A bright wash of colour bled down her neck; her hair tangled nearly to her waist. Her muddiedfuckingdress, torn up her thigh. In the hour since the bog, she’d viewed one of his worst memories, and he’d stolen one of hers in return. He’d realized the same magic in his veins ran in hers. A secret he’d given unwillingly, knowing he had to but baulking all the same.
A secret she’d looked at and ran from.
Running had never been a luxury afforded him; he hadn’t been brought slowly into learning about the Abbey’s manipulation. Not like what he thought to offer Maeve with his carefully chosen words, his house that wasn’t much, but at least it wassafe.
And still, she’d run. And Jude couldn’t take it. Couldn’t joke, couldn’t tread lightly—
‘You wanted to leave.’
Her breaths sawed raggedly out of her—‘Yes.’
Slowly, Jude drew the letter from his pocket and made a show of reading down the page. Maeve’s panting breaths abruptly cut off as she recognized what he was holding. He flipped the page over to check the back with an unhurried glance. ‘You’re hiding secrets of your own, aren’t you, Maeve?’
She took an unsteady step back.
Immediately, his eyes were on her.
Her expression wavered, fear, then indignation. ‘Perhaps I should give you some context first.’
‘Context?’ He raised a brow. ‘Is that needed?’
‘It is.’
Jude didn’t reply, just stared at her. Waiting.
She nodded – to herself, to him, he didn’t know. ‘I’ve been studying iconography for almost as long as I’ve been at the Abbey. My entire life, it feels like. Painting, studying faces, learning the craft… It’s everything to me.Everything.’
Something fervent and steady swirled in her dark eyes, lit by a shaft of wavering moonlight. In that heartbeat of connection, Jude saw a profound devotion to her art threading through her, perhaps longer lasting than her commitment to the Abbey. Her purpose, possibly even her entire being, was wound up in her craft.
‘I’m up for a promotion. Something I want desperately,’ she continued. ‘Ezra, my mentor – the one I wrote that letter to – knows this. He knew I would do anything to get it.’
Jude held the letter up. ‘Including spying?’
Surprisingly, her voice remained calm. ‘They said the position would be mine if I agreed to come, paint you, and report back. That I just needed to do this one thing for them. A test of my loyalty.’
Jude harboured no lingering disillusionment about the lengths the Abbey would go to manipulate their followers, but to hearthey had taken something so sacred to Maeve, so fundamental to her being, and held it over her head like a reward for good behaviour was abhorrent –evenif she had agreed to spy on him.
‘During the weeks prior,’ she continued, ‘I had been preparing to start my icon of Felix. He’s a saint at—’
‘I know who he is.’
‘Oh?’ Her brow furrowed.
Felix.He’d been studying at the Abbey during Jude’s time there, years before he’d become a saint. Full of self-importance and with a perennially sore neck from how high he kept his nose in the air, Jude had hated him on principle; at least, he thought he had.
His memories of the other man bore some mark of being tampered with. In what direction, Jude wasn’t sure. He wondered why he could remember parts of Felix with near-startling clarity when so much had been lost along the way.
When it became apparent that was all Jude would offer, Maeve continued, ‘After what you saw in my memory, I awoke on the floor, and everything was gold. Felix’s icon, which had just been a sketch and a basic underpainting before, wasfinished.Fully dry. I thought it was Felix who did it. He claimed he didn’t, that it wasmymagic—’
Her voice cut out. She took a shuddering breath and ran her thumb under one eye. ‘Ezra found out. Felix told him. The next day, I learned I was being sent to paint you. They wanted an updated icon. And they wanted information on you.’
‘An updated icon?’ Jude asked. ‘The old one… it’s in the basilica, then? With all the others?’
Maeve nodded.
Just as he’d suspected. Their ties to him, forged by his icon, must have been wearing thin, and they had sent Maeve to renew it. In a way, hearing that they still had his icon was a relief. It meant they were still trying to take his magic, his memories. That his books wereworking.
But questions still remained. Namely, how to break that bond completely.
