Chapter 11. Before Maris
BEFORE: MARIS
Iola was waiting for me at the top of the villa steps when I returned from the Illyrium, but she should have been across the bridge hours ago.
I’d spent most of the last two days in the temple with Ophelius, performing the rites of the First Feast ahead of the grain’s arrival from the coastlands.
I could already hear it—the beat of the drums at the gates far in the distance.
The procession would make its way through the Lower City before it crossed the Sophanes, and every Isarian would close their shops and leave their homes to watch.
Even the servants who worked in the villas of the Magistrates would pause their work, crossing the bridge early.
When she saw me, Iola’s face turned grave, and my feet slowed on the steps. She hadn’t waited for me like this since I was child, but even then, it hadn’t been with that look.
“What are you still doing here?” I stopped a few steps below her.
She hesitated for a moment before she let the hand at her back come forward, and a slow panic began to churn behind my ribs when I saw what she was holding. Clutched in her fingers was a tangle of emerald-green silk.
It took only seconds for me to recognize it.
It was the scarf I’d given to Matius’ son in the gardens.
When my gaze traveled up to meet Iola’s again, there was reproach in her stern eyes.
She’d been a young woman when I was born, destined to raise me instead of having children of her own.
It wasn’t like her to be rigid with me. In fact, any semblance of parental tenderness I’d gotten in life had been from her.
But there were lines I couldn’t cross, even with Iola.
“He came here,” she said, keeping her voice low.
The windows of the villa were open overhead, and the curtains that hung in my mother’s study were slipping out into the breeze. Iola wouldn’t risk my mother overhearing.
“You’re lucky she wasn’t here,” she whispered.
I let myself lean into the cool white stucco wall of the stairway, bracing myself for Iola’s ire. She wasn’t just angry, she was afraid.
“Are you going to tell me why the nephew of Matius was knocking on this door for you?”
“I met him at the party for the First Feast. I lent him my scarf for the bloodied lip his uncle gave him. That’s all.”
Iola wasn’t convinced. She crossed her arms, tucking the scarf into her elbow. “That isn’t the impression I got from him. He wanted to see you, Maris.”
I avoided her gaze, trying to move past her. “You should go. Zuri will be waiting for you.”
She stopped me, her fingers tight around my wrist. “This is dangerous. Do you have any idea what would happen if your mother knew he was here? If she thought there was something going on between you and a Matius?”
“There’s nothing going on,” I rasped.
“Then you’d better see to it that he doesn’t come here again.” She let me go with a sigh. “You’re a woman now, Maris. You have to know what your mother is capable of. What lengths she would be willing to go to if…”
The implication made me stiffen. No one knew better than I did how ruthless my mother could be.
She wanted to be Consul, and the Magistrates had no idea just how heavy-handed she’d been in her pursuit to control the future of the Citadel.
She was behind nearly every tumultuous upheaval the Forum had seen in her time as a Magistrate, and she’d chipped away at Matius’ majority hold far beyond what anyone had imagined.
But when I’d listened to his son insult her in the middle of her own party, I’d been too busy trying to quell the thrumming in my chest to even consider what the consequences might be.
It had been like watching an eclipse. It was a rare phenomenon, a disturbance in the balance of things. And I’d been utterly mesmerized by it.
“You need to be very careful,” Iola said, reluctantly handing the scarf to me. “I’ve done my best to raise you. But I won’t always be here to protect you. Not from them. Not from yourself.”
When I took it, she started down the steps to the street, leaving me alone in the shaded corridor. I balled up the silk and tucked it into the belt of my stola, opening the door and going inside.
The atrium was cooler than the sun-warmed steps, and the caged birds flitted on their perches, wings fluttering as I entered.
“Maris?” My mother’s voice echoed.
The door to her study was cracked open and the shadow of that curtain danced on the stone. I walked toward it like a moth to flame.
She was standing over her desk, a vial of godsblood open in her hand as she dripped the liquid onto a blank, shimmering parchment.
A sense of gravity pulled at the center of my gut as I realized there was a chance she’d been listening.
But with the sound of the wind coming up from the south, I could barely hear the street below.
She pressed her thumb to her tongue, sucking the godsblood from her skin, and then she methodically opened up a scroll, letting it unroll across the desk.
My eyes narrowed on the vial in her hand.
Whatever she was working on, she didn’t want me to see it.
Over the years, she’d begun to trust me with more and more, letting me peer into the background of the Forum’s inner workings, but there was still plenty she was hiding from me.
I gazed out over the Lower City, where the gates had been opened wide.
The procession of the grain had already begun, and though it was impossible to see from this distance, the caravan of carts could be discerned by the rising dust and commotion in the streets.
Once it crossed the bridge, the year’s harvest would be stored in the Citadel’s granary.
