The Castle & the Cloister (Daughters of Light #1)

Chapter I

I

One for the Sun

Two for the Moon

Three for the Stars, Beloved.

Raea in power to grow the trees

Silith in strength to draw the seas

And Lyria in light to guide us.

—AN HONORIAN LULLABY

Fiametta Raeana, postulant of the Order of Blessed Raea the Sun, paced her cloister’s southern breezeway with the feral energy of a mountain cat.

She’d been pacing for fully half an hour, ever since a soria came to fetch her from where she sat by the sea, nursing her small daughter Miriel.

Matria Dolenza wants a word, the soria had said, and nerves blazed to life in Fia, for she knew exactly what the Matria wanted.

Fia had brought Miriel along, though she ought to have handed the baby off to any one of the sorias who doted on her.

She hoped that sweet, helpless Miriel might serve as an inducement to the Matria to look on her more favorably.

Bright Raea knew Fia needed all the help she could get in that regard.

More than that, though, she wanted the reassurance of Miriel’s presence—the child grounded and comforted her when nothing else could.

Miriel served as a reminder of everything Fia had left behind, and of why she’d chosen to walk out of her old life one winter night, without so much as shoes for her feet or a brass penny for her pocket.

The mountains haunted Fia still—the lack she had lived with there, not just privations of the body but of the heart and mind and soul. Her child would never know such things. So Fia swore to herself the day she felt the baby quicken in her belly, and she had striven toward that end every day since.

Resting on her mother’s hip, Miriel let out a soft, querulous sound. Fia sighed and ceased her pacing for the sake of the child. Shifting her daughter a little, she drew in a long, slow breath of the cloister’s air and shut her eyes in an attempt to settle herself.

The smell of brine and lye soap and green things growing.

The heat of a plains afternoon in high summer, only made bearable by occasional breezes that gusted in from the sea.

Sorias laughing and chattering at their work, their constant murmuring a counterpoint to the high, clear voices of the cloister’s small fosters, who played in the shady corners of the many courtyards.

Fia would have thought it all felt like home, but home had been a misery and a torment, a place to hang white-knuckled onto life, even when death sometimes seemed preferable.

To her, the cloister felt like everything home had not been.

It felt like security. Like potential. Like safety.

But for now, at least, the cloister and life led within its walls were not hers to keep.

Until she’d made her fidelity oath and become a soria, all this serenity and safety could be torn from her grasp at any time—in the next few moments, perhaps.

So none of the ripe, reassuring atmosphere served to quiet Fia’s jangling nerves, because it did not belong to her yet.

At last, she bowed her head and nuzzled her face against Miriel’s, drawing in the one scent that calmed her when all others failed. Milk. Clean water. A hint of lavender. The impossible soft velvet of infant skin. The scent of her own heart made manifest.

The scent of hope.

Opening her eyes, Fia looked down at Miriel and found a toothless smile on her daughter’s achingly familiar face.

“It tempts fate to be so happy, love,” Fia murmured, brushing a kiss onto the baby’s forehead. “And we don’t need fate tempted, not today of all days.”

Miriel made a pleased sound in reply, and grasped Fia’s thick braid with one dimpled fist. Something electric ran through Fia.

A shock of love, of the reckless passion that had risen in her heart the day she first felt Miriel stir inside her.

It still took Fia by surprise sometimes, that she should be able to sustain such breadth of feeling.

But here she stood, and since the moment it had first ignited, her love for Miriel had never ceased to burn like fire in her bones.

Fia did not fully understand the strength of it or why it often felt like fury.

All she knew was that loving Miriel had given her the courage to remake her life.

And Miriel, with her fuzz of golden curls and her beaming, six-month smile, comprehended none of that. Her life, by comparison to what Fia’s had been, was steady, secure, and measured, hedged in by the impenetrable bulwark of her mother’s intemperate love.

A discordant sound rose from across the courtyard that spread out before Fia like a verdant jewel, rich with garden beds and olive trees.

Loud voices lifted in blustering anger cut across the laughter of sorias and the playful shrieks of cloister children.

