Chapter Twelve
Lina
Summer’s End marked the first day of the eighth month, a holiday well-celebrated among Soliz’s priesthood.
Still half-asleep and surrounded by the buzz of her peers in the refectory as they prepared for another regular day, Lina picked at a bowl of fruit, her mind on a rare bright spot in her childhood.
Travelling with her family and the high priests up to Rigel’s private estate in Eastwick, playing games with Castor and his friends out in the rolling fields; eating ripe goldenberries under the yearly meteor shower and thanking Sowelan for another good season.
It was once a farmer’s holiday, but for Soliz, it was a time to visit family, to plan ahead for the coming year.
For a moment she was a child again, her legs swinging over the edge of a too-big chair, savouring the tart burst of goldenberries and sweet cream.
The adults murmured, grown-up talk she didn’t understand and didn’t care to, and Castor would sit beside her, food untouched. Always listening, learning.
Praise be to Sowelan. And to the heathens, the traitors, a swift and pure death, a bright and shining flame.
A door burst open, slammed against the wall. All heads turned towards a priest Lina knew from Caelos, pale and shaky, too far from Lina to hear what he said. Hushed whispers, a shrill gasp, a victorious cry. Grown-up talk, except that Lina no longer had the privilege to tune it out.
“Did you hear that?” Ami, among the many dispersing to relay the news. She braced her hands against the table, face leaned close, eyes gleaming. “This morning Archpriest Saros ordered a raid on some manor belonging to Soliz Shrine.”
People filtered in and out of her periphery, talk, talk, talk, voices drowned by the hammering of her own heartbeat. Lina felt herself ask, “Manor?”
Ami huffed, impatient. “I don’t know, I’ve never heard of it.
Hearth-something, it’s over in Eastwick.
” Her hands fluttered, wiped away a jittery smile.
“Thirty dead. It’s nothing compared to what they took from us in Caelos, but they were high priests, seasoned pyromancers.
” She laughed, although it was tinged with anxiety, panicked.
“They’re saying the men who headed the siege on Caelos were there, celebrating something.
Probably planning another attack. And now look at them! ”
Her ears ringing, Lina looked past Ami to the sea of bustling bodies, talking heads. Some of her peers laughed; some cried, hugged one another. Finally, she heard, over and over. Justice dealt!
Her attention snagged on a familiar pair of eyes across the room, wide and troubled as he assessed his own surroundings. River met her gaze and lurched back, startled; he shook his head, gestured innocently to the riotous energy.
“Excuse me,” Lina said to Ami, pushing herself up from her seat.
River waited for her to wend through the crowd, didn’t complain when she grabbed his arm and hauled him with her into the corridor. “You,” she hissed, pushing him against the wall, “promised you’d at least warn me before going to Saros with everything I told you.”
River sighed like she was an idiot. “First of all, you aren’t exactly in a position to beg favours.” He shoved her right back. “Second, I didn’t tell Saros, and I didn’t know Kai would this soon either.”
“How can you not have known?” Lina demanded, her voice strained with the effort of keeping quiet. “You two’ve been in each other’s fucking pockets for – ”
“Kai and I haven’t so much as spoken to one another in days, and…
” River’s face fell. He raked his curls back and pivoted, kicking the wall so forcefully he left a heel-shaped mark in the plaster.
“I thought he’d do something to me, not – Prick.
This’ll only add more pressure to – ” He caught Lina’s eye and groaned, trailing off with a string of curses in the gods’ tongue.
Lina paced, counted her breaths, her footsteps, anything to keep her focused.
“This will bring hell onto us,” she whispered.
“They won’t take this sitting down. And we won’t survive their – ” She coughed, hands flying to her throat, fingers pulling at the wardstrings.
Were they tighter? Was this it? She couldn’t breathe.
She saw Castor’s face, wreathed in firelight, eyes, teeth, knives gilded by flame.
I told you I’d find you.
“Lina, breathe.” River yanked her hands away from her neck, gripped her wrists so she was forced to look at him. “You’re fine. Kai left you another fucking loophole, so stop with the poor me, I’m so scared bullshit unless you can do it quietly.”
Her blood froze, leaving her paralysed, wrenched back to when Castor had pinned her like this. She waited for the pain to come, her breath like a stone in her throat. But River looked tired, fed up but not with her.
Not with her.
Little by little, she released her breath, loosened her fists.
Loophole. From this moment, Kai had said about the binding ward: nothing she’d told him before that could hurt her.
