Chapter XVII #2
A turn. Another turn. The Priest tried to keep track of them, but they stopped so often for his guide to answer questions or for sorias and cloister children to wish the Priest well, it was impossible to maintain his bearings.
They’d climbed stairs twice, he knew that much—his room was on a second or third floor, but if they’d gone past a landing, it had not been wide enough for him to notice.
Several times, as they passed from one corridor into another, Aurelia had asked the Priest to lower his head, though his sense of space led him to believe the ceilings were very high.
He’d obeyed, supposing it was some religious matter—a sign of respect to Raea, perhaps, though he couldn’t make out why certain doorways and halls required it when others didn’t.
Confusion added to his disorientation, and the Priest’s annoyance grew acute.
“Here we are,” Aurelia said brightly, stopping in the middle of a corridor.
At their backs stretched a bank of windows or a balcony, open to the sea air, and the Priest suspected from the way the wind surged in carrying a heady scent of brine, that there was a view of the harbor.
It was lost on him, but Aurelia’s words as he stepped into the room he’d been assigned were not.
“These are my quarters, generally. I moved out my things this morning, but the room’s been watched since then.
There was no time or opportunity for anyone to tamper with it—I believe that is a standard Inver concern, which we accounted for.
But if you’d like to ensure your own safety, I won’t take it as a slight. ”
The Priest nodded and walked the perimeter of the room, fingertips of one hand brushing the wall, phelamon cane sweeping the ground as he found the furniture and mapped the place in his head.
If Aurelia was second only to Dolenza at the cloister, then the sorias were spartan in their comforts.
The room was small—smaller even than the Priest’s inherited cell at the mountain sanctuary’s heart.
There was space enough for a narrow bed, a braided rug, a small desk beneath a window, a washstand with a large basin and heavy pitcher, and a little hearth.
As far as the Priest could tell, the only ways in or out were through the door by which he’d entered, and the window near the desk.
“I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you,” the Priest said as he returned to Aurelia. “It wasn’t my intention to force you out of your room.”
“We’ve taken in a great number of Corrinian children,” Aurelia answered matter-of-factly. “Space is no longer something the cloister has in abundance, despite its size. And the children can only stay with us or be forced onward and out of the country. That is the law.”
“Yes,” the Priest said, working to keep from signaling either approval or disapproval. “I know it.”
Aurelia fell silent for a moment, as if she expected him to say more. To defend the Invers’ policies, or to undermine them. The Priest did neither, choosing instead to keep his own counsel.
With a sigh, Aurelia shifted, moving back into the open doorway.
“If you require anything, or wish for a guide, there is a bellpull here, beside the door,” she said. “We’re happy to serve you. Or, if you wish to make yourself free of the cloister, you’re welcome to do so. If you reach forward, you’ll find we’ve made an accommodation for you.”
The Priest put out a hand. There was the bellpull, and beside it a bundle of cords, each of them with a small metal disc tied to its end.
“Each disc is embossed with a number and an initial letter, indicating the room its cord will lead you to,” Aurelia explained.
“One and an R for the refectory, two and a G for the gardens, three for the laundry, four for the chapel, and five for the sea path. The cords are marked with knots at intervals as well, grouped in the number that corresponds to their destination. A glass bead to one side of each group of knots indicates your heading—if you touch it after the knots, you’re traveling to the cord’s end destination.
If you touch it before, you are returning to this room.
We have no locked doors, and you’re welcome to explore the grounds and buildings at any point, but this will, perhaps, make it easier for you to navigate.
Your guidelines run shoulder height through the cloister—we heard you have a similar contrivance near the ground on the mountain, but we have children to consider, and they’re prone to tripping.
Better for the older among us to bow our heads while passing through a doorway or two. ”
“Thank you,” the Priest said, and meant it. “And thank your Matria for her consideration. I didn’t expect the sorias to go to any trouble on my behalf.”
When Aurelia spoke again, she sounded amused. “It isn’t trouble. It is both our joy and our duty to serve, and to afford those within our walls every opportunity to flourish. You don’t strike me as someone who thrives on dependence.”
