Chapter XVIII #3
Lucian did not speak of tractability or generosity as if they were admirable traits, but Ariana was desperate enough to consider his proposition.
She thought carefully, taking stock of her meager possessions.
For a queen, she was hardly well-endowed.
She’d come to Inverlyn with no dowry, owning nothing besides the kirtle she wore.
Though Orden presented her with whatever jewels his family had pillaged from Vesper, she’d sent away the choicest of them.
Her household allowance was far more than she could ever spend on herself or her nonexistent courtiers, but most was given quietly to Dolenza, to aid in the resettlement of Corrinian refugees.
Lucian, of course, knew it, and fixed her with a canny look. “Again, a failure of understanding. A true Inver queen would know how to make her own conquests, enriching herself and strengthening her throne.”
“Where do you suggest I begin, if I wish to comport myself as an Inver queen?” Ariana asked. Small-minded men who believed themselves brilliant were always eager to air their intelligence.
“You have one treasure for which you could ask a very high price.” Lucian set his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers together, tapping them against his chin. “If you come with me now, and name your sum, there is nothing Afon Caervallin would not pay to see you kneel.”
An involuntary shudder of disgust ran through Ariana.
“Why?” she asked in disbelief. “Why should he desire that so fiercely? What can it possibly mean to him, that one woman who holds him in the lowest regard should not bend to his will?”
Lucian shrugged. “The allure of what still lies unconquered cannot be explained to someone who is not born with the wit to understand. There is the small matter of your subservience to Orden, too—there is nothing our king possesses which Afon does not crave. He would empty half his treasury in exchange for a few minutes with you on your knees before him. You might easily purchase Dolenza’s life with that.
You might even hire a quiet and skillful knife in the dark to dispatch Afon and end your troubles.
What irony, to cut him off with largesse earned by sating his desires. ”
But that was where Lucian strained the bounds of credulity.
“Orden has already commissioned you several times to end Caervallion’s king,” Ariana said, cool and queenly once more.
“You have always failed. Either you cannot or will not kill Afon Caervallin, and I may be a fool, but I am not foolish enough to believe you would ever accomplish for me what you cannot for Orden. So you can tell your master—whichever one you happen to be serving at the moment—that I will lie dead in a pool of my own entrails before I abase myself for Afon. He could burn all of Honoria and Corrin besides, and still he will not get me on my knees.”
She swept out of the room with her heart hammering in her chest, and the bitter taste of victory in the back of her throat.
That afternoon, Ariana lay in wait for Orden, pacing the confines of their small borrowed room.
The moment his voice resounded in the hall, she stopped at the chamber’s center and stood, pulse racing, palms slick with sweat.
The door opened and shut, admitting the overwhelming presence that was Orden, and Ariana fixed the king with her dark gaze, desperation shining from her.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, Orden, don’t do this. Don’t tamper with Raea’s house, or ravage the Hand by choosing another war. If you have ever loved me, set these new endeavors aside.”
Orden came to her and cupped her face with his hands.
“Ariana,” he said with conviction. “I loved you from the first because of your faith. And I have learned from you—for seven years, I’ve given you faith of my own, letting you do as you saw fit, backing you in all your trades and treaties.
For the next while, I need you to bend your faith toward me.
To trust that I have the good of Honoria and our son—indeed, your own good—at heart.
It is for you I make my choices. For Justus. For our kingdom. For all of the Hand.”
“What hold does Afon have over you?” she whispered. “Why can he move you to violence and leave me powerless by comparison?”
For the first time, Orden’s composure slipped.
He let go his hold on Ariana and ran a hand across his face, a rare and fleeting glimpse of a spirit in turmoil.
For the briefest moment, she thought he would speak.
Saw him about to bare his mind and his soul to her.
Instead, Orden took her habit from where it lay waiting on their bed.
He placed it within Ariana’s grasp, and she felt the dearly loved warp and weft of it.
“Wear this tonight,” he said. “And remember how I love you, my queen—every part of you.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking of me,” Ariana murmured in anguish, and Orden met her gaze with a sorrow that burned.
