No wonder she’d been feeling so awful.
It was odd. She’d expected to feel connected to her icon somehow. She’d seen Jude’s expression when he’d sat before his finished icon: the awe, the slack-jawed wonder as his gaze had moved from his icon to her – his iconographer.
All Maeve felt was emptiness. And, if she was being entirely honest, a little offended.
She wouldn’t have spared it a second glance if she’d seen the icon in the basilica. It was just so startlinglyaverage. Amateurish, even in style. The blending between colours wasjust– she wasn’t impressed. Had Brigid refused to paint it, and they’d used an apprentice instead?
She studied the flatness of her hair, hanging in a single braid over her left shoulder. The end of the braid was smooth besides one single strand, a bright slash of near-white against the dark blue of her dress. Everything else about the painting was monotonous, as uninspired as a tracing.
So why was the single hair out of place?
Her nose was a little off, her mouth thinner in the painting than in reality, but they’d got the darkness of her eyes and the point of her chin correct. Whoever had described her face had known her well.
She stilled, fingers still hovering over the icon.
Ezra was the only one who knew her well enough to describe her face so accurately. Even taking the iconographer’s magic into account… especially for apprentices, the description needed to be accurate. Who else would it have been but Ezra?
The realization sank like iron in her stomach as her gaze returned unwillingly to that damned stray hair. She wanted it gone.
Slowly, Maeve stuck her hand in the pocket of her habit, fingers closing around the slender box of matches. She’d taken them from the piety shop she’d stolen the habit from, desperate for anything that could help her start a fire. Before she’d left the inn, she’d pawed through Elden’s bag that Jude had brought up, finding only the books he’d shown her. No fire materials. No fuel, no matches, no wood. Only books.Gardeningbooks. Somehow the sight of all those books on urging up plants from the tough winter soil was as much a stab in the back than the fact he’d sabotaged them in the first place.
She slid open the box of altar matches. There were only eight. Eight chances to burn the icons.
Maeve picked one up, hesitating. Should she use one now? She wanted her icon gone… but was it worth an entire match? There weren’t any candles or lit sconces in the storage room, but there would hopefully be some in the basilica she could grab – if the guards didn’t stop her first.
A candle wouldn’t be much hope on the higher-up icons on the wall, would it?
But neither would the matches.
She ran her thumb over the tip of the match. Fear tightened her chest. Her eyes locked with their painted replicas. That fuckingstray hair—
The sharp smell of phosphorous filled the air as the match struck. She raised it to the boy’s icon first, but as soon as theflame touched the canvas, it extinguished, leaving nothing more than a singed hole in the painting.
‘No,’ Maeve gasped. ‘No.’ She picked up another match, barely pausing to think before she struck it. She had to burn the icons. She would find other matches, candles, maybe, or fuel somehow, but these icons needed to go first. She had to succeed atsomethingif she was going to believe she could burn the entire Abbey.
This time, it caught.
She burned the icon of the boy first, then drew the lit match to her own visage. Her vision grew quickly hazy, prickling against the malleable recess of her mind. She expected to have a reaction like Jude when she’d burned his icon, to pass out or hallucinate, but instead, there was a vivid flash of gold light, a sharp burst of pain behind her eyes, and then – nothing.
But something was different. Her mind felt refined, like copper after the fire, and her magic felt… accessible, as if she could have reached out a hand to grab it.
And her memories—
