Page 29 of The Castle & the Cloister

Discontented murmurs rose up around the women at the audience hall’s center, coming from Gileta’s retinue, from Orden’s courtiers and guards, from the Arbiter and Arbitress and their attendants. Orden’s face was a storm cloud, but for once, for this moment, Ariana was not concerned with him. She did not need his approval, but a way to both honor Afon’s request and put Caervallion in its place.

When Ariana spoke, it was in a clear voice that rang through the hall. “The moon requires blood for a sacrifice, and I have provided it.”

Letting go of both the Imperatrice and Caervallion’s ambassador, Ariana rose.

The muttering across the audience hall intensified. For where the queen had knelt, there spread a pool of crimson, and the hem of her pale blue gown was soaked red. Gileta’s lips parted, the light of grudging admiration shining in her eyes. Gwylen let out a short, sharp sound.

To the Invers, unmarked by the goddesses and uninitiated in their true ways, the sight of Ariana bleeding would be only shameful. To the daughters of the moon, it was something else entirely. A most sacred offering—blood spilled not through injury or death but in the course of giving life. It put a seal upon Ariana’s wish for peace and her invocation of their goddess, rendering her words high and holy, and all the more so because Silith had not rightly been offered blood in this place since it last served as her shrine.

The queen, the Imperatrice, and the Caervallin ambassador werebound together now—yoked one to the other in all their aims and ends. For any of them to sever that bond or serve as a willful stumbling block to another would be a slight to Silith herself. And of the Beloved Three, Silith was most vengeful, and least ready to forgive.

Ariana met Afon’s eyes.

“As your prisoner was withheld wrongfully from Honoria, and as I have bled on his behalf, I claim his life for my own,” she said. “I do not plead, for there is no law that would withhold him from me. By the precepts of the Hand, you ought to have returned him to us years ago. By Silith’s rites, he is mine. Neither your neighbors nor the goddess you claim will view you kindly if you deny me this.”

VIII

In winter, when the forests of Caervallion are a haunted place, leafless and sere and full of dire voices, I tell myself stories of you. I speak of how someday, I will sink my greatsword to its hilt in your belly, and draw it out, and lick the hot blood from the blade. I describe how your queen will look when I force her to eat your heart out of my hand. And I spend a great deal of time contemplating what she will do when I set the cloister of the stars to oil and torches and flame. Will she beg, at long last?

Truly, I think there is no length I would not go to in order to finally secure that sweet song for myself. Do not think yourself any better—they tell it all across the Hand, how Orden Inver lives for the sight of his star bride on her knees.

—FROM AFON CAERVALLIN TO ORDEN INVER

Afon killed the prisoner.

Of course he did. His eyes bored into Orden’s the moment Ariana’s voice died out. Silver light gleamed off the heathen king’s blade and blood spilled from the gaping wound that blossomed across the prisoner’s neck. Orden had known the man—Tribune Ataxis. He hadn’t even been a soldier, but an official in charge of supply caravans. Many of the Invers had twitted Ataxis for taking the role without protest, and Ataxis had never minded, saying that even Tyrus would falterwithout Kidrien to keep him supplied and the hearth goddess to manage his household.

He’d been a good man. Orden didn’t know many of those, aside from the Priest.

Afon stood with his chest heaving, a challenge glinting in his dark eyes and his vicious grin as he stood over Ataxis’s body. And Orden choked back a challenge and a retort, swallowing the taste of fury as crimson sparked at the edges of his vision, because he refused to let his queen’s bleeding be in vain. Oh, he knew full well what it would cost Ari, to have used her blood against Gileta and Afon’s own ambassador. How the courtiers would mock and snub her for weeks, declaring her backslidden and shameful until the next scandal caught their pitiful attention. She was worth a thousand of them—from the very first moment, Orden had seen an incandescent strength in her, made all the more irresistible because it came in the guise of something soft and yielding.