Lina nodded, grim. Kai had saved her from the immediate consequences of giving so much information, but now, the rest of them would suffer.
River released her and scrubbed his hands over his face. “You had to know this would happen,” he muttered. “As much as I’d like to avoid crediting that childish twat with anything right now, we’re safe as long as his ward holds.” River fixed her with a hard stare. “And it will.”
Lina rubbed her wrists. Unharmed. “You deal with Kai, then,” she said, her voice steadier. “I need to find out more.”
Oseidos hummed with frenetic noise: people bustling back and forth with the news, Leviathosi parading about like heroes, healers seeing to their burns and battle wounds.
Lina caught snatches of information, but nothing concrete – Hearthstone was attacked; the Leviathos executed it; a number of people between ten and fifty were killed – so she snaked through the crushing tide of people, eyes trained on the source.
On the altarhouse.
Was Castor dead? Rigel? Lina imagined them gone, dreamt of both peaceful passings and bodies speared with ice and blanketed with hoarfrost. Tried to drum up some guilt, some humanity.
She was guilty only for not feeling guilty. For wishing the worst, if only because it would keep the worst from herself.
The doors leading to the altarhouse’s inner courtyard were already open.
Sharp, biting words seeped through, Ione’s and others; when Lina crept around the corner and saw the backs of Archpriest Saros and Penina and Ronan Artem, all three of them facing off against Ione, she huddled into the cold shadows of the threshold and listened.
Ione stood before the fountain, straight-backed and regal, although her arms quivered with leashed rage. “It was short-sighted, Saros. Even I expected better from you.”
Saros tittered into his sleeve. “Of all of us, I’m the only one playing any sort of long game, Ione. It was high time we showed our teeth.”
Ione’s father Ronan shuffled forward, all smiles. “We had to act quickly, you understand, given our new information.”
Ione lifted her chin, unmoved. “I should have been forewarned at the very least.”
“This is precisely why you weren’t forewarned,” Penina Artem said. “So that your stubborn questions wouldn’t have delayed us any further. This attack was a return for every wound we have suffered.”
“And a warning,” Ronan added pleasantly. “After the damage Captain Etan and Lieutenant Nalu have wrought, the priests at Soliz will be suitably cowed.”
Ione’s mouth twisted with fury, a momentary crack in her icy facade. “This will do nothing but anger them,” she whispered, echoing the words rattling around Lina’s own heart.
Kai’s voice broke through then, making Lina flinch; her eyes flew to him, partially concealed behind a pillar he leaned against. “Let them be angry,” he said, stepping into the light.
He regarded Ione coolly, the warden Lina had feared him to be, dark and humourless.
“Let them rage against the ward they can’t penetrate and burn everything else in their path.
And at your command, Lady, I will make Etan and Nalu seem like children with toy swords. ”
Ione did not even glance at him.
“Forty dead,” Kai said, to Saros now. “High priests or not, that is pathetic. Let me and I will sweep Soliz into the sea.”
“Keep speaking,” Ione replied frostily, “and Menon will rip you limb from limb.”
He jutted his chin. “At Her leisure.”
Ione pressed her eyelids shut, breathing deep. “There will be collateral damage,” she said, ignoring Kai. “More deaths, more suffering. You should have waited, Saros.”
Saros opened his palms. “Such is the reality of war, dear. An unfortunate means to an end, but at least I have an end in sight.” There was a smile in his voice as he added, “What did you plan, Ione? To pray very hard, to ask very nicely?”
“You forget who you are speaking to,” she whispered.
“You forget how many of us have already lived and died by these centuries of bloodshed,” Saros retorted, loud and sudden enough that Ione recoiled. “I am paving the way for Menon’s manifestation, and your infantile idealism has only ever held us all back.”
As one Saros, Penina and Ronan pivoted, leaving Ione there to seethe.
But Lina couldn’t let them go, not yet, not until she had the chance to ask one thing.
She stumbled out from the shadows, her stomach flipping at the way the Archpriest halted, bemused; at the way Penina scowled and Ronan frowned.
Kai alone regarded her neutrally, one eyebrow lifting as though he was interested in seeing what she’d do.
“I’m sorry, I…” Lina wrung her hands, her gaze flitting past them all to Ione, whose face softened at the sight of her.
Lina swallowed and forged on, “I just needed to know, Your Beatitude.” She curtseyed hastily, remembering herself.
“I had heard that the men who attacked my old shrine were killed.”