Jude nodded. ‘Like adding fuel to a fire. Prayer is one of the Abbey’s core sacraments. How often are the acolytes required to pray every day?’
‘Twice,’ Maeve replied. ‘And always in front of an icon. If we want to pray outside the set times, we must have a coined icon to pray to.’
‘In the basilica, it’s notallthe icons you pray to at once, is it?’ he asked. ‘You choose just one to pray to at a time, don’t you?’
Maeve’s lip trembled. She bit down on it hard. ‘Yes.’
Jude crouched before her, putting their faces level. He had a wild light in his eyes she couldn’t parse out. ‘The Abbey does nothing without reason. Praying – it affects the icons. It fuels them, harming the saint in return—’
‘And the iconographer,’ Maeve interjected.
His throat bobbed. ‘And the iconographer.’
‘Although,’ she continued, ‘it might take longer for the iconographer to feel anything, as we paint so many icons. The effects from the prayers would be more spaced out, I think. Less concentrated.’
The frustration in Jude’s eyes only grew. Maeve didn’t know why her idea seemed to irritate him.
She shifted in her seat. ‘There’s more. Siobhan prayed to her own icon in her memory. It gave her lucidity. It returned her memories, at least some of them. I don’t know how I know… just that she looked into my eyes and I sawallof her staring back.’
Jude blew out a slow breath. He rose from the ground, settling himself on the stool beside her instead. ‘She prayed to herself?’
‘Praying empowered her, somehow,’ Maeve told him. ‘But not… not praying in general. Only to her own icon.’
She paused, taking him in. His utter stillness on the stool, the watchfulness in his hazel eyes. The undeniablehumanityin the man before her, something she had once seen as a contradiction, even an attack on everything she’d been taught to believe, now made it all the more difficult to voice what she knew needed to happen next.
He would hate it.
But she didn’t see another option.
Jude sat on his chair with one knee bent, the other extended in front of him with a certain lazy grace she’d grown accustomed to. Candlelight played in the hollows under his cheeks, the line of his jaw. Turned his hazel eyes more green than grey. Despite her trepidation, Maeve itched for a brush. The need to capture him was like nothing she’d ever known.
Jude wasn’t devout, but he was a saint.
‘I’m going to paint your icon,’ Maeve breathed. ‘But not for the Abbey. For you to pray to. Maybe that’s how you get your memories back.’
‘That’s a risk. To both saint and artist, as you said.’ A muscle in his jaw ticked. ‘What if creating an icon truly does harm the saint? Or… or what if the Abbey gets their hands on the icon, Maeve?’
Her hands clenched into fists on her lap. ‘You mean if I take it to them?’
Anguish flashed across his face at her words, yet he didn’t refute them. Maeve took a breath. Let it out. ‘You’ll have to trust me then, won’t you?’
Jude shook his head. ‘I can’t risk the memories. Not after I tried so hard to hide them. Tosavethem.’
He rubbed the flat of his palm over where the mark for his sainthood was tattooed on his chest. Rubbed it like he wanted to forget about it. Like hecouldn’t.
‘Will you show me?’ The words left her tongue before she’d fully considered them.
Jude’s throat bobbed roughly. His hand slowly rose to his shirt collar. He pulled it aside just enough for the top of the mark to show, starkly black on his skin. So fresh that it looked like it was inked yesterday.
Maeve pressed her lips tightly together as some unknown emotion rose within her. Pity at the thought of a child held down while the tattoo was pushed into his skin. Guilt for making him show her. Or maybe it was deeper; maybe part of her had nevertrulybelieved Jude was a saint until this moment, with the evidence clear before her.
Showing her was an act of trust – one she didn’t take lightly.
Tears burned in the backs of her eyes. She yanked her gaze off his skin and down to her hands, digging her nails into her palms until it hurt. Her next question, should she choose to voice it, would push her over an edge she couldn’t crawl back from.
‘Is the risk worth getting your memories back? Worth learning how to sever yourself from the Abbey completely? Can you trust me enough to try?’
The words shocked her. The blasphemy in them, the betrayal. The Abbey might have been her safe harbour, the very foundation of her soul… but could she continue, complicit in their harm? Could she ignore the devastation they’d wrought to Siobhan? To Jude? Could she continue serving a lie?
