Page 66 of The Castle & the Cloister

There was a rustle of parchment as the document passed between her and Orden. The Priest held his breath—whatever unbearable tensions he’d felt in his mountain sanctuary, surrounded by ghosts, it was nothing to what he experienced now, waiting for Orden’s response to the sun’s living mouthpiece.

When the king spoke, it was with the easy lack of care he would have shown in remarking on the weather.

“A worthy gift,” Orden said, “and one which we readily receive on our son’s behalf. As for the rest, it will not surprise you to hear that we find it wholly unacceptable. Regardless of any lack of accord between us, though, I should very much like to see the extent of Raea’s house, and of her holdings.”

His easiness faded at the last, replaced by the hunger the Priest had initially heard, and a faint scheming note. It would sound like no more than interest to those who did not know Orden well, but the Priest had been reared with him. Orden’s pointed desire for Raea’s cloister could only end with him trying for it in some unexpected fashion. Just as no one had seen his sudden blazing rise to power coming, so, too, they would not be able to anticipate whatever he had planned for the cloister. Dolenza, in her wisdom, wished for unity, but Orden only ever wished for authority under the guise of allegiance. This the Priest knew as well as he knew his own soul.

It would end in bloodshed, he thought to himself with a slight shake of his head. Didn’t it always, when his people were involved?

XVIII

Before any creature yet had eyes to see, there was light. Before any being yet had ears to hear, there was music. Without a single soul to desire or serve them, the three sisters danced and sang in their own sacred brightness, and we are all but echoes of that movement, that song, that illumination.

—A TEACHING OF THE BELOVED THREE

Ariana’s brief glimpse of Celina had been worse than torture.

To Ari, Celina remained caught in time, still as tiny and helpless and new as she’d been the day she was given over to a soria. Seeing her not as an infant but as a child, capable of walking and speaking, wearing her mother’s dark eyes and her father’s determined chin, cut to the bone. It was a visceral reminder of everything Ariana had missed. Three years of life, and all Celina’s many firsts. First foods and words and steps and adventures. She knew nothing of the small girl’s temperament or habits. All she knew was a baby that no longer existed—a little thing who she’d held to her breast and nourished with her own body, the two of them close in a way Ariana had never known before or since, save for a few fleeting moments with Justus.

The Celina of Ariana’s remembering was gone. The Celina who existed now was a product of Raea’s cloister and knew nothing of her mother or the Invers. So Ariana subsumed her heartbreak, as she’d always done, in the completion of her duties. Orden had warned her thatthe two brief council sessions he’d endured in Inverlyn had not gone well, and that there was no reason for another attempt at an accord between the nations of the Hand. No one had come to the cloister for peace, he said, but for a glimpse of Dolenza’s vast holdings. Still, Ariana had prevailed upon her king to allow one last conference. Dolenza offered the use of the refectory, and on their first full day at the cloister, Ariana went down to be sure all was ready.

The refectory was fiercely clean and attractive in a spare, serviceable way. Its windows looked out only to courtyards and laundry yards and vegetable gardens, rather than to the fertile plains or the dreaming sea. Back home in Inverlyn, Ariana’s council chamber was a round room at the very pinnacle of the castle’s tallest spire. Long, open windows ringed the space, so that it was unusable during the colder months but showed the glories of Honoria to full advantage the rest of the year. Mountain wind swept through that room, cleansing it of built-up ill will and festering ambition. To the south and the east stretched the foothills and the plains and beyond them the sea. To the west, the shadowy forested lands that ran league after league to Honoria’s farthest coast. And to the north, the bulk of the mountain showed, gray and weathered, with stunted conifers and alpine flowers clinging to its crags.

Ariana had chosen her council chamber carefully, to inspire high feeling and to cast Honoria in the best possible light. Dolenza had simply offered the cloister’s largest room, already furnished with conveniently sized tables. Sometimes, the practicality of Raea’s daughters drove the queen to distraction.

She picked her way around the table drawn over to the refectory’s center, stopping at each place to see if her orders had been followed. At the head, where Orden would sit, was a decanter of summer wine he’d waxed eloquent about the previous day. Gileta would be to his right, and Ariana had picked a small posy of star-shaped dune flowers just for the Imperatrice’s place. Gileta was fond of flowers, particularly if they were simple, and she would enjoy the tiny blossoms.

Ariana had agonized over where to seat Afon. By rights, he ought to be placed at Orden’s left. It would be an insult to put him anywhere else. But it was inviting disaster to seat the two kings side by side. Ariana could sit at Orden’s left hand, but Afon would certainly view it as a wordlessjibe. Gwylen could not take precedence over her sovereign, nor Lucian or Hadrian over a king. To seat the Arbiter or Arbitress at Orden’s side would be the worst choice of all.

Briefly, she’d considered Dolenza. It would be fitting to honor Raea’s Matria and reciprocate her act of goodwill in inviting the Invers to her cloister. But tradition excluded the Matria from affairs of state, and Ariana instinctively shied away from allowing her to be present. Orden looked at Dolenza and the cloister with naked hunger, and it was plain that the Matria had never truly intended any alliance to come of this visit, not with the terms she’d listed the previous day. It seemed to Ariana that Dolenza was testing Orden, goading him into some rash and ill-considered action, and the queen felt a growing sense of foreboding, along with a compulsion to break her king’s focus on the cloister whenever possible.

