Chapter XXXIII #2
“Fee!” she squealed, and Fia buried her face in the girl’s black hair.
Even here, she wasn’t entirely separated from the Priest or Ariana, Glora or Orden, Nikolau or Hadrian or any of the people she’d striven beside and against on the Invers’ mountain, whether they’d been friend or foe.
Celina would always serve as a reminder of her time there, and the things she’d said and done.
“Matria Dolenza,” Fia said as Celina returned to the absorbing job of pulling beans from their stems. “Let’s not drag this out any longer than we need to. Will you or will you not hear my fidelity oath?”
Dolenza rocked onto her heels and wiped the back of one hand across her forehead. When she fixed her eyes on Fia, her face was serene.
“No. I won’t.”
Fia had expected a mighty flare of temper to rise up in her if it came to this. But she felt nothing. One rejection had been shocking. The second disheartening. A third felt only inevitable.
“Is there any other service I can perform for the cloister, in order to earn a position here?” Fia asked.
“I can’t help with trade or records, for I don’t have my letters yet and can’t figure either.
But I could help with the laundry, the gardens, the children.
With the harvest. With making the houseless welcome.
There are many things I could do without bearing a soria’s title or privileges.
I have reconciled myself to that—I told you before that I would not have the cloister unless I served my goddess here, but I can serve her in lesser ways.
I can make do with even the faintest cast-off rays of her light. I know that now.”
Dolenza watched Fia closely. “You wouldn’t rather return to Inverlyn? You’ve made friends there and could have a position at court if it’s what you wanted. They’d keep you very comfortably—you could govern Honoria yourself, standing beside the Priest.”
“No,” Fia said, the word coming out sharper than she’d intended. “I know myself too well for that. I’d lose who I am—become one of them in time. Eventually I would convince myself that Inver fire is only another form of Raea’s light.”
“Isn’t it?” Dolenza asked. “Or rather, couldn’t it be, perhaps not yet, but someday? If that fire was tempered with peace and mercy? Orden Inver, for all his flaws, was not so far wrong. It was only ever his means that were lacking.”
Fia said nothing, not knowing how to answer.
“Do you know what is required of a soria, child?” Dolenza pressed. “Of the women who inhabit the role you’ve so stubbornly pursued?”
“Obedience to Raea,” Fia said quickly. “I can do that. I can submit to her will if I have the cloister walls around me.”
Dolenza shook her head. “It’s not just obedience. A soria must be humble and temperate in disposition, content with her lot in life, and a strict adherent of the blood prohibition. Do you feel you can fulfill those requirements? Do you feel you have embodied them during your time apart from us?”
Miserably, Fia looked away. How quickly her returning joy had dissipated.
“No,” she said. “Certainly not.”
“And do you know what is required of my role?” Dolenza asked. “Of Raea’s voice and hands and highest representative?”
“Perfect faith?” Fia ventured. “To be a soria like no other?”
“In Lyria’s order, yes. But I was never a soria.
” Dolenza smiled at Fia’s shock. “The requirements for Raea’s Matria preclude her ever having been one.
We must be ruthless. Relentless. Forever striving toward greater peace and a better world.
Willing to do anything necessary in pursuit of that goal.
Do you feel you could fulfill those requirements? ”
Fia could not draw breath.
“What… what are you asking me?” she managed at last.
“Fiametta Raeana,” Dolenza said, reaching out and taking Fia’s hand in her own, earth-stained grip.
“I can never hear your fidelity oath. But I would hear your ascendancy oath gladly, and train you up as my successor. From the moment you arrived at this cloister, heavy with your child and vicious in your advocacy for her, I’ve been considering your fitness for the role.
Oh, you needed to be stretched a little—pushed into a less narrow frame of mind.
But time after time, you have risen to the occasion, working peace in the face of daunting odds, and emerging with your faith and devotion to this cloister intact.
Do you think I’m unaware that Orden Inver would have offered you my place, and that you meant to refuse?
I can think of no one else I trust more to assume the mantle of Matria when I choose to step aside. ”
Disbelief colored Fia’s words when she spoke.
