Chapter VI
VI
If any grown Honorian be sun-marked or moon-marked or star-marked, let them cleave to the Inver gods, or serve the refractory house of Raea on the Solis Plains. If a child is visited with a mark of the old goddesses, let them be raised properly, in the Inver faith.
But if a scion of the ruling house be born goddess-marked, or visited with the mark at any time, let them be dashed upon the rocks of our mountain, lest the purity of our line grow polluted and our practices corrupt.
—A RELIGIOUS RULE OF THE FIRST PRIEST
Beneson the page had been in the castle’s employ for four years, and in the Priest’s opinion was by far the most useful member of the Inver household.
He was possessed of three invaluable qualities, rare in someone grown, let alone a boy of thirteen.
A good-hearted child with the most sensitive of moral compasses, he always managed to be just where he was needed most, and coupled his usefulness and tender conscience with enviable discretion.
The Priest suspected Beneson, young and unassuming though he was, harbored more Inver secrets than the king’s own spymaster—the key difference being that Beneson was a locked vault and a confidence entrusted to him was kept safe forever, rather than evolving into a weapon as most Inver secrets did.
So as the Priest heard Beneson’s familiar footsteps approaching from across the cavern of the gods, he knew the interruption would be worth his while.
Even if it was only that the boy wanted company, as he sometimes did, making time for Beneson was always worthwhile.
Accordingly, the Priest set aside what he’d been doing—mixing a crock of new goat’s milk with bruised paschalflower so that he might stave off the softening of the bones brought on by the cavern’s endless dark—and wiped his hands on a cloth, turning to face the approaching boy.
There was someone else with him. Someone whose wary, self-assured tread the Priest did not recognize. But as the page and the stranger stopped before him, the Priest caught a distinctive scent.
Salt water. Linen. Lavender. The warm fragrance of soil on a summer afternoon. It was one of Matria Dolenza’s women, standing next to Beneson. Only the daughters of Raea still smelled of sun, even in this lightless place.
“Beneson. Soria,” the Priest said with a courteous nod of his head.
But it was disconcerting that a soria was here at all without the Priest having heard of it beforehand.
Usually the network of devout scullery maids and disillusioned court secretaries he’d cobbled together did better by him than this.
“Priest,” Beneson said, his voice high and anxious. “Can I have a private word?”
The Priest nodded.
“My apologies, soria. This will only take a minute,” he said, before drawing Beneson aside.
“Something happened upstairs this morning,” Beneson whispered, rising up on his toes to speak for the Priest’s ear alone.
The boy was used to the sanctuary and the dark and carefully held his torch clear of them both, the heat of it perceptible to the Priest. “Lucian purged the kitchen and the guard of anyone goddess-marked. Turned them out, without pay or reference. I think… I think maybe His Majesty’s more anxious than he lets on about this new war he’s after, and about trouble at summer council.
Most of your folk are gone now. There’ve been a lot of changes among the court officials and the nobles, too—positions cut, people sent off to their estates without a warning or a reason, and others brought in from the provinces who’ve never so much as visited the capital before.
And I heard the king had words with Gileta in the courtyard earlier.
She’s not been in Inverlyn three hours and already threatened to break her alliance with Honoria and support Caervallion instead. ”
The Priest frowned. Well, that at least explained why he hadn’t heard a messenger from Dolenza was in the castle.
As for Gileta, she was always murmuring about shifting her allegiance to Caervallion, given their nominal worship of Silith.
Thus far, Orden’s more moderate temperament and Afon’s crueler nature had prevented such a change.
But with Orden calling for war, and Ariana indisposed, Gileta might finally make good on her threat.
Ruthlessly, the Priest forced down any feeling or opinion he might have on the matter.
His sphere was the religious, not the political.
Better he kept himself uninvolved. If he was ever to dabble in affairs of state, it would only draw attention and paint him as a threat to the throne and Honoria’s established order.
Though many Invers questioned Orden’s wisdom in allowing his half brother to survive, they had grown used to the Priest’s presence in their sanctuary.
The Priest relied on that familiarity and complaisance for his own safety—he had no interest in challenging the status quo.
