Chapter 31. Before Maris
BEFORE: MARIS
The night of my wedding, there were crows circling in the sky.
I stood at the window, watching them turn in the air, black wings tipping on the gales pushing inland from the sea. There was a storm coming and its sweet, earthy scent bled through the breeze, catching the delicate edges of my chiton.
The courtyard of the Illyrium was filled with citizens from the Lower City, a steady, relentless current of panic brimming in the air. The first few days after the tribunal, the temple had been flooded. Every soul in Isara had come to make a sacrifice, begging the gods to have mercy on us all.
Behind me, the great bronze lamps that hung from the ceiling were lit with roaring flames, illuminating the painted ceiling overhead.
Every inch was covered in individual panels that depicted scenes from the life of Toranus, the architect of lineages and creator of bloodlines.
Beyond the glow of the lamps, the crucible sat in the corner, the temple smith waiting.
I’d chosen a stola of seashell iridescent silk, and it looked like melted pearl in the candlelight.
Fine gold godsblood chains draped from the belt at my waist, falling in arcs over my hips, and the same strands were hung from my neck and my wrists.
My fingertips fidgeted with them as I watched the dark street below.
“He will come.” Ophelius’ deep voice lifted over the crackle of the altar fire, where she stood with her hands clasped before her. “It is fated.”
I turned to face her, the wind at my back.
There was no warmth in her eyes. She’d said almost nothing since I asked her to perform the rites.
In fact, she hadn’t so much as asked a single question, and that made me nervous.
It felt almost as if she’d been waiting for it.
Like she’d known this would happen long before I did.
The idea made a slow, cold shiver slide up my spine.
Her hand opened before me, beckoning me forward, and I obeyed.
I crossed the stones with slow steps and her hand encircled my wrist, lifting it between us.
She turned the heel of my palm toward her, eyeing the blue veins beneath my skin.
Her lips just barely moved as her fingertips pressed to the vine-like pattern, and before I could even ask what she was doing, a hot jolt of pain shot through me.
It ricocheted up my arm, through my chest, and down into my legs, burning.
I pulled away from her, cradling my arm.
“What was that?” I hissed.
Ophelius’ blank face looked back at me, her mouth flat. “I’ve closed your womb.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
“You want me to perform the rites? Then I need to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
I looked down at my wrist, where the veins had darkened. The skin was red and swollen, but the pain was slowly receding, turning to a dull warmth.
“It will be undone in time, but we haven’t come all this way just so he could put a child in you,” she scoffed. “There is too much work to do, Maris.”
We. It was almost as if Ophelius believed she had orchestrated the whole thing. She looked into my face, surprising me when she placed a rough hand on my cheek. Her eyes searched mine like she wasn’t quite sure what she saw there.
“Your path has changed, Casperia.” Her hands tightened on me. “And he is a part of it. You can feel that, can’t you?”
I stared into her eyes, feeling the prickle of tears in my own. The emotion brimming inside me was one I couldn’t name, and I was grateful. I was afraid that if I did, it would come alive.
“Ophelius?” I whispered, the question spinning in my mind now poised on the tip of my tongue.
I was afraid to ask it because I was afraid of the answer.
Defying the Forum was dangerous, and Ophelius had never been political.
She was smart enough to stay out of the Magistrates’ games.
But I hadn’t forgotten how all this started—on the morning of the First Feast, when she asked me about Luca Matius.
I glanced at the temple smith, keeping my voice low. “Did you have something to do with the leaflet?”
Ophelius’ face turned just enough for me to see her profile. When she spoke, it was with the same resonance as a prayer. “Sometimes you must burn a field to save it, Maris.”
The doors to the temple flew open and I turned, exhaling when I saw Luca. He was dressed in his ceremonial legionnaire uniform, the brilliant red cloak billowing out behind him as he made his way up the aisle. But when I saw who was with him, I stilled.
Magistrate Saturian’s son followed on Luca’s heels, his dark eyes flashing in the low light. The fear that had been thrumming in my gut all day swelled, making my palms slick.
Luca’s steps slowed as he neared me, and his eyes dropped from my face, traveling down the length of me.
His expression turned almost grave, his lips parting.
I could feel it all over again—his hands sliding up my legs.
His mouth on my skin. I was about to take vows with this man, but I’d already given all of myself to him.
The part that couldn’t be undone was already past us.
