Page 108 of The Castle & the Cloister

Until the words left Ariana’s mouth, she did not know how she would answer. But when her reply came, she felt the bitterness and sweetness and rightness of it.

“No,” she said firmly. “I will not. I knew all along that the role I was bound to could not be Lyria’s will. I know it yet, though I shamed her in faltering. But I will never transgress the will of my goddess again. I will never undertake another act of violence, no matter the cost.”

Gwylen opened her mouth as if to speak, but no words came. Ariana’s refusal had aged her, turning her gray and haggard, but Ariana pushed past the Caervallin woman and walked on, past the pool of lamplight,into the mountain dark. She would brave its long, unknown roads just as so many of her countrymen had done before, looking for a place to rest when all the world had set itself against them.

So the reign of Honoria’s Lyrien queen ended, and the exile of Orden Inver’s widow began.

XXXIII

The sun in her brightness sent us a new postulant this spring, before the leaves had yet come into bud. She is suspicious and uneducated and unmannerly, but there is some fate clinging to her, like an errant ray of light. In Corrin, she came to us from the mountains and served in the hospital tents, doing the work of a full soria, then vanished the moment the last tent was struck. Raea will make something of her, I do not doubt, but what remains to be seen. I must watch and wait, and test her mettle.

—FROM MATRIA DOLENZA RAEANA TO IMPERATRICE GILETA SILITHIEN

It was well past midnight before the Priest dragged himself back into the king’s chambers, bone-tired and thoroughly sick of life at court already. He’d survived one week of it, engineering his own rise to power, but there were a full two decades more to come—an almost intolerably wearying thought.

Justus lay asleep in his arms, a soft bundle of perfect relaxation. The Priest had stopped to feed him once during the sanctuary revels—Fia had vanished as soon as the ceremony ended, and the Invers must certainly have been taken off balance by the sight of their new regent carefully nursing the king with a clean rag and a helping of goat’s milk and paschalflower, but no one spoke of it. Hadrian, sounding approving for once, had told the Priest at the end of the night that the entire court wasbewildered and half-afraid and more than a little in awe of him. None of them knew what to expect from a man who’d knifed Lucian the spymaster in the castle audience hall, sacrificed and consigned a queen to fire, bedded a soria and made an ally of Raea’s house, and yet who still claimed a regency rather than a throne, and took as much pride in the small king as a devoted mother did in her own sons. He was an enigma to the nobles, Hadrian said, and no one moved against a foe unless they understood him first.

It would not, the Priest thought drily, be difficult to ensure he remained someone the Inver court failed to understand.

With gentle hands, the Priest set Justus down in the waiting bassinet beside the king’s vast four-poster bed. The child would need a larger bassinet before long, and then a small bed of his own. There was a corner by the window occupied by a shelf of useless bric-a-brac: the Priest could have that taken out and move in a bed for Justus, where he’d be able to see the sky, and the sun and moon and stars.

As if summoned by the Priest’s thoughts, Fia spoke from where she’d been waiting, silent beside the window.

“I was on my way out,” she said quietly, mindful of the sleeping baby. “I made it as far as the courtyard gate and had to turn back. Not because I can’t go, but because I couldn’t do it without saying a proper goodbye to you. We owe each other that.”

The Priest and Fia met halfway across the room, and he took both her hands in his.

“There will be a part of me that always wishes I could have stayed with you,” Fia offered. “I’m not one for sentiment or eloquence, but you should know that much, at least.”

The Priest nodded. Fia rose up to kiss him, and the taste of finality and separation were so strong that her touch was an anguish, rather than a joy.

“Goodbye, Priest,” she said.

Stay with me, he wanted to beg.Don’t leave me to weather this place and these people without you. Be a bulwark for me, and I will be a blade and a shield for you. Surely there must be middle ground between us, made as we are for sunlight and for flame.

But he kept his counsel. Strong as Fia’s faith burned, fierce as herlove for her daughter ran, the Priest would not diminish them for all the world. For a moment, he held her in his arms, and then she was gone, striding away just as she’d come—singular, determined, bearing nothing besides her postulant’s kirtle and a single rough shoulder bag of travel rations and waterskins.

The Priest stood and waited until the scent of sunbaked earth and lavender had faded from the room. Then he moved back to the bed and crouched beside Justus’s bassinet. Setting one hand on his nephew’s chest, he felt the faint rise and fall of the baby’s breath, the fragile tempo of his heartbeat. With a little sigh, Justus shifted in his dreams, reaching up with one dimpled hand and grasping the Priest’s thumb.

Something vicious and unreasoning and akin to anger woke in the Priest, all centered on his brother’s child, and the thought of any harm befalling the innocent soul that had been placed in his keeping. Bowing his head, he spoke quietly to the darkness and the mountain and the boy in his care, and to the listening moon.

“By wise Silith, goddess of my mark, I swear to do everything in my power to keep this child safe. To be a guardian and a comfort to him, and to keep Honoria a place of honor and prosperity until I surrender it without bloodshed. Should I fail in my oath, may the vengeful moon strike me dead.”

Something deliciously cool and silver ran through the Priest, and though he knelt at the peak of the mountain and Silith’s sorias inhabited its deep heart, he could hear them sing—a hymn not of grief, but of victory.

A knock sounded at the king’s outer door, cutting off the sorias’ song, and when the Priest opened it, Hadrian was waiting. The old man brushed past him into the study and made himself comfortable by the hearth without waiting for an invitation.

“Well then, Priest,” Hadrian said with a calculating note in his voice. “I’ve brought a list of people who’ve wronged me and who I should like dealt with, using funds from the royal coffers rather than my own. I have another of deserving friends who ought to be given places on your various councils. But first, about my son’s posting in Vesper and my appointment as magistrate…”

Fia walked. Long into the night she stayed on her feet, until the mountain was only a dim shadow behind her and the plains had truly begun. When she grew tired, she bedded down beneath an olive tree and woke with the dawn and the birds.

By noon, the cloister was growing clearer and clearer ahead of her. The sun no longer shone oppressively as it had done at high summer—it was warm still, but Raea had mellowed, and even the plains nights were growing cool. Bells rang out intermittently, signaling the sorias to move from one task to the next, to join each other in the refectory, to gather in the chapel for prayers.

Fia moved faster, anticipation replacing the exhaustion and sorrow that had haunted her for days. She was on her way toward hope—the cloister had always been hope for her, and refuge. After a rudderless and loveless youth, this place had become her center, the point around which she turned, never able or willing to fully break away from it.

“Fia!” Soria Beatrice called out in delight as she approached the wide front gates. “Is it really you? It seems forever since you went away, and it didn’t really count, having you back with the court. Will you be staying now?”

Beatrice stood perched at the top of a wooden ladder picking apples, and scrambled down to envelop Fia in a billowy, cider-scented embrace. For her part, Fia couldn’t help herself—she was smiling so widely she ached with it, finally back where she belonged.