“Neither do you.”
His arms closed around her, and something inside Ariana shattered. She felt safe with him. She should not—she did not understand him, and everything they most desired was at terrible odds—yet with Orden she felt a comfort and security she had not even found before Lyria’s most sacred shrine.
They did not go down to dinner. Instead they lay together, with Ariana in her soria’s garb, and watched the sun set over the gilded sea.
Ariana wanted so badly to cleave to him—to offer the faith he asked for.
And yet everything she still worked toward, privately and quietly, was in opposition to his very name and blood and the course he’d set himself on.
Ariana wished there could be two of her.
One to love the goddess Lyria and the way of peace, and one to love her Inver king.
As the light grew long and dusky, sonorous bells rang out across the cloister, sounding the evening call to worship.
Then Ariana let Orden take her by the hand and draw her out into the corridor.
Several of his attendants were waiting, and she tried not to mind the caught breaths at the sight of the habit she’d long ago put aside, or the charged looks that passed between them, or the whispers that rose up as Honoria’s king and apostate queen swept by.
The response in the chapel was worse. Several of Raea’s sorias broke out into shocked murmurs.
Fia’s gaze was a palpable weight, fixing on Ariana from where she sat at the head of the chapel, near the feet of an outsized statue of Raea in her matron’s guise, holding a sheaf of wheat with a child at her side.
Beside Fia stood the Raean altar, once white marble, now stained an earthen color somewhere between crimson and rust, a testament to centuries of sacred women’s blood offered there.
Dolenza, as she met the king’s party, did not even register surprise at Ariana’s habit. She settled Orden and his people near the center of the chapel, where the sound of the sorias’ singing could be heard to best advantage, then drew Ariana onward.
There were no benches in the chapel, only the solid stone floor spread with reeds and linen mats. Ariana sank down at Fia’s side and saw the Priest come in as she did so. He looked painfully uncertain, and had Justus cradled in one arm.
“Ari,” Fia said under her breath, the words sparking with intensity. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Ariana confessed, everything within her a maelstrom of conflicting emotion. “Fia, I—”
But Dolenza raised her hands, plunging the chapel into silence.
“This summer, under Raea’s fullest and most blessed light, we welcome unprecedented guests,” she said in a voice that carried. “Orden Inver, his wife and child, and the people of their household. We offer them honor and a show of our earnest regard. Soria Aurelia, if you will?”
Aurelia stepped forward from where she stood at the chapel’s side, holding an ungainly bundle.
Moving to the back of the altar, she set her burden down and removed the cloth that covered it.
Another ripple of shock passed through the sorias as they saw what it was—a metal brazier holding live coals.
“From the heart of the Invers’ mountain, we have summoned a flame. And rather than an offering of blood or plenty, tonight on our altar, we light an Inver fire.”
Ariana scanned the gathered worshipers, seeking Orden’s face. He was rapt, his eyes fixed on the altar, the same look on his face she’d seen a thousand times.
Satisfaction. Hunger. Desire.
He wanted the cloister, he wanted the devotion of Raea’s children, and by blurring the lines between their faiths in pursuit of peace, Dolenza only stoked the coals of that longing.
At the back of the chapel, one of the oldest sorias stood and left, an expression of disgust twisting her mouth into a frown.
Another followed her, and another, and if it troubled Dolenza in the least, not a sign of it showed on her ageless, unreadable face.
The Priest, by contrast, shifted uncomfortably in his place by the door, all but wincing each time a soria took her leave.
A heavy, breathless air of anticipation hung over the chapel. Small flames crackled in the quiet—an alien sound in a sanctuary devoted to the Beloved Three. Ariana had never felt an atmosphere so fraught, as Dolenza let the silence stretch on and on.
At last, the queen could bear it no longer. She scrambled to her feet, and Fia followed like a shadow. Moving to the altar, Ariana bowed her head to Dolenza and Aurelia in turn.
“Matria,” she said. “May I?”