Jude chewed the side of his cheek. He’d never experienced such a consuming longing for violence.
‘As I was saying,’ Ezra continued. ‘Magic is fragile, as you well know. Any… tampering is like a misbalanced scale. Instantly recognizable. When you began probing into your abilities, we felt it. Is it not natural for us to want to know why? To want to protect the Abbey and its followers?’
Jude fought to keep his words steady, his emotions at bay. The last thing he wanted was his magic lashing out right now. ‘How long have you known?’ he asked.
‘A year or so,’ Ezra replied.
His words confirmed Jude’s earlier wonderings – Maeve wasn’t the only spy, then. He wondered why they’d thought it best to send Maeve when Elden was already there reporting back. How much had he seen? Had he, too, broken into the library and seen the memory books? Had he realized Jude was looking into iconography? Or had it been more mundane, moreintimate, reports of long hours spent in the garden, of dawn walks in the moors. Of pints and burnt dinners and arguing over whose turn it was to feed the cat.
Jude tried to swallow the pain, wondering if it would always ache just so violently.
‘Our reporting had become spotty, as of late,’ Ezra said. ‘It seemed our intel had grown too… soft to be useful. Hence sending the iconographer.’
‘Maeve,’ Jude corrected once again, vitriol in his voice. ‘Her name isMaeve. Who decided to send her away, then, if it wasn’t you? To out her as an abomination in the eyes of the Abbey for the magic she unknowingly wielded?’ He dug his fingers into the wall to hold himself in place. ‘Were you the one to decide not to mark her?’
Ezra’s eyes didn’t leave his. Pale blue. Guileless. ‘The Abbey doesn’t view the saints asabominations, at least not the way you’re imagining. We view them like any other deity, I suppose.’
‘I don’t understand.’
He didn’t. Not even a little. The saints had been the only deity he’d ever been taught to recognize. He knew there were other religions, other gods worshipped outside of the Abbey’s prying eyes, but not for Jude.
‘When a group commits to a god, if you want to call it that, it’s natural to want thatthingto be set apart. Distanced from the common people,’ Ezra explained, adopting an academic tone. ‘When something is far away, it’s easier to view as perfect. Cracks are only visible from up close, after all, and who wants to devote their lives to something fallible? Even those who are privileged enough to see the saints for what they are—’
‘The elders, you mean,’ Jude interrupted.
‘Yes. The elders. We keep the saints distanced to maintain that fragile equilibrium between those who pray and those who grant. Both magic and religion have their place. Religion is a public endeavour. Belief in the saints binds our community together. It’s an expression of structure. And every community needs its scaffolding.’
‘And magic?’
‘Magic,’ Ezra responded patiently, ‘is something individualistic we’ve made communal. By nature, it’s a private action. A talent that crops up every so often in individuals. We’ve simply moved it away from the individual and towards the collective.’
Jude weighed Ezra’s words against his own cynical view of religion. He compared it to Bethan’s acceptance of her abilities, grown in an environment away from the Abbey and its secretive, white-knuckled hold on saints. She didn’t hold the suffocating hatred Jude did for their shared magic, which made him wonder – was his attitude towards his magic down to his personal experience with it or what he’d been taught to believe?
In a way, he understood where Ezra was coming from. Even though Jude’s magic felt out of reach on the best of days, he’dalways viewed it through a selfish lens. It washismagic. The Abbey’s touch was what made it feel tainted and wrong.
Yet… the elders used that very same magic every day. They’d taken what was personal and made it collective, sacrificing his autonomy in the process.
The thought didn’t sit right.
‘But you’re the ones who steal our abilities to manipulate memories and call it answering prayers,’ Jude said slowly.
Ezra made a quiet noise in the back of his throat. ‘If it helps you to see it that way, yes.’
‘That’s not how you see it?’
He weighed his head back and forth. ‘Not… exactly. We elders view ourselves as more intermediaries. We’ve trained our entire lives, after all. We’re gifted with the discernment to choose when and how we shape memories to answer prayers. The saints—’ He paused, inclining his head in Jude’s direction. ‘Why should acolytes trust you to decide what prayers get answered? You’re so young, so volatile with unearned confidence. Why, even my own son—’
Ezra’s jaw snapped shut, eyes bulging. His hand slipped up to his neck, moving beneath the collar of his habit. Something flashed silver before it disappeared beneath the brown fabric.
Dizziness swarmed at the edges of Jude’s vision. He blinked rapidly as it vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving him unsteady on his feet. When he searched back to the last few seconds of conversation, he couldn’t remember what Ezra had said.
‘All I mean to say is,’ Ezra added before Jude could probe at his memory any further, ‘saints are young when their powers manifest. Imagine how catastrophic it would be to give children free rein over their abilities.’
‘Why pretend to answer prayers at all?’ Jude countered. ‘Why intervene and not let life take its natural course? It can’t be easy manipulating the memory of so many.’
‘Would you let life take its course if you had the power to change it for the better?’ Ezra asked. ‘Besides… we’re not altering events. Just how they’re remembered. Who does it harm to let them believe in prayers? It’s a comfort to know someone is there, someone is listening when they pray.’
Jude hated his tone, hated the false kindness in it. It reeked of wilful delusion. His deep-seated fury at the memories of somanyunder the thumb of the Abbey grew stronger. The members, even the acolytes, had no idea their memories were being altered in the name of answered prayers.