Fia watched as Aurelia, the Matria’s right hand, gathered up her kirtle and hurried to where a small group of well-dressed plains farmers stood arguing with a far lower-ranked soria.

Though Miriel consumed most of Fia’s time and energy, it hadn’t escaped her notice that there was tension between Raea’s cloister and the people of the Solis Plains, most of whom worked as tenants of the goddess, farming Raea’s land and gathering Raea’s harvests.

The sun goddess was surpassingly generous, but of late, Matria Dolenza had been less munificent than the plains folk were accustomed to.

Some were unhappy with her governance and did not realize their great good fortune in serving a mistress who permitted such voluble grievances and often heard them personally.

Soria Aurelia approached the tenant farmers with a disarming smile, her hands spread wide in welcome.

Doubtless they’d be mollified within a quarter hour at most, sent off with bottles of the cloister’s coveted summer wine, presents of honey cakes, and assurances of Raea’s pleasure in their obedience.

The sorias were masters of restoring goodwill without ever actually granting concessions.

Raea’s daughters might be placid and bright and diligent, extending easy camaraderie to anyone they encountered, but beneath their sunny exteriors, every one possessed a spine of iron and the stubbornness of a wild mountain jenny.

“Fia?” Matria Dolenza’s voice called out from within the recesses of her study. “I’m ready for you now.”

Fia pressed another kiss to Miriel’s cheek. “All right, my heart. One oath and all our wandering is finished. Just a few words and we’ll be bound to this cloister and to a life of peace.”

But even as she spoke, Fia’s worry flared up.

She swallowed around an anxious tightening in her throat, for she’d learned long ago that certainty was an indulgence best left to fools.

Still, the very air in Raea’s cloister was saturated with it.

Calm and purpose and certainty were as pervasive here as the smell of the sea.

The question was, would Fia be allowed a part of it? Would she be permitted to stay?

With a backward glance at the sun-soaked courtyard onto which the breezeway led out, Fia pushed her way into the study.

The crescentcloth tapestry that served Matria Dolenza for a door settled into place behind her, the near-transparent weave of its back side allowing a view of the courtyard.

The outward-facing image, by contrast, showed a deftly woven scene of the Solis Plains at harvest time, and afforded no glimpse of the Matria’s sanctum.

Matria Dolenza was behind her desk, the only sound in the room the scratching of her quill pen.

Fia stole a look around herself—in seven months at the cloister, she’d never seen the interior of Dolenza’s study before.

It was a cool, sparsely furnished stone room, as spare and duty-bound as the Matria herself.

“Why not sit?” Matria Dolenza said without looking up, and reluctantly, Fia took the unornamented wooden chair across from her.

This wasn’t what Fia had expected. She’d anticipated smiles and embraces from a few of the higher-ranking sorias waiting to hear her fidelity oath, as they’d done for Soria Beatrice two months back.

She sat in silence, suspicion growing in her like a shadow as Matria Dolenza finished writing and scattered sand across the page.

At last, Dolenza looked up and fixed Fia with a searching stare.

The Matria wore a soria’s headscarf much of the time, bound with the woven band that marked her station as head of the order, but Fia had seen her without the scarf once before.

Though Matria Dolenza’s ebony-skinned face was smooth and hardly lined, her hair had been an exuberance of curling iron gray.

There was something unknowable and canny about her eyes, too, and Fia was no closer to guessing the Matria’s age now than she had been upon first arriving at the cloister.

“Fiametta Raeana,” Matria Dolenza said by way of greeting, and Fia bowed her head. “Is there something you need?”

For a moment, Fia said nothing. The Matria had sent for her, after all.

And it was, to the very day, the end of her four-month term as a postulant.

Nothing stood between her and the protection of the cloister now, save for a single oath.

But when Dolenza let the silence go uninterrupted, the question she’d asked hanging on the air, Fia fixed her gaze on Miriel’s sweet face.

She needed the courage her daughter afforded, and wanted, too, to draw Dolenza’s attention to the baby.

If she could not be moved for Fia’s sake, perhaps she might be for Miriel’s.

“My postulant’s term finished this morning, Matria,” Fia said.