Chapter One
Ione
The brass clang of the death knell startled the seagulls into taking flight, their own plaintive cries competing to ruin what had thus far been a lovely first day of summer.
Mainlanders, Ione recalled, celebrated today with dancing and weaving unfortunate-looking marigold garlands – but as the faint, sickening stench of roasted flesh hit her, Ione remembered that this day was also for burning.
“Ignore it, Holiness.” Jorah, her hydromancy teacher and one of Archpriest Saros’s many dogs, straightened his posture as though he hadn’t just been half-asleep. “Don’t let it break your concentration.”
The bell sounded again, a call for the high priests to meet and mourn.
Ione tried to be impressed that Jorah could ignore not only the bell but the reek of death, but came up short: sanctimonious old men only annoyed her.
She steeped herself in the change in the air, breathed through the pain of what it meant.
It felt distant, somewhere on the mainland, but heavy with the lingering essence of magic: the acrid burn of pyromancy wielded by the Sun God’s followers.
Ione pivoted towards the source of it, her bare feet bitten by the pebbled floor of the fountain.
Outside the stone walls of her courtyard glimmered a world of blue: cornflower skies and matching painted roofs of homes and shrines dotting the Isle of Oseidos.
And surrounding it, the sparkling summer sea.
And – there, a shadow curling up over the wall. A column of black smoke.
“Is that Caelos Shrine?” A thick trunk of water snaked around her as she moved towards the edge of the fountain, an elementary spell and Jorah’s latest attempt to awaken the true breadth of Ione’s powers.
Feel the water, no, FEEL it!, including but not limited to standing in a cold fountain and meditating for hours.
“Holiness,” Jorah cautioned as Ione let the water fall and stepped up onto the rim of the fountain. “You must learn to shut out these distractions.”
She supposed immolation was distracting, although that wasn’t quite what she would call it.
A sunbeam speared the clouds above, but despite its warmth, Ione shivered.
She closed her eyes, searching past the fetor of smoke and pyromancy for the soft, post-rains scent of her own people’s water magic.
An indication that they had fought back, that perhaps not many of them had died while she stood here suffering Jorah’s monotonous commands.
“Holiness – ”
Saros’s dogs were only good for barking. “You’re excused, Jorah.”
“Not until you finish meditating.”
The heavy moon door leading into the altarhouse creaked open. Ione relaxed, hearing the footsteps of her seleneschal guards.
“What timing,” she said. And to Jorah, “Thank you for today, Jorah. Do you need help back to your flat? Your knees make this awful noise whenever you stand, I’ve noticed.”
She issued him a cool look, her shoulders back and head high.
Dignified, queenly, even in just a white cotton bathing robe.
She wasn’t much now, but the threat of what she would someday become earned her this small victory: the old man bowed in half and, knees crackling, lumbered gloomily into the dark hall.
Once he’d gone, River, her head seleneschal, rushed to help her down from the rim of the fountain.
Which was kind, really; lowering oneself from a knee-high height could be extremely dangerous.
Ione flicked a bubble of water at him, smiling and wishing he’d smile back.
Even Cynthia stood out of the way, playing nervously with the sleeves of her indigo soldier’s uniform.
“Tell me, then.” Ione sucked in a breath, steeling herself. “The smoke – is it Caelos Shrine? Is it… very bad?”
Cynthia lowered her head, her short brown hair casting a shadow over her face.
River rested his offhand on the hilt of his rapier – a near-constant anxious tell – and said solemnly, “Around half the shrine.”
“What?” Ione lurched, and maybe it was lucky that River was there, because he righted her before her knees buckled.
Half of Caelos Shrine. She had imagined a smaller number, twenty, fifty, one hundred before the rest evacuated. She had, to her shame, made that more palatable.
Five hundred. She held a trembling hand over her heart, grief filling her. Guilt.
Gods damn you, Menon. She pressed harder into her sternum, reaching, sensing. Feeling nothing but her own racing heartbeat.
She was born with the Moon Goddess Menon’s blessing, worshipped by the high priests and raised as the saviour of Menon’s disciples. Ione was a beacon of hope, a harbinger of peace for her people – and of the end of times for the Sun God Sowelan’s cruel apostles.
But Menon’s divine grace did not come with instructions.
You’ll learn how to wield Menon soon, her father always told her, like summoning a goddess was one of the more awkward aspects of puberty.
