Chapter XXI
XXI
I swear to all those assembled here, and to all Honoria besides, that I will rule as no other Inver before me has done.
During my reign, we will not only have war, but prosperity.
Not only conquest, but honor. Justice will be delivered with temperance and wisdom, rather than wrath.
We will become not only a force to contend with and a sword to subjugate, but a beacon of courage and culture, and a great hammer that reforges others into our own glorious image.
—FROM THE CORONATION SPEECH OF ORDEN INVER
Fia knelt in blazing afternoon sun at the feet of Raea’s likeness.
She’d been there since before dawn and refused to leave during the clamor of the royal party’s departure.
Everything in her felt raw and bruised. She could not help remembering the Invers’ mountain and its searing occupants.
She could hear the ghosts in their cavern still, the sound ringing in her ears.
She could hear Ariana and see the queen’s quiet smile.
“Do you know, I still dream of peace?” Ariana had said to Fia one morning when they sat together in one of the breezeways, Justus in his bassinet between them.
Raea’s light had been a wealth of gold, spilling over the sea.
“I told you years ago that I’d die for it, and here I am, doing just that a day at a time.
But oh, Fia, what death could be more worthwhile?
There is nothing else I would spend my life on.
Do you think…” She hesitated, her lovely face marred by the weight of old grief.
“Do you think Lyria knows? Do you think even without my mark, she might see me and understand?”
“She sees you,” Fia said fiercely, reaching over the sleeping prince to clasp Ariana’s hand tight in her own. “If she has eyes at all, and any love for those of us toiling beneath her, she sees you.”
Above and around Fia, afternoon shadows lengthened, but the design of the chapel was such that Raea stayed in full sun.
She was crowned with it, gilded with light.
Raea was a force to consume all other flames, even the Inver fire that had burned so briefly on her altar.
Fia wished to be less before her. Wished to be no more than a mote of dust, drifting in that sacred light.
She prostrated herself, forehead pressed to the warm flagstones of the chapel floor, and tried to drive memories from her by force.
Fia had wakened the morning after her bloodborne dream still safe in the Priest’s arms. He was awake already, waiting quietly in the pallid gray light.
The familiar nocturnal rhythm of the prince stirring and feeding every few hours had occurred just as it did elsewhere—to Justus, one bed was much like another, so long as Fia was with him.
Without any arrangement being laid out in words, the Priest had taken the baby after each feeding, changed his linens, and walked with him until he dozed again.
Now Justus was fast asleep, his little mouth slack, his body limp with perfect relaxation.
“Fia,” the Priest said, her name spoken soft beside her ear. She turned carefully to look at him, his scars and his wry mouth and his decided Inver jaw.
“Yes?”
For a moment, the Priest was silent. When he spoke again, it was with a clarity and fervor she’d never heard in him before. There was conviction in every line of him, which she had never seen in regard to his clan or his gods.
“If I was anyone else—if my life had taken any other shape—I can think of nothing I’d want more than to pass every night the way I did this last.”
Fia drew in a sharp breath, heat burning behind her eyes.
Nikolau had always pressed her—asked for more, wanting declarations and commitment and for her to leave what little she had behind in order to cleave more fully to him.
The Priest’s words, by comparison, were like a dart to the softest places of her soul.
There was no requirement in what he’d said, no additional weight or expectation settled on her.
She was as free as she had been the moment she knocked on his door, and Fia found herself moved by that as she had never been moved before.
Reaching forward, she slipped her hand around the back of his neck, shifted herself a little closer, and kissed the Priest, her mouth warm and soft against his own.
At first, he seemed too surprised to respond.
There was the briefest instant where he hesitated and did not move beneath her touch.
Then his own hand reached out, tangling in the waves of her long, loose hair.
Fia was hungry for his touch—all but starving for it—and she pressed him with her lips, asking for more, opening slowly to him until they sat half-upright in bed and he took full advantage of what she offered, deepening their kiss into something expectant and languid, the velvet slide of his tongue against hers a promise of things to come.
But they would not come, Fia warned herself as she broke away and scrambled to her feet, flush with both desire and despair. She would not do anything that would add to her heartbreak if what she had dreamed came to pass.