“I don’t? Shocking,” the Priest answered, slipping easily into a new degree of familiarity with the even-tempered soria.
Aurelia let out a soft laugh, and the Priest was flooded with a sense of gratification.
Gods, he liked the woman in spite of himself, just as he liked every other soria he’d met.
There was some perverse desire in him that made their devotion and their edges and their rigorous standards, their good humor and their stubbornness and their high-minded ideals, all nigh irresistible.
“Nevertheless,” the Priest said, in an attempt to cover his feelings, “thank Dolenza for me, for making the arrangements.”
“She didn’t,” Aurelia said. “A note came to us from the castle, requesting things be laid out for you just so. All we did was follow the instructions we were given.”
He should have known. “Then I’ll thank Ariana myself. It’s like her, to consider everyone and everything.”
“The queen is a paragon, and I don’t doubt she would have done such a thing if there weren’t so much on her mind.
But it was Fia who sent word and explained what was required.
She was most specific. Besides petitioning the cloister for a soria’s role, she’s asked for nothing since coming here, so we were happy to oblige her. ”
It would have cost Fia, the Priest knew.
Both the request itself, and the sending of it.
He was all but certain, given her upbringing, her ignorance about the book and the timekeeper in his cell, as well as a number of things she’d said on the road, that the postulant could neither read nor write.
The cloister would remedy the situation once she became a soria, but she’d have had to ask someone to write the note for her, and Fia was prideful as they came.
Beneson. That’s who she’d have enlisted, and why the Priest hadn’t heard of her making arrangements for him beforehand. The boy was more discreet than the dead, sometimes.
“If you wish to thank our postulant, as you expressed a desire to thank either Matria Dolenza or the queen, you’ll find her in the refectory,” Aurelia said in an unreadable tone.
“I should imagine she’ll be there an hour or two yet—Miriel is a favorite with both the cloister children and the sorias, so Fia will find it hard to get away quickly.
Or would you prefer I send up bread and wine? ”
“No,” the Priest said quickly. “No, I’ll come down.”
“Good.” Aurelia’s smile was audible once again. “I thought you might.”
Not long after, the Priest emerged from his borrowed room.
Cooler, in fresh clothes, and with the dust of the road no longer clinging to him, he felt an unfamiliar sense of well-being.
It was, he realized with a shock as he followed the cord marked for the refectory, the sensation of safety.
He was letting his guard down. Indeed, it seemed impossible not to, in the cloister’s accommodating and convivial environment.
But he was no soria. No hapless Corrinian forced to wander in search of a nonexistent haven.
No carefree farmer or merchant. He was an Inver, in a place that still stood in opposition to his family, his court, his faith, his very existence.
The Priest tried to bear down on that renegade, dangerous feeling of wellness, and found it very hard to crush.
Beneath his hand, the cord came to an end, coupled with the impression of a large, echoing space opening out before him. A few low voices murmured, scattered across the refectory, but it seemed predominantly empty at midafternoon.
“Priest,” Fia said from his left, and he went to her.
The Priest ran two fingers along the surface of a long table as he walked, and sat when Fia took his hand and guided him onto a bench at her side.
There was a child in her arms, and he could tell from its small noises that it was Justus, not Miriel.
Another young, precocious thing climbed onto his lap and began to make gruesome faces out of his features, by moving them with her hands.
“Eyes,” the older child said solemnly, pulling the Priest’s mouth downward into a frown.
“No eyes, actually,” he answered with equal gravity, and put out his tongue. The girl giggled, a high-pitched, delighted noise.
“That’s your niece, Celina,” Fia said. “She marked her third summer a few weeks ago. Neither Ariana nor Orden want to see her while they’re here, but I thought she should at least meet her little brother.”
There was a listless quality to Fia’s voice the Priest had never heard there before, and a hoarse roughness.
She sounded as if, in the brief time they’d been parted, she’d been crying, not gently but fiercely—the sort of tears that brought a sick headache in their aftermath and left you feeling entirely spent.