Chapter XXIII
XXIII
Remembering that the sun was their mother, the living things upon the earth cried out not to Lyria nor to Silith, but to Raea, when the shadow came among them.
Busy with her other harvests, the bright sun did not hear.
With her mercy and her brokenness, Gentle Lyria tried to banish the shadow and failed, for it was too far to be pierced by her thousand lights.
With her knowledge and changefulness, Wise Silith attempted to drive out the darkness and was rebuffed, for it hid in every crevice and deep place, where she could not reach.
At last, Raea’s storehouses were full. Bending to the cries of her children, the sun rose in power once more, and the shadow over the earth was consumed.
—FROM “THE SHADOW ON THE EARTH,” A SACRED STORY OF THE BELOVED THREE
They’d locked Fia not in some dungeon, but in a stinking back storeroom, which smelled of spoiling meat and rotting vegetables.
She’d been handled roughly on the way, for she fought tooth and nail, snarling and spitting and hurling invectives at the Inver guards.
Fear had put her beyond herself temporarily, turning her into a cur that bit and howled.
Even in her panic, though, she had not considered using the blooded touch—not so publicly, not ever.
Now, she paced furiously, four steps forward, four steps back.
The motion calmed her, tamping down mindless fear, making her a thinking creature with wit and intent once more.
This much was true: she must find a way to sever every tie she’d ever had to the cloister.
Unlike Ariana, she bore her mark intact.
She wore a postulant’s kirtle. She’d been sent to the mountain at Dolenza’s behest. Things would go very, very badly for Raea’s house if Fia did not manage to cut herself off from them completely, given that she’d been found kneeling by Orden’s still-warm body.
That had been a hideous shock. Not the body, for she’d seen her share of corpses.
But that it had been the king, with her at his side in the wordless moment of his dying.
Her mind ran with blistering speed, moving from possibility to possibility.
She could not simply kill herself by turning the blooded touch against her own veins.
A martyr’s death was expected of her people—that would not absolve Dolenza and the cloister.
Neither could she scrabble and pull at whatever connections she had on the mountain, using them to facilitate her own escape.
To flee would still leave Raea’s house under the shadow of blood guilt.
She might, perhaps, maintain Dolenza and the cloister’s innocence for some time under torture—Fia had known a great deal of mistreatment in life already—but she had also suffered enough to know that everyone broke in the end.
If the Invers set themselves on forcing an accusation from her lips, sooner or later, they would get it.
Which left her Nikolau and the Priest. She could claim, with a measure of truth, to be an associate of Honoria’s deserters, who’d used the goddess’s kirtle as a means to access the throne.
If she did so, the halfhearted searches and raids conducted on Nikolau’s followers would reach the fever pitch of an inquisition.
They would be hunted to extinction, and die screaming.
She would trade the destruction of the cloister for the wholesale slaughter of Nikolau and his people.
So. The Priest. He could, perhaps, declare Fia mad.
Burn her brand away and say she’d done it herself, before killing Orden.
Claim she harbored some strange and darkling obsession with the Invers and their habits—Raea only knew, Afon seemed to skirt close to that same condition.
If the Priest upheld her madness and made an offering of her to Tyrus, it might, just might, be enough.
Everything in Fia recoiled at the thought.
She had only ever wanted, with a fierce and desperate longing, to live. But what else could she do?
A grating sound came at the door and it was swung open, flooding the storeroom with torchlight. Though her eyes were dazzled, Fia immediately recognized the dry, soft voice emanating from behind the ruddy glow.
“Well then, plains witch,” Lucian said. “Someone else has claimed your crime, and the throne as well. Do you care to dispute that?”
Of course. If another Inver claimed Orden’s death and had the means with which to hold the throne, they would be accepted as ruler in his stead.
Should others in the clan protest that claim, there might be infighting.
Squabbles approaching the level of a minor civil war.
But there would not be the ruthless slaughter that would come if Fia remained guilty and was tied to either the cloister or the deserters.
She shook her head in denial until her teeth rattled.
“I thought not,” Lucian purred. “You’re to return to your duties, then, nursing the dead king’s get. Fall in.”
