Chapter IV #4
Together, the two of them left the crowded hospital tent, which was little more than length after length of canvas stretched over supple poles.
Outside, the day was beginning to die. Thick golden light spilled over Corrin’s central plains, once green and fragrant, now a wasteland of ash and craters and coiled wire.
Carrion birds called harshly, feasting on the bodies of horses and of unfortunate soldiers the sorias had not yet managed to clear away.
But on every side of the plains, mountains still rose to the sky, silent and weathered, washed with fading sun or cast into twilight shadow.
“I wish you could have seen it before,” Ariana said as Fia paused to take in the view.
“What a thing to come to Corrin. The fields were beautiful, Fia. All wildflowers and grazing sheep and horses. I don’t know where people will go now, or what they’ll do—the armies burned their homes and slaughtered their herds or flocks. ”
“I’m sure it was lovely,” Fia murmured, though the truth was, she’d known little of beauty in her life.
Wearily, they brought Fia’s bucket and bundle of linens to the washing tent and fetched fresh water to boil at one of the purifying fires, to further cleanse her cutting tools.
Ariana stayed with her, and Fia was glad of the company.
They sat shoulder to shoulder within a small circle of flame, as the sun sank behind the western mountains and darkness gathered around them.
“There she is,” Ariana whispered, turning her face to the sky as stars sprang to life in great milky swaths overhead. “Oh, Fia. Has she ever looked more radiant?”
Fia glanced up skeptically before stirring the embers of their fire.
They were only stars to her, cold and remote, their goddess overly stringent in her demands.
Fia flourished in daylight, under the encompassing light of Bright Raea, who gave life and health and nourishment.
But she smiled softly at the look on Ariana’s face, of beatific rapture.
Fia could not help but be drawn to such perfect worship.
“Where will you go after this?” Ariana asked presently. “Back to your mountains? Do you miss them?”
Fia nodded. “Yes, I will. And no, I don’t.
It’s not a good place to live, where I come from.
Not like you say Corrin was before all this.
But I have a younger brother at home, who I’d never have left if it wasn’t for the dream I had.
Our mother… she makes a hard life harder.
I worry about Ander being alone with her.
And the king’s pressers take people from our village often.
I need to be there, to keep Ander clear of them. ”
“I’m sorry,” Ariana said, and when she spoke the words, it seemed as if the stars themselves bent low to offer sympathy. Fia stole a glance at her in the fire’s ruddy glow. Ariana had a fineness about her, and a fragility, as if Lyria’s own light shone from within.
“And what will you do after this?” Fia asked. “What service will the mother of stars require of you next?”
“Oh, to go home, I hope,” Ariana said. She toyed with the hem of one sleeve, the deep blue fabric of her soria’s kirtle dark against the night, the wrists and neck embroidered with glinting silver stars.
“My cloister is a day and a half from here, near Corrin’s eastern edge.
After all this, I might…” Her voice caught, and something pained and broken flashed across her face.
“I might choose seclusion for a time, to seek Lyria’s light.
You came after the fighting, Fia, but I was here for it.
It was a dreadful, ugly thing. Monstrous, even.
I hope never to see such a sight again. But they say there’s been no resolution between Honoria and Caervallion.
No lasting peace made. It was not a battle where the field was won or lost; they only shattered each other upon it. ”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Fia said. “War and politics aren’t for my sort. We live and die, and there’s not much in between but getting from the one to the other.”
“I would die,” Ariana murmured devoutly, “to keep Corrin safe, and to keep anything like this from happening again.”
Fia let out a short, dry laugh. “Honoria’s doing this same thing across the sea in Vesper as we speak.
Has been for two centuries, ever since the Invers came to power.
We’ve not been at peace for a day since.
Even growing up in a pisspot at the country’s back end, I know that.
There’s no use dying for peace where I come from—it’d be a life lost in vain. ”
“It’s not right.” A frown crossed Ariana’s expressive face. “The goddesses—”
“—haven’t got much to do with it,” Fia cut in. “Seeing as the Invers slaughtered Lyria and Silith’s children and threw down their cloisters when they took charge.”
