Page 63 of The Castle & the Cloister

At last, the king reached a crossroads ahead, calling back directions to the rest of the procession as he carried on.

“A few minutes now,” Fia said quietly to the sweating Priest, the first time she’d spoken in over an hour, “and everything will be better.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what she meant. Then they were in the crossroads, and he felt them moving to the east, guided by his hand resting on Fia’s stirrup. The dirt road beneath them became neatly laid paving stones, and all at once, everythingwasbetter. The air lightened. A breath of wind stirred. With it came the tang of salt.

“Nearly there,” Fia offered. He wanted her to say something more—to explain why she desired a cloistered life so fiercely, or to list some of the charms of Raea’s house for him. But she only fell back into silence. The Priest drew his hand away from the withers of her mule, relying solely on his cane and the smooth, dusty surface of the road for direction. If they drifted apart, so be it. He’d never been one to push in where he wasn’t wanted.

They carried on beside each other for another mile, the breeze growing stronger, the heat lessening its hold on them, and a hollow sense of anticipation opened up within the Priest. Fia continued to ride without speaking, lost in her own thoughts, and he was grateful for it now as he tried to work himself back into some semblance of detached and cynical Inver calm.

Then he heard Dolenza’s voice ahead, calling out a greeting to Orden. The air cooled precipitously as they passed into the shade cast by a building or a wall, and then there was sun again, and a sense of enclosure. A courtyard, the Priest thought. But he had little time for more than that, because Fia dismounted in a sudden rush, and he could hear her retreat as she ran across the cobbles.

No sooner had she left than someone spoke by his side.

“Priest,” a woman’s voice said warmly. “My name is Soria Aurelia. I am Dolenza Raeana’s right hand, and as she will be at the king’s beck and call during the court’s time here, so I place myself at your disposal. Is there anything you wish for after your journey? A meal, in the refectory or alone? Cold wash water? To be shown around the cloister, or taken to the harbor? Whatever would refresh you best, I will provide it.”

The idea of a cold wash, a change of clothes, and something to eat besides the extravagant yet borderline rancid foods the royal party insisted on, was irresistible. But the Priest couldn’t help the frown that wrote itself across his face, or the question that sprang up as Aurelia made her offer.

“Is it fitting for a highly placed soria to serve me?” he asked. “I am, after all, the head of a heretic faith.”

“You’re our guest,” Aurelia answered. “And we have no servants here. It is every soria’s pleasure and duty to serve, from the newest postulant to our Matria herself.”

“In that case, I should like to be shown to my quarters,” the Priest said. “And the cold wash you mentioned wouldn’t go amiss, nor would some food.”

It felt unaccountably strange to be making demands and to be waited upon. At court, the Priest was often solitary, spending the bulk of his time alone in the darkness of the mountain sanctuary. He emerged for banquets and court suppers when necessary, and enlisted Beneson for errands on occasion, but mostly fended for himself, choosing to get his own meals from the kitchens, and to take his own linens to various launderers in the city. It wasn’t so much a matter of independence but of practicality—life had taught the Priest to be deeply distrustful, and what was done by his own hands could not easily be used as a tool to harm him.

“As you wish,” Aurelia said. “Will you take my arm?”

The Priest swallowed back frustration, not at Aurelia, but at the world and life in general. He hated to be led, but in an unfamiliar place had little choice. It struck him then that he’d felt no such resentment toward Fia during their four days of travel together. Even after she’d begun to withdraw, each time he’d had to leave the road to do the necessary and rejoined the retinue, she’d beckoned him back with her voice. And she hadn’t invited him to use her stirrup or her ankle or the flank of her muleas a convenient guide—it had seemed like a foregone conclusion between them that he would, like an arrangement that had always existed.

Curious, the Priest thought. He wasn’t sure he liked any of that, or how the postulant’s current absence gnawed at him. He drew himself away a little, internally, and examined the sensations he felt toward her. They weren’t unpleasantly strong, nor did they give him a warning sense of weakness. He didn’t fully trust Fia, but neither did he distrust her. If she was ever to betray or harm him, it wouldn’t be out of malice or ambition, but because he’d set himself at cross-purposes with her faith, or threatened something she loved. As the Priest had no intention of doing either, it seemed safe enough to indulge the taste he’d developed for the young woman’s company.