Prevailing upon the Priest to attend council had been a stroke of inspiration. Ariana accosted him the night before and found him unexpectedly willing. Though he’d always kept clear of Honoria’s governance whenever possible, he’d owned to Ariana that perhaps doing so had been the wrong choice. Were he more present, he might have known Orden meant to begin a new war before it had been planned and announced. So. The Priest would take the seat to Orden’s left, and Afon would not be slighted.

Ariana had thought long and hard about what token to leave for him. At last she’d settled on something practical—a velvet pouch of dried paschalflower, for use in the tonic the Priest drank. For Afon, she had a new knife sheath, decorated with beaten silverwork, and for Gwylen, a fine new quill made from an elegant seabird feather. Before the Arbiter and Arbitress’s places, she set two small purses of Honorian coin. The impersonal nature of the gifts, and the implication that Corrin must depend on charity, would not be lost on anyone present.

Ariana’s own place was at the foot of the table and set with the trappings of a scribe. She’d always personally written out the contracts and edicts and trade agreements that resulted from such meetings, while the other delegates sealed and signed them. Dropping into her seat, she toyed idly with a stoppered inkpot. There was still time before the others arrived, and Ariana was deeply troubled. Celina’s nearness weighed on her.Ellimere’s absence was an open wound. Who Justus would someday become haunted her every waking moment. And Orden—Orden was worst of all.

He’d been so attentive and solicitous to her on the road, after Crispus’s death. It always bewildered Ariana, that a man who was capable of such brutality toward others, who’d murdered his way to the throne, could be unfailingly gentle with her. Oh, she’d sparked his temper once or twice through mishap or miscalculation, but he’d never turned the full force of it on her. He was controlled, her Inver king, despite his quick passions and rages.

Since arriving at the cloister, his attention had grown more marked. Last night, in the privacy of their own chamber, he’d encouraged her to speak of her past as a soria. Ariana had never breathed a word of that old life to him. Lyria and Orden were anathema to each other, and she would never be able to reconcile them, so she preferred to keep them entirely separate. But Orden had coaxed and cajoled, until she owned that yes, the very rhythms and certainties of cloister life still called to her and soothed her soul as nothing else had ever done.

“If there’s a chance for you to join the sorias during our stay—to sing, or pray, or speak, whatever it is they do—I hope you’ll take it,” Orden had said to her the night before, from across Dolenza’s borrowed room. He stood by the window unlacing the front of his doublet, and though there were a few faint lines at the corners of his eyes that had not been there upon their first meeting, Ariana’s king looked regal as always—the very picture of a ruler born from fire and ambition.

Fia and Justus were housed elsewhere, and Orden seemed pleased to take on the role of Ariana’s attendant himself. He’d already helped her to undress, and to brush her long black hair. Just being in Raea’s cloister seemed to have rekindled Orden’s desire for her from an ember to a flame. It had burned low, by necessity, while she carried Justus and the small lost daughter of whom neither of them spoke. But within the cloister walls, Orden couldn’t seem to keep his eyes or his hands or his mouth off Ariana. He reached for her beneath tables, twining his fingers through her own. He stopped for kisses in the corridors or walked with a hand on her waist, and nuzzled at the curve of her neck while brushing her hair.

Though Ariana still bled, it had lessened considerably without Crispus’s destructive touch. She was stronger and felt almost well. When Orden had removed his doublet and breeches and washed, donning a clean, cedar-scented nightshirt, Ari found herself on her knees before him, all of her own accord. He’d sat on the edge of Dolenza’s bed, and she’d taken him into her mouth with her lips that once sang Lyria’s most sacred hymns. When he’d come undone, in a jolting rush of salt and heat and power, he bent over Ariana and breathed in the scent of her dark hair. He swore to her that they were perfect together, that their son was perfect, and that the Honoria they’d leave him would be perfect too.

Starved for lack of something to worship, Arianawantedto believe him. To believe in him. To have herself a king, if she could not have a goddess. And then he’d repeated his desire to her, that she should join the sorias at their worship if the opportunity arose.

“Yes, my lord,” she answered quietly, taking his hand when he stood and held it out to her.

“I have something for you,” Orden said, drawing Ari to her feet.

She gave him an uncertain look. The king turned from her, bent, and pulled a phelamon wood box from beneath the bed. It was light, the slips of wood thin, the whole thing hardly thicker than a book, though at least twice the length and width of one. Setting it down on the bed, Ariana opened the lid and froze.

Within the box, smelling of spices and night air, familiar as a second skin, lay her soria’s habit. The deep blue of the fabric had not faded. The silver stars embroidered around the neck still shone as bright as ever.

“I asked you to give it to me,” Orden said. “Our first night together, after you’d given me everything else. Your body, your mark, your faith. Do you remember? I said I would keep it safe for you.”