Chapter IX
IX
The gods have spoken, and the word they have sent down to me is this: no longer will their minor blood sacrifices come at the expense of their worshippers.
Rather than the blood of a petitioner, they require the blood of their Priest, shed by the one who wishes their favor.
Let the Invers be conquerors in this, as in all things, for it does not become our people to spill their blood needlessly, even before the gods.
—A RELIGIOUS RULE OF THE NINTH PRIEST
I knew as soon as I saw Gwylen that someone would try for Orden’s life this summer.
But I didn’t expect it to be so soon.” Ariana spoke softly to the Priest from where she stood at the hearth goddess’s altar, while the Priest busied himself with tending to the other three.
It was always so when she came down to his sanctuary—at her request, he remained nearby, but occupied, so that they might murmur their secrets while appearing to do no more than pray.
“She’s no ambassador. Do you… do you know what she truly is? ”
“Afon’s right hand,” the Priest answered.
He sat before Mortis’s altar, crushing herbs for incense.
When the mix was ready, he would add a pinch of incaendium and a splash of aqua vitae, and the herbs would purify and compress into ember-like shards, fit for offering to the Inver pantheon.
“She’s a spy and assassin and whatever else is needed, as far as I can tell.
Like Lucian, only better at her job, because it seems she’s disappeared.
No one’s laid eyes on her since the first few hours of the welcoming banquet. ”
“She’s—” Ariana fell silent for a moment.
“Well. It doesn’t matter. When I saw her I knew there would be trouble, and I was sent a warning by Dolenza too.
I went to Orden’s rooms last night because of it, and he’d been drugged—nothing that couldn’t be passed off as the aftereffects of a night of drinking, if need be, but I wasn’t able to wake him, no matter how I tried.
While I was there, one of Gileta’s women got in, with a silk garotte. ”
The Priest swore under his breath. The alliance between Honoria and Song Royale really was going to break, then.
Vesper would be a bloodbath, and the very idea of it turned the Priest cold.
Orden had never been to Vesper, nor Gileta, nor Dolenza—none of the players in power who made their decisions with little regard for the tens of thousands of ordinary folk toiling and dying there.
But the Priest had been to the frontlines and spent years embroiled in the horrors of Honoria’s longest war.
Vesper’s brutal front was the last thing he’d ever seen.
“What did you do?” he asked Ariana finally, and could hear her breath catch.
The Priest thought briefly of telling her of his own confrontation with Lucian’s footpad, but it seemed unnecessary.
The trouble had been dealt with, and it would only pain Ariana that he’d taken a life to protect their interests.
“I dissuaded her,” the queen said.
“Just asked her to leave, was that it? And she said, Well, of course, Majesty, if you’d prefer I not assassinate your husband, I can go.”
“Adda.” Ariana spoke his title as a reproach. The Priest could hear his new nephew grizzling in the queen’s arms. She made a small shushing noise to the baby and the cavern’s ghosts began to hum ever so softly, an ancient cradle song. The infant prince quieted.
“You know what they all think of me,” Ariana said. “That I have whored myself out to your clan and your gods in exchange for whatever scraps of power Orden allows. Gileta may like me a little, now and then, but everyone on the Hand believes I’m a wretched apostate, capable of anything.”
The Priest waited. He found silence was often the best response when others wished to unburden themselves to him but struggled to find the words.
“I put Orden’s dagger to our son’s throat.
” The admission left Ariana’s lips devoid of any feeling, and the Priest’s heart ached.
He knew her all too well—her gentleness, her faith that still gleamed like a muted star, her stringent ideals.
Such an action would have cost her greatly.
“I swore to Gileta’s woman that I would kill the baby if she didn’t leave, and bade her warn her mistress that Orden is not to be touched.
It may be permissible to kill a man bloodlessly for rekindling a war, but Silith would not look well on it if an innocent’s death was part of the bargain. ”
The Priest’s mortar and pestle had fallen still, though he sat surrounded by the scent of bitter herbs. “I’m sorry. That was a hard thing, little queen.”
She was rustling about behind the hearth goddess’s altar, adding fresh shards of incense to the brazier and a few drops of lavender oil.
The Priest kept oil of lavender on hand for those who wished to make an occasional clandestine offering to Raea, and it was a testament to Ariana’s unsettled frame of mind that she chose it now, when she scrupulously avoided any vestige of her old practice under better circumstances.