The potential is there – you just have to apply yourself, her mother said, like Ione didn’t train every day for the past nineteen years to become the holy, earth-flooding weapon she was destined to be. So far, she had succeeded in killing a spider, and that was with a rolled-up parchment.
Saros, the Holy Archpriest of Menon’s sect of moon-worshiping traitors, had long ago stopped preserving Ione’s feelings of inadequacy.
Their dislike of one another was mutual: Saros hated what he called spoiled brats, and Ione hated disgusting old men.
If it wouldn’t have embarrassed him, made him look like a poor leader, Saros might’ve given apostasy a go.
“Well, then.” Ione flitted past River and Cynthia to the basket of clothes she’d left beside the breakfast table.
“I suppose I’ll make an appearance.” She let her bathing robe slip from her shoulders to the flagstones, not minding her nakedness – her seleneschals had seen her naked tonnes of times, and anyway, her body was only a shell – and lifted the dress she’d chosen for today from the basket.
The oyster-grey silk sheath and matching robe weren’t especially mournful, but they were plain and would do for now.
“Please don’t fight Saros today,” River said behind her, a tad desperately. “With the mood he’s in, you’ll probably lose.”
Ione pressed her eyelids shut and breathed, swallowing the hard lump in her throat, the deep, honest despair for the people whose lives were lost. She imagined them running, fighting. Burning.
She summoned instead a dazzling smile, her only weapon until Menon awoke and, she could only hope, bequeathed her with a very sharp ice spear. “Oh, but it’s so fun,” she complained. “And I’m already such a disappointment.”
River groaned, giving in and coming to stand beside her as she shimmied into the dress. His dark brown hands, a stark contrast to Ione’s long white hair and near-translucent skin, reached around her shoulders and swept her hair out of the way, letting Cynthia lace up the back of the dress.
Her own hands still shook as she combed her fingers through her damp hair. “The people who survived,” she whispered, gazing out to the sea beyond her courtyard walls, “are they still in Caelos?”
Cynthia moved in her periphery. “The shrine’s a deathtrap now,” she said. “Ceilings collapsed, part of the dormitory fell into the sea – totally uninhabitable.”
Cynthia was not one to mince words, even when sometimes Ione wished she was. “Thank you,” Ione sighed. “I feel much better.”
River plaited Ione’s hair, murmuring something to Cynthia in the gods’ tongue – either an admonishment for her bluntness, or possibly Dry her robe, because Cynthia lifted the bathing robe from the flagstones and, with a flick of her wrist, evaporated the water from it.
River liked using the sacred language because, Ione suspected, it made him feel very official.
“The Caelosi will be temporarily rehomed,” River said to Ione then in the common tongue, ignoring the face she made.
Her own mastery over the gods’ tongue was meant to emerge alongside her ascension.
In the meantime, all she could confidently recite was a few basic phrases and swears.
“They’ll stay here in Oseidos Shrine for the time being. ”
Ione clicked her tongue. “Oseidos will be crowded, then. And here I’d hoped to visit the mainland today. You know that new salon in Lodestone?” She held up a hand, pouting. “My nails need touching up.”
He huffed. “People have died – ”
“I know,” Ione cut in, sending him a withering look.
“Another day, another slew of deaths, another weight on my conscience. Thank you.” She unfurled to her full height, not exactly imposing, and felt Cynthia sidle up beside her.
A silent support. “Do you want me to cry? To scream to the heavens for help? To throw myself in the way of some fire-starting barbarian and hope Menon finally allows me to use Her? Or will I stand in the fountain and feel the water for another couple of years?”
River was sterner than Cynthia – he had to be; although only two years older, he was practically raised to be Ione’s protector – but even he wasn’t made of stone. Sighing, softening, he reached for her, and Ione knocked his hand away.
“I do love you two,” she said, and she did.
River and Cynthia were her only companions, and if she was kind enough, and loved them enough, then perhaps one day they would choose her over Saros.
“But sometimes you especially, River, are too much Saros’s lapdog.
” She pinched his cheek. “And Menon is really going to have a hard time forgiving that when She manifests.”
He shrugged, contrite. “Saros raised me.”
“The guard captain raised you,” Ione corrected him. “Saros funded it.”
“I got a very nice sword out of it.” River stepped aside, but not without a faint smile in his voice as he said, “Now let this lapdog lead you to his owner.”
Ione laid her wrist onto his outstretched hand. “Fine, but do me a favour and bite him.”