But she could see Ariana was still troubled by it all—by circumstances far beyond their control, and cruelties not of their making.
“We can’t change the way the world works,” Fia said practically, sounding, after days spent in their company, like a capable and brusque Raean soria. “We’ve just got to live in it.”
“I wish we could change it.” Ariana looked up to the stars again, every line of her wistful and yearning. “I wish we could make life better, and kinder.”
Taking up a pair of tongs, Fia fished her instruments out from the boiling pot on its bed of coals.
“Barring that,” she said, “you can come with me. I’ve got two more arms and a leg I’m supposed to do before I’m so tired I can’t see straight. It won’t change the world, but I think it helps a bit.”
Getting to her feet, she held out a hand to Ariana, and wordlessly the Lyrien soria took it. As if joined at the heart, the two girls let out a small sigh and turned for the row of hospital tents where the wounded and dying waited.
Ariana Lyrien was still a slight, fragile thing, and her face in the gloom and the firelight of the queen’s chambers was pale as bleached linen.
Her eyes were very wide and very dark, and her fall of damp hair was black as a night with no moon.
All around her there was blood. Bloody water stood in bowls, soaked bundles of rags, and the linens the queen sat upon were a swath of scarlet.
The air was sharp with the smell of it—of iron and salt and despair.
Fretting attendants and fussing physicians surrounded the bed, and it made Fia anxious just to look at them.
Even from the doorway, Fia could sense the fear rolling off Ariana in waves.
As she stepped into the room, Ariana’s eyes fixed on her, and it was like meeting the gaze of some wild creature caught in a trap.
There was a spark of recognition, but only that, for whatever the queen felt upon seeing Fia was subsumed by fear and the task at hand.
“It’s unhealthy,” one of the attendants said waspishly. “You mustn’t lie here in your own filth like that, Majesty. Let us take the bedding and the little princess away to be disposed of and give your son to a wet nurse. The one you arranged for last month is waiting in the nursery wing.”
“No.” Ariana leaned forward, clinging to a bundle in her arms. “I was clear enough in my orders. You take nothing from this room. Not the linens. Not the birthing tools. Neither of the babies.”
“At least let the new prince be washed, then,” another attendant said. She cradled what Fia assumed was the child. Children? It was all a muddle. What, by Raea’s love and light, was Ariana even doing here? “Perhaps you could feed him yourself, if he was clean and sweet-smelling.”
“I won’t hold him. I won’t touch him,” Ariana answered imperiously. “Lyria will never stop punishing me for my faithlessness to her, and I won’t have her judgment fall on my son as well. But this one, at least, can’t come to further harm.”
A squat man with heavy jowls drew closer to the queen, and Ariana glanced a warning at him.
“Stillbirths happen, Majesty,” the man said, his voice even and reasonable.
“You’ve suffered difficulties before, and birthing two children at once is always harder.
Can you not be grateful the new prince survived and give the princess to me?
You think well of the Priest—he’ll ensure what’s left of her is ushered out of the world in such a way that it honors our gods. ”
The look the queen shot the man was venomous.
Fia felt an echo of it at her core, for the same ferocity rose up in her when she thought of misfortune befalling Miriel.
She’d never seen anything as pure and vicious as Ariana, who had once been a daughter of the stars and now, through some twist of bitter fate, had become this terrified, bloody queen who sat with arms wrapped around her dead child, refusing to give her over.
It woke an answering fury in Fia, shot through with grief.
Ariana Inver fixed her eyes on Fia, and fathomless sorrow shone in her gaze.
To lose a child. And to lose a child like this, in a shuttered, smoky room, with unconsecrated blood staining every surface. It should not be so. Fia’s skin crawled just thinking of it.
The living child in the attendant’s arms—Honoria’s new prince—began to wail.
As his thin, reedy cry echoed from the corners of the room, silent tears tracked down the queen’s face.
And when all the attendants turned their attention to the babe, Ariana mouthed a single word to Fia, while the very look in her eyes was an act of supplication.
Please.
That word was Fia’s undoing.