Without a word, Fia gathered up Justus and left the room.
She had not spoken to the Invers’ Priest since, though thoughts of him plagued her as she kept vigil at the feet of her goddess.
Only when the sun dropped below the horizon and Raea’s visage finally traded sunlight for starlight did Fia shift and blink, breaking free of her tormented reverie.
She straightened and tilted her head from side to side, trying unsuccessfully to work the knots from her neck.
Slowly, the gathering dark returned her to herself.
She realized, with a twist of shame, that her presence in the chapel had been a disturbance to the entire order of the cloister.
Every day since she had come to it, the sorias sang before their altar and their goddess, raising their voices in worship at dawn, at noon, at sundown.
But Fia’s vigil had gone unbroken, and as she thought over the blur of fragmented desires and regrets and ambitions that had been that day, she recalled hearing hymns of light rising from the beach.
When she stood and turned, she found Matria Dolenza waiting, seated near the door with her back against the wall, just as Fia had sat to nurse Justus Inver.
“Have you chosen a path for yourself, child?” Dolenza asked.
Fia nodded. Her Matria did not press any further, merely sitting as Fia offered her a low obeisance and left the chapel.
The well-swept stone floors of the cloister were cool beneath her feet as she moved through its corridors, then out into the vast dooryard hemmed with citrus and olive trees that stretched between the cloister and its outer walls.
On the cloister’s threshold, she hesitated.
Raea’s house kept its gates forever open and welcoming, and poised between them, Fia turned back to fix an image of home in her mind.
Heat radiated from its stones even under starlight and moonlight; life sprang green and abundant in every nook and corner.
Pressing a kiss to her fingers, Fia brushed them briefly against the outer wall.
Then she set off into the night, with no more than the kirtle on her back and her name and her goddess mark to call her own.
By the time Fia caught up to the royal procession, they were in Inverlyn again, arriving in the castle’s outer courtyard.
It was strange, indeed, to walk into that gray and forbidding stronghold choked with milling guards and travelers, and feel that she was on familiar ground.
Fia ignored the sudden change in her spirits as she walked through the castle gates—an echo of what she’d felt at the cloister.
A sense of homecoming. She steeled herself, refusing to allow this place to feel so to her.
It was a den of wolves and a danger at best, not somewhere to be comforted by.
Glora stood at the courtyard’s far end, waiting with a bevy of servants to oversee the chaos of disbanding the royal traveling party.
Fia noticed the way the chatelaine’s eyes roamed over the royal party and settled on the Priest. For a moment, Glora watched him, and there was something in her focused attention that tugged at the postulant.
As if warned by the weight of Fia’s regard, Glora’s gaze shifted, and she beckoned the postulant over to her.
Reluctantly, and with little grace, Fia went.
“Didn’t expect to see you return,” Glora said with surprising satisfaction. “But you’ve dealt fairly with our little prince, so I’m not sorry you’re back.”
Startled, Fia locked her eyes on the chatelaine. “I… thank you. Where is the queen?”
Glora’s face softened, another entirely unlooked-for turn of events. “Gone straight to the sanctuary, to make her prayers to our gods. She gave orders that no one’s to disturb her.”
“And Justus? I was delayed on the road, or he’d be in my keeping.”
“Priest,” Glora called, her voice going rougher as she summoned him. “The nurse is back. Said she’ll take the boy.”
Fia watched the Priest make his way to them with infinite care, Justus in one arm, phelamon cane sweeping the ground as he navigated the minefield of crates and chests and oddments that was the courtyard in the midst of a royal return.
“Fia,” the Priest said. He handed Justus to her, and Fia took the baby eagerly, gathering him to herself with all the thwarted love she carried for Miriel.
“Ariana’s in some trouble,” the Priest said, drawing Fia a little away from Glora, who kept stealing interested, calculating glances at them.
“She means to keep a vigil at the hearth goddess’s altar until dawn tomorrow.
It’s not a practice of ours, and she’s only done it three times before—when she lost the two pregnancies before Celina, and when Orden hadn’t yet decided what to do about his moon-marked child. ”