Chapter 15
R enault keeps me in the Sanctum until well past supper. My hand cramps into a claw from all the notes he has me inscribe, fingers and palms stained with blue-black ink. We speak little about anything other than his work, and there is a strange relief in it—as if we are just friends, as if the goetia trial never occurred, as if so many things do not feel like they dangle from the side of an abyss.
I find nothing in the Catechisma to explain what I saw this morning, but the familiarity of my day allows me to convince myself it was a dream. All I need to do is not think about it too often, not relive how real the soil felt between my fingers.
I stop in the kitchens, having missed suppertime in the Great Hall. The cooks are wrapping up their work for the evening, but, as always, a long, narrow table by the door holds the meager leftovers for anyone who missed the meal bell. I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and reach to wrap an apple into the fabric. It is bruised and the flesh is a bit mealy, but it’s easy to eat as I head into the Vincula.
My ever-present feeling of dread should increase, I think, as I board the attollo, a wordless guardsman at my side. Here I go into the mouth of the beast with little protection from its fangs. And yet something in me releases instead as the attollo comes to a halt, depositing me into the depths of the Vincula. It makes little sense. Last time I was here, a member of the High Ecclesia attacked me and my very virtue was called into question. There is nothing here for me but strife and failure. And yet my shoulders drift further down all the same, the knot in my stomach loosening.
I have little time to question such things at the present moment. Instead, I must ready myself for the Lupa Nox’s temptation. As the guardsman leads me to her cell, I try to practice standing tall, my mouth set in a firm line. I repeat passages from the Catechisma again and again in my head, praying for the strength of my Lord to infuse me. To help me resist the sway of her darkness.
All my lines of defense crumble when I see her. The knight is chained, seated in the chair beside the straw pallet.
This time, she does not make it look like a throne.
Her head lolls to one side, her breathing harsh as a winter sea. Bruises cluster on her collarbone, exposed by the neckline of her blouse, and one eye is slightly swollen. I clutch my healer’s kit tightly, my heart pounding as the guardsman checks the knight’s restraints. Satisfied, he places a tall stool beside me. And then I am alone with the Lupa Nox.
She stirs, the muscles in her forearms flexing against her shackles, and then draws her head up from her chest. Her hair is loose and wild, a dark veil across her face. One lip is split, marred with blood. “I’m fine,” she tells me. “Looks worse than it is.”
Something like guilt, of all things, clutches my throat. “I’m...This is my fault?—”
“No,” the knight says, shaking her dark locks out of her vision. “No, it’s not. Not at all. Though if you insist upon feeling bad about it anyways, you can make it up to me by holding a cold compress to my eye. It hurts.”
I just stand there, frozen, unable to comprehend her words. A manipulation, surely, in response to the way we have tried to manipulate her with the show of High Ecclesian force. But her voice is so honest, so without the guile and double-meaning I often hear in others’ words and can never parse out. I cannot pretend to know her, but as I hesitate, staring into her face like a fool, I find only the very same exhaustion I feel in my own bones.
“Of course,” I murmur so low I’m not sure she even hears me. I set the kit on the stool and prepare a cut of flannel with clean, cold water from a glass flask tucked into a side pocket. “It’ll be ready in a second. Is that all right?”
The knight says nothing for a long moment, her gaze falling onto me, sweet as fresh snow. “Are you all right?”
Her eyes dip away from my face, trailing down my throat, and I swear I can feel it as deeply as though it were her fingertips on my skin. My breathing suddenly presses tight against my bodice, heat pooling somewhere forbidden between my legs.
It takes me too long to realize she’s just examining my neck because she saw the High Ecclesian grab me there. Not because she longs for me in the wicked, endless way I fear I might long for her, just as I once did for Carina.
“I’m fine,” I say tightly, rehearsing all the lines Renault suggested in my head. Make the knight think I’m scared.
I am scared. I’m scared of everything, of the way it feels like invisible walls press closer and closer to me at every moment, so it will hardly be difficult to fake. Then I’ll appeal to her delusions of the Host. Without making any requests, I must convince her I need help and that the best way to help me is to open herself to talk of the Host.
“What happened to you after you left last night?” the knight asks.
I swallow hard. I should approach her, wipe the blood from her lip, check her collarbone to ensure it’s not broken. But it is so terribly clear that something happened to her after I left, and instead she inquires about me. She is sitting here, chained and imprisoned and wounded, and yet she asks about me. Confusion muddles me, twisting my thoughts.
