Page 24 of The Castle & the Cloister

“Not the heir,” the Priest said with quiet satisfaction. “Orden’s son is with his mother. This is the stillborn girl. Ariana’s heir, I suppose. She’ll be sent to Lyria’s cloister to foster, never the wiser about her true provenance.”

The spy let out a snort of disapproval, still turned toward the child. “Orden is even weaker than my master believes. First taking a daughter of stars to wed, now swelling their ranks with the fruit of his own loins. A disgrace to his forebearers, that one, though it seems all of Darias’s pups who lived are. Pity Honoria, led by a blind man and a king who rules from between the legs of his queen.”

With the energy of a coiled spring, the Priest seized the spy with his right hand and dragging him backward as his left grasped the offertory knife, bringing it up and driving it into the side of the spy’s throat. In one decisive motion, the Priest tore the blade forward through artery, veins, muscle, and flesh. A hot spray of blood fountained out, undoubtedly anointing the blankets and the child nestled in them, but the Priest did not cease his burst of movement. He forced the spy away, farther from his infant niece and toward Mortis’s altar.

“Not a war god for her,” the Priest ground out as he held the spy face down on Mortis’s shrine while the last lifeblood pumped out of him. “Not this time. I name a child here and dedicate her to our pantheon. May Mortis, god of judgment and death, stand watch over Ellimere Inver. Lethimbe her guardian, and the flame that settles in her burning soul.”

When the impertinent stranger in his grip fell entirely still, the Priest shoved what was left of him aside with a twist of his mouth. He moved the brazier of coals from Tyrus’s altar to Mortis’s, scattering its contents so that his own blood and the dead spy’s mingled together. It would leave the child he spoke for doubly blessed, the force of her naming powerful in the eyes of the gods.

Or so Inver tradition would have the Priest believe.

Taking the torch from Tyrus’s altar sconce, he set the coals and tinder alight, the heat of flame flaring up and drying the blood that slicked his hands. As the fire crackled and the scent of incense rose, he was struck by a sudden and uncharacteristic resolution.

Once he’d dealt with Ellimere, and seen her safely out of the castle, he would make his presence known at council. This summer, unlike everyother, he’d take an active interest in Honoria’s politics. What did it matter if it painted yet another target on him? He’d been born with one resting over his heart by virtue of his name and bloodline.

The Priest nodded, fixing himself on his new course as somewhere in the cavern’s endless gloom, a long-dead soria laughed, an eerie silver sound that echoed back from the walls and seemed to carry on forever.

VII

… And when faced with the darkness, so vast that it threatened to swallow the earth and wither all things growing, so deep that it blotted out even the faces of her elder sisters the Sun and Moon, Lyria the Gentle shattered into infinite pieces, into shards of light uncountable and unknowable. She made of herself such a fragmented thing, her parts so small and scattered, that even the darkness could not extinguish them all.

Where the force of the Sun and Moon could not prevail, Lyria’s mercy triumphed, and the darkness was vanquished not by a flood of light, but by her soft, innumerable stars.

—FROM “LYRIA AMONG THE SHADOWS,” A SACRED STORY OF THE BELOVED THREE

An intolerable lassitude had settled over Ariana. She wanted to sleep—her body was starved for it—but her mind would not let her slip into the relief of unconsciousness. It had fractured, pieces of it left with the cloister in Corrin, with her eldest living daughter safe in Dolenza’s care, with the baby she’d entrusted to Fia and the Priest, with the small unnamed boy child who dozed in her arms. Ariana had been born for breaking and always viewed it as a service to Blessed Lyria, but it seemed terribly hard that her family should be torn apart, too, thebonds between her children severed before they could even speak. She’d never begrudged Lyria a single act of service, but this—this cost her dear.

In an attempt to unite the fraying threads of her attention, Ariana reached for the letter Dolenza had sent. The Matria’s determined script cut across the page, certain and assertive and bold—things Ariana herself had never been.

To Ariana Inver, mistress of all Honoria, greetings and blessings from our Beloved Sun.

I’ve been reminded recently that the time for your childbearing is close. So I offer you my very best wishes for a safe birthing and a healthy child. Along with those wishes, I send a postulant of mine—Fiametta Raeana, a mountain girl who covets the office of a soria. If it pleases her, she may stay awhile in your service. If it does not please her, I suspect there’s little in the world that can induce her to go against her will.

Your Majesties will be gratified to hear that the summer fishing is progressing well. We’ve taken in over three hundred barrels of whitehead and well over five hundred of smallfish in the last week alone. I offer up prayers daily for an abundant harvest, both on sea and on land, and a winter of peace and plenty.

Your devoted servant,

Matria Dolenza Raeana

Ariana let her eyes lose focus and her vision blur. Further weariness washed over her at Matria Dolenza’s words. The letter did not just contain well-wishes, and it had nothing to do with fisheries. It was a reminder, and an admonition, spoken in the form of a cipher. Over three hundred Corrinians who’d reached the age of their majority and over five hundred Corrinian children had been smuggled onto Vesperin ships by the sorias since summer’s onset. Every Vesperin ship they’d boarded hid under a cloister flag, disguised as part of the fishing fleet. To even enter Honorian water was a dire risk to Vesperin vessels, yet for the sake of Corrin, and Lyria’s outlawed sect, they gambled with their own safety. The agreementhad only been struck after Ariana herself agreed to meet covertly with a Vesperin emissary, providing them with a queen’s assurance that she would do all in her power to ensure their ships remained safe. It had been one of the greatest risks she’d taken yet, but so few places offered sanctuary to the people Ariana had been born among. Honoria itself had no sympathy for the hapless and helpless and unarmed.

Or rather, Honoria did not sympathize outright. Because here lay Ariana, having passed through blood and tasted death, as all women did in childbirth, and every action she undertook, every breath she drew, was calculated.

Will this decision advance the cause of peace? Will the words I’m about to speak save lives, or end them? Will the nod or the bow of my head make my own life easier in the moment, but cause misery or death to others in the end? Will my smile purchase a reprieve, or my frown incite disaster?

These were the questions that plagued the queen at every turn, until she felt like a wraith, a shadow that haunted the castle’s halls.

I pray for a winter of peace and plenty, Dolenza had said, but made no mention of Orden’s new war. No admonition, no request that Ariana intercede with the king, no dire hints at sanctions to come.

That explained the nightglass.

Suppressing a shiver, Ariana felt under her pillow for the pendant the Priest had surreptitiously given her. With Fia and her star-marked daughter gone, the queen finally allowed Glora to send up a chambermaid, who’d cleaned the room and freshened the bed. Exhausted as she was, Ariana had remembered the nightglass and palmed it furtively when she got up, tucking it away once more when the bedding had been changed. Now, she drew it out and sat still a moment, the cool chip of faintly glowing stone lying in her cupped hand like a fallen star.

It took a great deal of courage for Ariana to set the nightglass to Dolenza’s letter, where the transparent stone revealed cramped symbols between each line of the Matria’s decisive handwriting. They were an ancient cipher, each symbol representing an entire word or idea, and Ariana had learned them well as a soria. The ink with which they were written was only made visible by nightglass, and Ariana moved the pendant slowly along the page as she read the warning scribed there, and trembled.

By Raea the Sun, by Silith the Moon, by Lyria the Stars: rein in your king, or it will be done for you.

Seven years she’d spent working tirelessly for peace, and it had not been enough. It was all in ruins now, thanks to a whim of Orden’s that she could not comprehend.