Page 41 of The Castle & the Cloister

“I know you still cling to some of your old ways.” Orden took her hand in his own and traced slow circles onto her palm with his thumb. The king’s touch sent little shocks through her, like sparks or stars, and she lifted her gaze to his half unwillingly, forever powerless to resist him.“But Ari, I think the time has come. It can’t be put off any longer. For our son, you must make a blood sacrifice. Not of the sort the Priest provides, either—a full sacrifice, before all, at the boy’s naming. Do you have it in you to undertake that?”

Neither of them had ever spoken about the true extent of her faith, and the degree to which she was truly apostate. Orden took whatever she offered—prayers to the hearth goddess, participation in the milder Inver rites, devotion to him and his need for an heir—and viewed it as loyalty. His question was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging suspicion that she still harbored much of her former faith.

“I don’t…” Ariana hesitated, awash with despair. She felt faint with his touch, and with the odd, disjointed sensation that had come over her as she bled and bled without ceasing. “Orden, I—”

“I know what happened between you and Afon in the sanctuary,” Orden said, and though he spoke sternly, compassion shone in his eyes. “I realize this is not a thing you would undertake lightly. I would not ask it of you if I did not believe it necessary. Afon considers you to be weak, my star. He thinks your strength is a brittle veneer that he may shatter, after which he would tear apart the softness within. You must show him your true nature; what I know you to be. A queen, indomitable. I see it in you, Ari, every day. I saw it for the first time in Corrin when you refused to beg Afon for your own life. I saw it when you came to Inverlyn and offered yourself so gloriously to me. There is fire in your heart. You are relentless in your own way, and I need Honoria and Afon and all the Hand to recognize that too. I cannot cross swords with Caervallion again unless I know you will be held in proper esteem when I leave.”

There. It had arrived—the moment Ariana was waiting for. Here lay her chance to forestall the coming war. Oh, Orden would be disappointed by her refusal to sacrifice, but he would understand and would not hold it against her. Most importantly, fear would keep him home. Fear and the realization that she was not what he had believed her to be. That at her core, she did not burn, but faltered.

He would keep peace in order to defend the frailty of his wife.

The very thought was as unnerving and alien to Ariana as witnessing a blood offering. If she loved anything in Orden, it was his boldness and his strength, no small part of which found root in believing his queenand his Priest were fit matches for his own power. To take that from him would be more than cruel. It would break his conqueror’s heart.

And then, sealing Ariana’s fate, Orden lowered his voice.

“How often have I asked you for something, since that first moment when you offered me a boon?” he murmured. “Not once, Ariana. Understand the importance of this when I say, I am asking you now. If you cannot do this for our child, do it for me. I need to know that if I fall, you will be strong enough without me.”

“Yes.” The word came out a whisper, and Ariana had never hated herself as much as she did in that moment, stretched beyond breaking on the rack that was the love she bore for her husband and her goddess. She saw it all. The knife, the offering, the blood. Anathema to gentle Lyria, and unsanctioned in any way by the Beloved Three. “I will sacrifice for our son, and for his future.”

Orden raised Ariana’s hand to his lips and kissed it fervently as the world spun around her.

“My queen. You put us all to shame.”

It must be done, Ariana told herself. She would spill blood for this family she’d formed through deceit and self-interest, and she would use the goodwill and power it garnered her as she ever had—to work toward the cause of peace. Lyria would not forgive her the means, but Ariana must strive all the harder to ensure her apostasy was in service of a sacred end.

Perhaps it was only fate that she become a knife. Perhaps there had never been a way to avoid this.

The sun was riding low in the summer sky when Matria Serafine appeared at the entrance to the empty hospital tent, where the two kings had been. She took in Ariana, still on her knees, and the small signs of violence that surrounded her.

“Orden Inver commended you to me,” Serafine said, looking like Lyria herself with her long white hair and stark blue eyes. “He warned me to watch over you well—said a soul like yours is a treasure, and that I must be more careful, and see you come to no harm. I have not heardhim speak so favorably of any other follower of the Beloved Three. And Afon—he seemed enraged. Not about the war, or the armistice, but by you.”

Ariana nodded. Instinctively, she’d begun to sift through the soil, gathering seeds of meadowstar and tucking them into the pocket of her kirtle.