I look toward the guardsmen, far off on the other side of the large, empty cell. The earthen walls absorb sound in a way all the marble and stone aboveground surely do not. “My betrothed helped correct me,” I say, the rehearsed words sour on my tongue. “Reminded me of my priorities. Of how important it is I help heal your soul.”
“Convert me, you mean,” the knight says, her brow creasing. She winces for a heartbeat, the expression clearly paining her swollen eye. “Why is it so important? Why don’t you just kill me?”
Traitorous words threaten to leap to my mouth—that I have so little idea about anything that is truly going on here, that sometimes I worry I am as much a prisoner as she is, that I’m afraid and confused and I don’t know who I can really trust. I grit my teeth and swallow those dramatic, silly phrases back down. With a shaky exhale, I force myself to dab at the crusted blood on her mouth. It’s hard to think about anything else at all with my gaze there—on the sweep of her lips, an elegant curve. Of that dream, when she?—
“Because we don’t wish to harm you at all,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t sound as choked and fragile to her as it does to me. I clean the remaining blood from her lip and step away, preparing a compress for her eye. “But you are . . . very dangerous. You understand that, yes? How many of our people you’ve killed? But if we can change you, help you see the way . . .”
Her expression closes, all hard angles. Something near-feral glints in her dark eyes like a warning. “How do you know I won’t just simply go along with whatever you say?”
“All members of the Host undergo a sacrament,” I explain, feeling a little more settled. I can just tell her the truth here—no manipulations, no half-answers. “It’s called Baptisma. It takes place at an ancient, sacred water font within the Devorarium, our place of worship. To complete the sacrament, you must truly believe. The Mysteries that flow through the water will know otherwise, and you’ll be rejected.”
Patchy memories of my own Baptisma at the sacred age of ten and two anni flood me—the flowing white gown, the Sister guiding me under the water in the magnificent grotto. The feeling of the Mysterium taking hold of me beneath the surface, down in the dark waters, reaching into every fiber of my being.
“What happens when you’re rejected?” the knight inquires, her tone delicate, though she watches me with all the intensity of a wolf.
“It depends,” I tell her, steadying myself to slide one hand around the back of her skull and press the compress to her eye with the other. I have to rest my hip against the arm of her chair to remain steady with both hands occupied. Heat sears through me when I feel the curl of her fingers against my thigh. Asphodels invade my senses next. I anchor myself to those memories of my Baptisma so many anni ago.
“Most of us receive the sacrament as young things,” I reply, holding the compress in place, trying not to think about how right the curve of her skull feels in the palm of my hand. “The Baptisma Font is gentler with children. If the ancient Mysterium does not accept us, we are returned to the surface and encouraged to continue our studies. For adults, those who undergo the sacrament and do not truly believe . . .”
“Probably don’t surface, do they?” she asks, the words vibrating through the space between us. There’s a lilt to her husky tone, as if she finds this amusing somehow.
“No,” I reply. The compress has gone warm, as I expected, so I pull it away. Frustration rises in me like lightning, quick and violent. If only I had been granted the Mysteries. It’s a simple enough charm to keep a compress cool if physical contact is maintained with the cloth. Something I could use again and again to help people. But I am, it seems, still deemed unworthy.
“We don’t have anything like the Baptisma in the Sepulchyre,” the knight says.
Surprise pulls my brows together as I look at her. “Don’t you worship the Creatrixes?” I rinse the compress with cold water, watching the beads of moisture darken the dirt floor.
She pauses. “We honor them, as is their due. But not . . . not like the Host. It’s not worship .”
I’m too dumbstruck to do anything but stand before her, one hand flattened on the stool for support, the other holding a dripping strip of flannel. “You don’t worship?” It seems impossible, blasphemous and unthinkable to me, my whole life having been structured around the First Son and His city.
Her gaze is solemn, that dangerous mouth pressed in a straight line as she considers my words. But then something changes in the knight’s expression, and suddenly she is all hungry wickedness.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she replies, lips curving into a shape that makes me tremble. Her eyes sweep across my long braid, then my shoulders, trailing all the way down to my toes. The knight’s attention transmutes me into a column of pure fire—a heat that yearns to devour something and then be devoured in turn.
“Make no mistake,” she tells me, the words dripping from her mouth like poisoned honey. “I do my fair share of worship at the altar between a woman’s legs. My psalms are her cries of pleasure, my holiness found at her breast.”
The knight’s words tear through my flesh better than any butcher’s blade. I feel little more than my heartbeat, a pounding sensation extending across my entire body. All of my sin beats at the door of my chest, howling and begging.
“Have you,” the Lupa Nox begins, leaning forward, her shoulders straining, “ever been worshiped like that ?”