My mother had dressed for the display out on the street in a pale yellow stola the color of morning sunlight and a rich blue chiton.
Her skin looked two shades darker beneath them, and the jewels around her neck were an opaque lapis lazuli cut in perfect circles.
The Magistrate families had a place at the riverfront to watch the grain cross the bridge, and the other side served as a kind of observation point for the spectators in the Lower City as well.
They stood on one side of the river, and we stood on the other, gems sparkling and silks shining.
“Cutting it quite close,” my mother murmured.
“We have time.”
“This business at the temple is getting ridiculous, Maris. You all but sleep there these days.”
“I’m a novice,” I reminded her.
She finally turned toward me, one eyebrow arched. “And there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret letting you take that on. It pains me to say it, but I should have listened to my brother.”
My uncle’s place as a senior scribe had afforded him more power than anyone in the Citadel knew.
The role was considered a humble one but was held only by highborn Isarians.
He’d wanted me to serve as a novice in the Hall of Scribes, arguing that it was the perfect place to go unnoticed until you took your seat as Magistrate.
But I’d hungered for a noviceship that would be out of my mother’s sight.
Serving her brother wouldn’t afford me that.
The rattle of the door to the villa echoed through the atrium and my mother sighed. “You’d better be here to tell me that Magistrate Matius has died!” she called out just before my uncle pushed into the study.
“He hasn’t, I’m afraid.” Nej smirked, giving me a wink.
“What will it take for that man to finally choke on his own blood? Honestly. I have half a mind to take care of it myself.”
A shiver raced up my spine as she said it, but Nej didn’t even blink. He was dressed in one of his nicest togas, a pair of amulets strung across his chest.
“You don’t have to. He’ll be dead long before the Twelfth Feast.” He pulled a scroll from his belt, handing it to her. “The one you requested.”
Having a brother in the Hall of Scribes meant unfettered access to the Citadel’s library. It was the reason my mother’s own collection of scrolls was so robust. But there were texts even she didn’t have access to, and Nej was a solution to that problem.
“Then I’d better get to work on that son of his.” She unlocked the cupboard on the shelf, stowing the scroll inside before she reached for the iridescent bottle she kept there. “That’s one legionnaire I wouldn’t mind in my bed.”
I cast my eyes back to the window, teeth clenched.
My mother wasn’t just known for her political maneuvers in the Forum.
The means by which she achieved them were the talk of the Citadel District.
There wasn’t a week that went by that she wasn’t inviting someone into her chambers or taking illicit meetings at the baths.
She placed the vial of godsblood back inside its cupboard, locking it, and the memory of the legionnaire’s words came back to me.
That the stola I’d worn at the party could have fed a dozen families in the Lower City for a year.
That single bottle of godsblood tincture could feed infinitely more than that.
My mother had successfully portrayed herself as a voice for the Lower City, and that had worked in her favor in the Forum. But she had no love for the citizens on the other side of the river. She was just smart enough to know that there would come a time when she would need them.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that he’s beautiful,” she said.
I wished I hadn’t noticed. Matius’ son was strikingly handsome, his form cast like one of the statues in the temple.
He had the look of a god, and I wasn’t the only one who’d thought so.
The other Magistrates, along with their sons and daughters, had been whispering about him throughout the night.
But now the memory was spoiled with the knowledge that he’d likely end up in my mother’s chambers. They all did, one way or another.
“I thought he offended you,” I said.
My mother squared her shoulders in a way that felt almost like a challenge.
“The days of the gifts are over, Maris. The gods don’t just hand out power like they used to.
You will have to learn to use everything at your disposal to move the pieces on the board.
And one of the most effective tools you have, whether you like it or not, is between your legs. ”
She gave me a snide look before leaving the room, her voice carrying out in the atrium. “We’re going to be late.”
Nej caught my eyes. “She’s right, you know.”
Nej’s affairs were almost as notorious as my mother’s, and I’d heard rumors more than once that he was often summoned to the bed of the Consul himself.
“We’ll see,” I said.
Nej’s expression turned pitying. “You think the favor of the gods is enough.”
“I do,” I admitted.
He and my mother thought my piety was foolish, but I’d resolved a long time ago to wield the judgment stone with more conviction than my mother once I had it in hand.
“I wish this were a world where you could go on with childish notions like that one, Maris. But soon enough, life will show you how brutal it can be. And even the gods can’t save you from that.”
He came lower to kiss me on the cheek, giving my arm a gentle squeeze before he went out into the atrium.
I waited for his footsteps to grow faint before I pulled the scarf from my belt, letting the fabric unfurl in my hands.
I almost couldn’t see it against the dark green silk, but it was there—the stain of Matius’ blood.