“It was. And it means Gileta has no intention of treating with us. We’re going to lose any trade with her. And Vesper…” Her voice trailed off.
“And Vesper,” the Priest repeated.
“Better if we let them have Orden, perhaps,” the Priest said wryly, and Ariana let out a shaky, tear-choked laugh. “Just… anyone who wants him. Gileta. Gwylen. Afon. The Vesperins. What a lot of trouble we go to for a man neither of us likes.”
“I can’t,” Ariana said, and there was despair in the admission. “It isn’t in me to give him up. And you know we’re both alive because of him. You’d be dead in a moment if anything was to happen to Orden, and I—I owe him so much, yet he holds none of it over me.”
The Priest resumed his work, grinding the pestle down harder than was strictly necessary. He did not like to hear of Ariana’s obligation to his brother, whom he hated more than half the time and could not understand the rest.
“I know it’s pointless asking, and I’m sure you’ve already tried,” the Priest said. “But can’t you stop Orden from pursuing this madness? Tell him you don’t want another war—he’d make a conquest of the sky and bring you Silith herself as a prisoner if you asked him to.”
“I’ve tried.” There was a hint, the faintest hint, of impatience in Ariana’s carefully modulated voice. “I’ve coaxed, I’ve cajoled, I’ve begged him on my knees. He only tells me it must be done, and someday I’ll understand.”
The baby let out a small, fractious noise, followed by a gusty sigh from the queen. The Priest heard a whisper of fabric, and then the prince feeding.
“Where’s the nurse?” he asked.
“Gone.” The Priest had never heard Ariana sound so bleak before. It must have been an appalling disappointment, to have the help of a soria and then lose it. “Despite what she said in the audience hall, she never meant to stay.”
“I’m sorry,” the Priest said again, helplessly.
“It’s not—” Ariana began, but the Priest raised a hand for silence, and she fell still at once.
“Someone’s coming.”
The queen began to intone a prayer to the hearth goddess, while the Priest continued his work with renewed focus.
Before the new arrivals had reached the altar rise, he knew who it would be.
The Priest recognized them by their rustle of silks and smell of strange incense.
Even without that, there was the way the ghosts of Silith’s murdered daughters began to faintly chant a welcoming hymn.
“Imperatrice,” the Priest called out, getting to his feet as Gileta and her retinue approached the altars. “How good of you to honor the Inver gods with your presence.”
During the reign of Darias Inver, the Priest’s father, there’d been no alliance between Song Royale and Honoria—that had been Orden’s doing, within months of taking the throne.
Orden had courted Gileta as assiduously as he might have wooed a bride, convincing her of his intent to rule in a different vein than his forebearers had done.
No wonder, then, that Gileta radiated anger as she climbed the altar rise and approached the Priest.
“Silas,” Gileta said, coming to a halt before him. “Still alive in this den of vipers, I see.”
It always sent a shock through the Priest to hear her use his name. No Inver did, out of deference to his role. It seemed unbearably intimate, and Gileta, he suspected, knew it put him on edge, and took pleasure in doing so.
“Alive and well,” the Priest said with a bow of his head. “Has it occurred to you that perhaps my survival in a lair of serpents is the result of being one myself?”
Gileta let out a low laugh and took his face in her hand. The Priest stilled and did not resist as she turned his chin, presumably in order to search for some unknown quality, though what she was looking for the Priest could never guess.
“Not a viper,” Gileta said at last. “Not like the others. A salamander, perhaps. A creature born of fire and fit to survive it, but lacking a serpent’s venom and malice.”
“I’ve malice enough for the both of us,” the Priest said honestly. “And some left over, besides. Would you care to make a blood offering to our god of war?”
“Silith’s daughters have spilled enough blood before that altar to last until the world crumbles,” Gileta answered.
“Though Caervallion would turn our goddess into no more than a facsimile of your heathen Tyrus, with his lust for battle and death. Do you know what I awakened to this morning, Priest?”
“Your attendants’ prayers for peace, and for Afon to rejoin the moon’s proper fold?” the Priest hazarded.
“A woman’s body, marked with the Caervallin bear, which someone dumped upon the doorstep of my guest chambers.
No doubt to remind me of Afon’s barbarism.
Not that Honoria lacks its share of that—is your child well this morning, Ariana?
Enjoying his mother’s love, and her protection from the dangerous games of court? ”