“I have a task for you,” Matria Serafine said after a stretch of silence. “Something to aid Corrin and to help her recover from this great hurt, while ensuring such a thing does not happen again in our lifetime. I do not place it upon you lightly—it is a difficult obedience.”

“I have sworn everything to Lyria. I see no difference between such a task and my fidelity oath.”

Serafine shook her head. “You don’t understand, child. I would not lay this burden on your shoulders if you were not the only one who may be able to manage it. It will take all from you for a time, and perhaps forever. Your cloister. Your community. Possibly even your life.”

“I do not wish to be a martyr,” Ariana said, and it pained her to admit her own fatal flaw. There was no act of worship or service Serafine could command or the goddess Lyria desire that she did not yearn to perform, save the ending of a life, even if it be her own. “But I do wish to walk fully in Lyria’s light. I wish for all the Hand to do so, and I would die a little every day to see her grace reach us. Is that enough, Matria?”

Serafine inclined her head. “More than enough. And so I will tell you the most zealously guarded secret of our faith. Of how a woman of peerless devotion may rise to the right hand of a blasphemous power, and there pursue the highest service to the Beloved Three. You would be, for a time, the bearer of a role more sacred and hidden than any other the goddesses ordain. Acultellus, a servant graced with Raea’s capacity to heal through bloodshed, Silith’s dispensation to end suffering by any means, and Lyria’s right, by her mercy, to judge.”

Ariana’s heart beat so loud in her ears that it nearly drowned out Serafine’s voice, and her breath came swift and shallow. She realized, in looking at her Matria, the woman who had raised her, that something had fundamentally changed since war came to Corrin. There was a hardness, an implacability in Serafine now, which Ariana had never seen in her before.

“Cultellus? A little knife?”

Once again, Serafine nodded. “Yes, my star. Because even the Beloved Three understand that sometimes peace is purchased with a blade.”

You will make yourself a queen, the Matria had instructed her. It does not matter who you begin with—Orden or Afon. What one has, the other will desire. It is their way. As cultellus, all prohibitions laid out by the Beloved Three will be void for you. You will become veiled by Silith Obscurum—the dark of the moon, in which no action can be seen or judged. If you choose Afon first, you will do away with him and allow Orden to take Caervallion and you along with it. After you have dealt with Orden as well, the house of the sun will rise and assume control of the majority of the Hand. If you choose Orden first, you will cede Honoria to Afon afterward, and when you have finished with him, the daughters of the moon will take the Hand. We would not ask this of anyone else—the task of a cultellus may only pass to a soria whose entire nature is in opposition to the work required, but whose obedience is faultless.

Ariana had agreed. She’d murmured words of assent, allowing herself to receive strange and arcane blessings, and she had gone to Inverlyn, knowing that her Matria was a fool. Whichever king Ariana went to first, he would surely be the death of her. Afon because he would kill her outright, Orden because she had seen Lyria’s light in him, and to extinguish it willingly would mean the destruction of Ariana’s soul.

So Ariana Lyrien entered the Inver capital, ostensibly on divine business, but truly in hope that the king who had saved her once might do so a second time. And oh, he had risen to the occasion with a will. In the presence of Orden’s entire court, Ariana had burned away her mark and made an offering of herself to him, and he had been powerless to resist. He’d given her a crown and a country, his heart and his body, and every day that Ariana spent as his queen, guilt ate away at her.

Orden believed—the Hand believed—that she had turned apostate for love of him. But she had come to him already disobedient, running from the call of her order. Ariana had not made herself a queen because she loved a king. She had done it because she required a shield, and no one else had ever been so for her but Orden Inver. She knew this too: were her defenses any less than an Inver king and an Inver crown, the Beloved Three and the daughters of light would have her obedience sooner or later. She was not strong enough to resist them, and would end a cultellus, to the ruin of her conscience and soul.

Exhausted as she was, Ariana’s body had adjusted and reattuned itself to the tiny boy sleeping within arm’s reach. She woke to the faintest, stealthy noise in the hour after dawn, having only just returned to the queen’s chambers and dozed off after spending the scant hours during which Orden slept, at her king’s side.