At least for now. At least until their goals or beliefs diverged and proved irreconcilable.

Aurelia led him through a warren of corridors and courtyards, peopled with chatting sorias and laughing children. The Priest wondered where Celina was kept—the court spoke of Orden’s eldest living child so seldom she’d been forgotten, but the Priest remembered. Ariana, he was sure, remembered too. Somewhere in this good-natured, entirely alien labyrinth, there was a child with Inver blood, and he intended to become reacquainted with her before leaving.

“May I ask you something?” the Priest inquired of Aurelia as she led him through the maze of the cloister, alive with women’s and children’s voices. “Are men barred from Raea’s order? The queen has made mention of fratrias at Lyria’s cloister—they’re a rarity, from what I gathered, but they still exist. I’ve often wondered why Silith and Raea seem less open-minded than Lyria on that score, when the mother of stars is considered strictest of the Beloved Three.”

For a moment, Aurelia was silent. When she spoke, her voice was even, kept carefully devoid of emotion. “Every house of the goddesses had its fratrias before the Inver rise to power. Why Silith’s order no longer accepts them, I can’t be sure. But Raea’s fratrias were our one loss during the conquest of Honoria—they were deemed too great a threat and put to the sword by your ancestor and his forces. Perhaps the Invers no longer consider that small slaughter of note, by comparison to the butchery theydid on Silith’s mountain. But we remember our fallen brothers. We honor them by leaving their places unfilled, and strive to demonstrate our harmlessness to the Invers by keeping our order strictly female.”

“Does that indeed render you harmless?” the Priest asked pointedly. Aurelia made no answer, leading him on.

A turn. Another turn. The Priest tried to keep track of them, but they stopped so often for his guide to answer questions or for sorias and cloister children to wish the Priest well, it was impossible to maintain his bearings. They’d climbed stairs twice, he knew that much—his room was on a second or third floor, but if they’d gone past a landing, it had not been wide enough for him to notice. Several times, as they passed from one corridor into another, Aurelia had asked the Priest to lower his head, though his sense of space led him to believe the ceilings were very high. He’d obeyed, supposing it was some religious matter—a sign of respect to Raea, perhaps, though he couldn’t make out why certain doorways and halls required it when others didn’t. Confusion added to his disorientation, and the Priest’s annoyance grew acute.

“Here we are,” Aurelia said brightly, stopping in the middle of a corridor. At their backs stretched a bank of windows or a balcony, open to the sea air, and the Priest suspected from the way the wind surged in carrying a heady scent of brine, that there was a view of the harbor. It was lost on him, but Aurelia’s words as he stepped into the room he’d been assigned were not.

“These are my quarters, generally. I moved out my things this morning, but the room’s been watched since then. There was no time or opportunity for anyone to tamper with it—I believe that is a standard Inver concern, which we accounted for. But if you’d like to ensure your own safety, I won’t take it as a slight.”

The Priest nodded and walked the perimeter of the room, fingertips of one hand brushing the wall, phelamon cane sweeping the ground as he found the furniture and mapped the place in his head. If Aurelia was second only to Dolenza at the cloister, then the sorias were spartan in their comforts. The room was small—smaller even than the Priest’s inherited cell at the mountain sanctuary’s heart. There was space enough for a narrow bed, a braided rug, a small desk beneath a window, a washstand with a large basin and heavy pitcher, and a little hearth. As far as the Priestcould tell, the only ways in or out were through the door by which he’d entered, and the window near the desk.

“I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you,” the Priest said as he returned to Aurelia. “It wasn’t my intention to force you out of your room.”

“We’ve taken in a great number of Corrinian children,” Aurelia answered matter-of-factly. “Space is no longer something the cloister has in abundance, despite its size. And the children can only stay with us or be forced onward and out of the country. That is the law.”

“Yes,” the Priest said, working to keep from signaling either approval or disapproval. “I know it.”

Aurelia fell silent for a moment, as if she expected him to say more. To defend the Invers’ policies, or to undermine them. The Priest did neither, choosing instead to keep his own counsel.

With a sigh, Aurelia shifted, moving back into the open doorway.