“Well-informed as you are, Matria, you must know all that I did in Inverlyn. Things no daughter of Raea ought to. I killed a man on a pagan altar, and a soria as well. I brought about the deaths of others, in how I maneuvered the Priest into power. I spoke on your behalf and committed you to an alliance you may find unwanted or distasteful. I cannot possibly serve as Raea’s hands and voice after your time is done. ”
“I know all of this,” Dolenza said. “None of it comes as a surprise. But I know this too—while you and the Inver court were housed here, I was sent a bloodborne dream every night, as a warning. In it, I saw Honoria plunged into new war, and the people used up as fodder. I did not accept the future laid out in that dream, and refused your oath in the hope that you’d return to Inverlyn and forestall what I witnessed.
You were not part of the dream, only someone I believed I could depend upon.
Now here we stand, with a new regent and an infant king on the throne.
You’ve guided our nation well and taught the Invers they needn’t only follow the strongest or most brutal among them—that they can view cunning and caution as strength, and a child as the potential for a brighter future.
That’s something no one’s managed in two hundred years. ”
“I don’t think I did all that,” Fia said, glancing down at the bright pods in her half-full basket. “If you could have heard the way the Priest spoke at Justus’s coronation, and the way the court received it—they hate our goddesses. And they hate us too.”
“Does your Priest hate us?” Dolenza asked. “Does he hate our goddesses?”
“No. He even bears Silith’s mark. But he must play the part, and I worry he will forget it is a role only, and not who he truly is.”
“As he leads, so may his people follow, rather than the reverse. There is hope for Honoria now like we have not known in a very long time. And perhaps hope for Caervallion, too, with Ariana finally at rest.”
Fia frowned. “I don’t see why Ariana should have anything to do with Caervallion.”
And Dolenza laid out the entire heartbreaking truth as Fia listened numbly.
How Ariana had been sworn to the role of cultellus and given the lives of Orden and Afon by the Beloved Three.
How, in the strength and purity of her belief, she’d striven to preserve those lives rather than end them, only to finally give in and put down the Inver king she loved.
“Her story is one to weep over,” Dolenza said solemnly, replanting a small bean bush which Celina had inadvertently pulled up by the roots.
“We had considered—the other daughters of the Three and I—going as far as to remove Ariana ourselves, in order to deal with the Hand’s unwanted kings.
But to harm or hinder a cultellus brings terrible retribution from the goddesses.
That trouble is at an end, though, and Afon can be removed from power at last. Gwylen will do it handily—she’s tried so often over the years and chafed at every failure. ”
Fia bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
Dolenza had not spared herself in the telling of Ariana’s tale.
She’d been frank about her own complicity—how she’d pushed Orden hard toward the possibility of seizing the cloister, in order to force Ariana’s hand.
So reluctantly, Fia met the Matria’s honesty with forthrightness of her own.
“Ariana Inver is alive. The Priest and I spared her, and sent her down the mountain paths. I’m not certain anyone could tell you where she is now.”
For the briefest moment, Dolenza went ashen beneath her dusky skin. But her discomfiture was gone so quickly, it was as if Fia had imagined it.
“We will have a more difficult road to walk, then, in the coming days,” Dolenza said, “and I will need a strong successor by my side more than ever. Still, I will not force your assent. If you feel yourself unfit and refuse the role, we’ll find a place for you.
You’ll be a soria in all but name, and part of our life here.
But I want you as my intendant. I see no impediment to that. ”
For a time, Fia and Dolenza were silent, working side by side.
Between them, Celina discovered that the beans she pulled were good to eat, and had several of them in quick succession.
Fia thought of the mountain, and of the Priest and Justus.
If she was not there to guide their course, who might they become?
She thought of the cloister, of her daughter and the sorias.
If she gave up the role of Matria, who else might rise to it, and how might Miriel and the children of Raea be used by Dolenza’s successor?
Would they be spent in the pursuit of peace as Ariana had been, viewed as acceptable sacrifices on the altars of the Beloved Three?
She thought of Honoria, still embroiled in war, and Caervallion, tormented by Afon’s reign.
She thought of Corrin, slowly falling to pieces.
As she did, heat and light grew in her, and whether they were wrought of sunlight or of flame, she could not be sure.
In the end, it did not matter. What mattered was how she used them.