“What about Ari?” the Priest asked swiftly. “I haven’t had any news. Is Her Majesty’s trial over yet?”
Beneson hesitated, clearly uncomfortable. “Yes, but… I think the soria can explain it all better than I can. That’s what she’s come for. I’ve got to get back upstairs—Afon will be here any minute, and everyone’s in a lather.”
“Go,” the Priest said, and Beneson hurried off.
Returning to the altar rise where the soria waited, the Priest was puzzled for a moment. Fear and discomfort radiated from her, and Dolenza’s women were generally an unflappable lot. She stood motionless, and the Priest did not realize what was eating away at her until she spoke.
“It’s dark,” the soria said, her tone at once nervous and belligerent.
“Apologies,” the Priest said again, as he moved to the hearth goddess’s altar and took a patch box from the shelf at back of it.
Striking sparks, he lit the tinder kept perpetually ready in each of the gods’ metal braziers.
Warmth and the sound of catching flames radiated from the hearth goddess’s altar, not loud enough to drown out the soria’s relieved sigh.
“This is the first time I’ve met a soria who minds the dark,” the Priest said mildly, returning to her when he was certain the little altar fire had taken.
“Gileta once told me followers of the Three see an absence of light as an attribute of Silith, for the Wise Moon sometimes hides her face entirely.”
“I’m not a soria,” the woman before him answered, still tense and unhappy, though her fear had lost its edge.
“Just a postulant. And I don’t much care if the dark belongs to Silith.
To me, it belongs to my mother, who used to shut me up in a root cellar with no light.
The winter my two younger sisters died of plague, the ground was too hard for them to be buried, and my village couldn’t spare the fuel for a pyre.
So we kept their bodies frozen in the cellar until spring.
I spent days at a time down there with them, when I’d been clumsy, or done something that got my mother’s back up. ”
She spoke the words with restrained anger, as if she meant to startle or wound him in order to vent some private passion. But the Priest, who oversaw the spiritual needs of the bloody-minded Invers, had grown very hard to shock.
“How unfortunate,” he said, the words dry and unsympathetic. “I myself was consigned to perpetual darkness when my brother the king failed in his attempt to murder me and left me sightless instead.”
But the postulant, it seemed, was equally difficult to catch off guard.
“We’re both richly blessed in our family, then,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation. “How the divine have favored us. Are we alone here, Priest? And are you worthy of the queen’s regard? She says she trusts you.”
“Ariana can trust me,” the Priest said, and he did not think it would escape this sharp-edged postulant’s notice that he had not claimed to be trustworthy in general, but only in particular. Only for the queen.
“And are we alone?” the young woman pressed. “There’s no one hidden in the corners? No one to overhear?”
“Most likely,” the Priest said. “Our guards feel as you do about the dark. But in Inverlyn, you can never really be certain that no one is listening.”
The postulant fell silent. When at last she spoke again, the anger in her voice had been replaced by grief.
“By now, most of the castle knows that Ariana Inver has delivered two children,” she said carefully.
“A healthy prince, to someday sit upon his father’s throne.
And a stillborn daughter, goddess-marked from birth.
The queen says… she says at least her daughter will not live life torn between her goddess and her blood. ”
There was some significance behind the postulant’s words that the Priest did not understand at first. But then she stepped forward and pressed a bundle into his arms, and he felt Ariana’s daughter stir. The Priest drew in a soft breath.
“Her Majesty trusts you will do what is necessary for her daughter,” the postulant said.
“It may not be the Inver practice to name children until they’ve been in the world a full week, but it is the practice of those who worship the Beloved Three.
And as the princess is goddess-marked, I give her a name to take into death with her—Ellimere.
Ellimere Lyrien. May she go in Lyria’s light. ”
The Priest’s heart was a forge hammer in his chest. It had been one thing for Ariana to prevail upon Orden to set his eldest daughter aside because of her mark.
But to spirit an Inver child away entirely, out from under the king’s nose, with the clear expectation that she be sent to foster at Lyria’s last cloister in Corrin?
If Orden was to discover it, it would undermine every ounce of trust he’d ever had in Ariana.
And the Priest did not think his brother would weather such a betrayal well.