He stopped before me, his eyes running over me again. “I’m late. I’m sorry.”
“I thought you changed your mind.” I swallowed.
“Have you?” He met my eyes, waiting.
I shook my head in answer.
“You’re…” he breathed. “You look beautiful.”
A small smile broke on my lips, but it fell as my gaze went over Luca’s shoulder, finding Saturian’s son. He was watching us, an apprehensive look in his eyes.
“I wanted him here.” Luca answered my unspoken question, and after a moment I nodded.
Luca’s hand slipped into mine, and in an instant, I felt tethered to the earth. The coals on the altar hissed behind us and he pulled me toward the smoke, knotting our fingers together.
Ophelius took a bundle of cypress from the bowl beside the fire, twirling the stalks in the flames. In moments, a soft, rippling smoke was seeping into the air.
“Which name do you take?” Her voice echoed in the temple.
“Casperia,” Luca answered, without even a moment’s hesitation.
I looked up at him. We hadn’t discussed which name we would take. We hadn’t even gotten that far. “Wait,” I said.
But Luca’s eyes were on Ophelius. He was resolute. “We take the name Casperia.”
The temple smith stepped forward and something in Ophelius’ expression looked almost pleased. Like another one of her prophecies had come true. She held out a hand, waiting as Luca removed his medallion, and when he set it in her palm, she handed it to the smith.
She pulled the cypress from the fire, waiting for the flames to snuff out before she turned to us again. “I graft you, Luca Matius, into the family line of Casperia.”
The deep vibration of her whispers hummed as she wafted the smoke over us, and Saturian watched in silence as the smith dropped Luca’s medallion into the crucible. He looked almost afraid, his jaw tense and shoulders back.
I’d been in the temple smith’s chamber only once in my life—the day the gods named me.
Every child born Isarian was brought to the temple on the feast day that followed their birth so that their medallion could be forged.
It was a sacred thing, the material representation of citizenship and family claim.
It was also something that happened only once in your life unless you took vows and took the name of another.
Upon death, your medallion went back to the crucible to be melted into an ingot that would be forged for another new soul.
Reforging Luca’s medallion would cut him from his family line, and the vows were until death.
The weight of that hung heavy in the temple.
For the citizens of the Citadel District, giving up your family name was something people only did when they needed to advance their position, and something that was almost never done by someone who was the last of a line.
But in only moments, the family Matius would be no more.
And when Luca took his uncle’s seat, the name engraved there would change to Casperia.
The body of the Forum would see it as a ploy by my mother—a swift, unexpected piece moving on the board. But not even Magistrate Casperia would see this coming. Nor would she benefit from it.
The smith pushed the rack into the forge and watched over it carefully as he cranked the bellows to keep the flames burning hot.
When he poured the melted gold into the mold, the metal reflected the light like a mirror.
It cooled slowly, the hiss of steam erupting into the air as the blacksmith submerged it in water, and when he pried it free, my family name stretched across the medallion’s face.
Gone was the line of Matius. Now Luca was a Casperia.
Ophelius clasped the medallion around his neck, the word flashing on its surface, and a feeling like fire began to burn over my skin. She wasn’t speaking to us anymore. Now she was conversing with the gods.
When I looked up at him, Luca was steady. Unshaken. His eyes didn’t leave mine as she spoke the sacred words and they wrapped around us, making me tremble. When he felt my hands shaking in his, Luca closed his fingers around mine tightly, as if trying to anchor me there.
“Flesh to flesh, bone to bone, blood to blood,” Ophelius whispered.
She chanted the words over and over, sealing the ceremony in a ritual that couldn’t be undone. The sound made my head swim in the thick smoke from the herbs on the coals.
I’d imagined it—taking my vows. But it had never looked like this.
Magistrates’ daughters didn’t get married in the temple in the middle of the night, hidden in shadow and secrets as an act of radical rebellion.
But that was exactly what this was, and there was some part of me that felt like it was only the first wind in a much greater storm.
Like we were weaving threads we couldn’t see the pattern of.
Ophelius opened the leather-bound tome on the altar, dipping the stylus into ink that shimmered with godsblood. I watched with my heart in my throat as she recorded the names there.
MARIS AND LUCA CASPERIA
SIXTH DAY IN THE MONTH OF CALISTO
END OF THE LINE MATIUS