Orden would not harm his star unless there was no other choice. So instead of acknowledging what Afon had done, he turned aside and found rescue in a most unexpected place. The infant prince in his arms began to squall, the reedy, insistent sound of his cries echoing back from the stone walls.

Well done, boy, Orden thought. We’ll make something splendid out of you.

“Where’s the wretched nurse?” he boomed over the baby’s cries, pinning on his expansive king’s mannerisms and skewering the nearby Chief Physician with a glare. Gulping and looking more frog-like than ever, Crispus pointed to the back of the room, where a sour-faced postulant in a plain kirtle stopped short in the act of edging toward the door.

Ah yes. Dolenza’s witch. Orden had forgotten.

To her credit, the young woman immediately abandoned whatever plan had her bent on leaving, and was already on her way toward Orden, elbowing through gathered nobles and court officials with a forbidding scowl on her face. She swept up to the king as if she was royalty herself, and Orden felt an odd, electric energy radiating from the Priest at his side, who’d been silent and withdrawn for most of the proceedings. Ariana’s attention, Orden could not fail to notice, was also trained on the postulant with unusual intensity.

“Your name?” Orden asked.

“Fiametta Raeana, servant to Bright Raea the Sun,” the postulant said. She stood with her shoulders thrown back, her chin high, and was nearly tall enough to meet his gaze dead-on.

Since the Invers’ rise to power, the line of Matrias who oversaw Raea’s sun-soaked domain by the sea had done what was necessary to survive. They’d bargained with the house that slaughtered their sister orders. They’d placated it. They’d argued and cajoled and flattered, but in one small thing, they would not abase themselves: no woman attached to the cloister was required by Raea or her Matria to kneel for an Inver king. And though the Invers denounced the practice as barbarous, the influence and reputation of the cloister were still so potent that they dared not force humility.

It annoyed Orden greatly to have such a hotbed of dissent within his very own kingdom. Afon had no such irritation to deal with—the daughters of Silith who still dwelt within Caervallion either approved of his bloodthirsty ways, so long as he embraced the name of their goddess, or ignored him entirely. Orden knew it would do him no favors to have an upstart peasant in plainspun refuse him courtesy at the onset of a council that could be the ruin of his reign. It would signal to Gileta that she had a staunch ally within Honorian borders, and to Afon that he might make devastating use of Honoria’s fractured religious nature.

Gods, what Orden could do with the cloister and the plains if they were his. He’d have no need of this tedious farce of a council; of Gileta’s support and trade, which came with an entire cobweb’s worth of strings attached; of hosting Afon to maintain his appearance of moderacy. He could do as he longed to so fiercely and spill Afon Caervallin’s guts on his throne room floor, grinding them into the stones of the mountain when he’d finished.

With the postulant standing before him, plain and tall and raw-boned, Orden resigned himself to a humiliating reminder of the cloister’s autonomy. He sighed, and shifted the screaming prince from one arm to the other. Then, a wonder. With a flicker of her gaze in Ariana’s direction, and then Afon’s, the postulant slowly sank to her knees.

“Majesty,” she said. “My Matria wished to send you a gift—something of great value, to mark the arrival of your son and heir. She wishesto strengthen the bond between your castle and her cloister, so all of the Hand will see that Honoria stands united, a power to be reckoned with. There is nothing my Matria values more than the souls within her care, so I offer my service to you and to the prince, as a token of Blessed Raea’s respect and regard.”

Truly, the gods must be smiling today. If Dolenza had intended any such thing, Orden would eat his best hawking glove. Yet the postulant had hit on just the words to convince all those assembled of Honoria’s strength. Ariana had some hold over her, it seemed, and already Orden’s mind was racing, working through how that might be best used to the throne’s advantage. The wet nurse could serve as an informant, perhaps, whispering Dolenza’s secrets into Inver ears.

“We acknowledge Dolenza’s deference, and accept her offering,” Orden said, raising his voice to be heard over the cries of his son. “Now for the gods’ sakes, do what you came here for.”