As she made to pass him, he did not stand aside. Instead, though he was a few inches less than Fia in height, Lucian threw his weight against her, slamming her into the lintel of the door. She felt her jaw snap on her tongue and tasted blood.
“You’d have been better off claiming guilt,” the spymaster murmured.
“It was your lapsed star who owned Orden’s murder and her intention to take the throne.
And she has nothing to back her claim—I’ve already got her in chains, waiting for whoever rises to make an offering of her before our gods.
For years now, I’ve wanted to see that. I can be patient another week or so. ”
Fia said nothing. She let herself be shoved along, adding bruises to her bruises, and asked no questions when they chivvied her not toward the castle’s upper reaches and the queen’s quarters, but into the tunnel that led to the sanctuary.
There, Lucian and his men did no more than push her out onto the stairs that led down into the impenetrable gloom and turn back the way they came.
Fia waited, feeling her pulse quicken. After a long while, she heard a loud clang and scrape from the tunnel’s far end, as Lucian locked its entrance.
Then she was alone, trapped in the dark.
An unpleasant, slithering sensation ran down Fia’s spine.
She could see bodies in her mind’s eye—her youngest siblings, dead of plague and frozen in the cellar below their mountain hovel.
Her brother, hanging from a deserter’s noose.
The prisoner of war she’d sacrificed with her own hands.
Orden Inver, gasping out his last breath at her feet as she watched the light leave his eyes.
Forcing down her traitorous fear, Fia descended the stairs and felt about for the Priest’s grooved pathway.
When she found it, she carried on, into the bowels of the cavern.
Around her, a faint crystal-clear sound grew audible from somewhere in the void. Singing. Silith’s ghosts were chanting a hymn. And not just any hymn, but the Silithien song for the dead.
With a muffled curse, Fia stumbled and righted herself, heart hammering in her chest at the thought of what would happen if she lost the path.
Coming to the altar rise, she traded etched grooves for the Priest’s taut wire pathway, which ran from the rise to his quarters.
All the while, Silith’s daughters sang, until at last Fia’s fingers brushed the rock wall and wooden doorway of the Priest’s cell.
“Priest,” she said carefully before lifting the latch. “It’s Fia. I’m coming in.”
The moment she stepped through the door, the ghostly sorias ceased their singing, so that small rustling noises filled the space instead.
Reaching for the patch box and lamp the Priest kept on hand for others, Fia struck a light.
Its flare was intolerably bright, and it took her vision some time to adjust. When it had, she found a spectacle that filled her with a sinking sensation.
Strewn across the bed were packets of herbs, travel rations, and an open rucksack, in which the corner of the Priest’s ancient herbal compendium was visible.
Justus lay in his bassinet, contentedly sucking on one fat fist, while the Priest rifled through open drawers in his expansive bureau.
He barely nodded as Fia laid a hand on his arm.
“We’re leaving,” the Priest said flatly.
“You can come, if you like. But it’s now or never.
Ariana’s been arrested—she claimed Orden’s death.
Lucian has the mountain locked down to prevent a bloodbath, now the throne is empty and anyone could claim it.
So I’ve got to get Justus out of here, or he won’t last a week. ”
“You can’t just leave!” Fia protested. She felt she’d be sick if she thought too much about Ariana in chains. “This is your mountain and your people. You need to stay and save Ari.”
A muscle worked in the Priest’s jaw. “No, I don’t. She chose her fate. Someone had to save your wretched skin, and your goddess house. I don’t even want to know how you ended up in Orden’s chambers, standing over his corpse.”
“What will they do to her?” Fia managed to get out.
The Priest shrugged. “Most likely she’ll be offered to Tyrus to legitimize our next sovereign’s rise to power.
If Justus is here, he’ll join her on the altar.
I do not intend to be the one holding that knife.
If we leave now and travel fast, we can get Celina from your cloister before anyone else reaches her.
Miriel too, if you want to stay with me and mine.
Then we’ll book passage for Vesper and seek amnesty there.
The idea of going turncoat has never appealed to me, but if selling Inver secrets is what will keep my brother’s children alive, so be it. ”
Fia shook with rage and nausea. Part of it, she knew, was shock as well, and a horrible poisonous guilt over Ariana’s current position. But the Priest was here, so he must bear the brunt of it.