Chapter XXXIV
XXXIV
Someday, when the time is right, I will prise everything from your hands.
Honoria, the throne of our father, the legacy of our forebearers, the children of your loins, the bride of your heart.
As you stripped me of rank and inheritance and youth, I will divest you of all you hold dear.
Then, with nothing left to your name, you will come crawling to me.
You will beg for the lowest place in my household, and rather than giving you the solace of death, I will keep you alive in your misery.
I will have you watch me make everything that was yours my own.
This is what I plan in rare moments of charity. More often, I think I will kill you. And I will use Ariana Lyrien as the knife.
—FROM AFON CAERVALLIN TO ORDEN INVER
Two things kept Ariana alive on her way through the mountains.
First, the double-edged knowing that someone had died in her stead.
It cut at her constantly, that though she’d been raised for martyrdom, instead she’d made a martyr of someone else.
Ariana could not bear to render someone else’s sacrifice an empty one, even when the very fact of it filled her with leaden despair.
She thought of the girl burning in her place.
Thought of her children, scattered across the Hand to be raised motherless and fatherless.
Thought of Orden, always and always and always.
And she thought of jumping. Of taking the one extra step at a cliff’s edge that would grant her oblivion.
Barring that, there was the tantalizing idea of simply stopping.
Curling in on herself in the lee of some seldom-traveled mountain pass, and letting the world whittle her down to bones.
But while the knowledge that someone had died for her kept her from inertia, it was the memory of home that drove Ariana on.
Like a phantom, she recalled Lyria’s house.
Three floors of soaring, bone-white athalon stone rising skyward, polished to a mirror shine and topped by a row of spires.
The glass of the cloister windows glittered blue-white, and into every window was set a filigree of nightglass chips.
A jewel box by day, Lyria’s house could only be fully appreciated after sundown, for when darkness fell, the cloister both reflected the glint of stars in its gleaming walls, and added to their numbers with the glow of the nightglass that ornamented it.
It was a constellation in its own right, and Ariana had always felt that within her cloister, she’d left the troubles of the world behind and ascended into a purer, more peaceful realm.
She needed sanctuary badly now. More than ever before.
Without some respite, she feared the wounds to her spirit would become fatal.
She’d seen Corrinians like that, following the battle summer.
Walking and going about their business, but dead on the inside.
They’d been casualties of war as surely as any broken and lifeless body.
So Ariana fled to the haven that had shaped her entire existence.
For the first week of travel in Honorian land, she wore the thin veils of a plague survivor, who often hid their faces and their skin, indelibly marred by the ravages of disease.
By and by she left off the veils, realizing that no one was looking for a slight, hollow-eyed woman with black hair.
Honoria believed its treasonous queen was dead, and few outside of Inverlyn had ever seen her face.
The mountains seemed interminable and then, after two weeks of walking and begging for her bread or harvesting roadside herbs or going hungry, the peaks dropped away into foothills.
She crossed the broad and rushing River Went at Dedisco Flats, and there the rolling land of Corrin began.
Having been so long away, Ariana was shocked by the devastation that still persisted seven years after war.
It was one thing to hear that Corrin remained a wasteland, its formerly green meadows rendered a torturous dust bowl of bare earth, and another entirely to see it.
Wildfires still sprang up to consume anything green that dared to grow, a final legacy of the witchsmoke that had scarred the ground and still lay latent upon it.
Ariana stumbled across several of the unnatural fires—patches of sullenly burning flames, which seemed to feed off nothing but the dead soil.
The cloister, though—the cloister was just as she remembered it.
From a distance, she could see it waiting, a refuge of serenity and light.
Ariana came within view of home at twilight and stood for a long time, watching the great sweep of the night sky grow gem-bright with stars, reflected and amplified by the small, contained galaxy of Lyria’s house.
It was only upon drawing closer that she realized even Lyria’s last shrine had changed.
The first thing Ariana noticed as she carried on was the smell, of refuse and waste and boiled vegetables.
In all her memories, the air around Lyria’s cloister was breathtakingly sweet, blowing in clear and cool from the mountains and carrying the scent of a thousand meadow flowers.
The second thing was the clutter and claptrap scattered around the cloister’s walls and grounds, invisible at a distance but apparent from nearer by.
There were crates and abandoned carts and bits of broken furniture everywhere, forming a labyrinth of cast-off objects for her to weave through.
And a sea of torches was springing to life on the cloister’s far side, toward the north.
A slum to match the refuse heap here to the south, no doubt.
It was not until Ariana stood within the shadow of the cloister itself and heard the sounds of many horses, the clatter and jangle of equipment, and the murmur of Caervallin voices that she realized the encampment to the north was no assembly of refugees.
It was Afon, and he’d laid aside any pretense of bandits or renegades or official disinterest, descending on Corrin with an army.
As Ariana approached the great central doors of her home with halting steps, she found him waiting for her, lounging within the alcove that surrounded the entrance. When she drew near, Afon straightened and nodded his head in commendation, his welcoming smile gleaming white in the shadows.
“Well done, little star,” he said. “It did take quite a push to make you strike Orden at last, but here we are. Well done, indeed.”
Ariana stood and watched him, choosing silence as her defense.
“Do you know how many times I tried for Orden over the years?” Afon asked. “Nearly a dozen. And I never could do him lasting harm. He and I are brothers in that—the moment the Beloved Three chose a knife for us, no one else was permitted to do the cutting.”
Though she did not speak, Ariana could not help the look of confusion that flitted across her face.
“Oh yes,” Afon said with immense satisfaction. “We were, the both of us, invulnerable to anyone except you. Now Orden is gone and only I am left. How greatly I shall treasure you in his absence—I shall wrap you up and never let you come to harm.”
The words were a threat rather than a reassurance, and Afon’s widening grin was a terrible thing to behold. Involuntarily, Ariana took a step back, only to find a contingent of Caervallin guards behind her.
“I give you a choice,” Afon said, moving forward until he left the cloister’s shadow and torchlight gilded his battered armor. “The same choice I gave your husband. Do as I bid you, or Lyria’s last house burns.”
Ariana blinked. Pieces began to fall into place.
“What did you bid him?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“To make a new war against me, of course. He had no taste for it, but he pursued it for your sake. He said—now how did he phrase it? It will not break her heart to find me a warmonger, but it will break her to see Lyria’s light die out on the Hand.”
Looking at Afon and his torches, and the cloister shining behind him, Ariana understood one thing with perfect, agonizing clarity. No war would have kept him from his aim. Whether Orden upheld peace or sent forces against Caervallion, Afon had always intended to burn the house of stars.
“What do you bid me, then?” Ariana asked.
Afon took another step forward. She felt his hot, wanting breath on her face. Smelled the scent of old bearskin and sweat and armor grease. Saw the furious and frustrated light that gleamed, half-mad, in his eyes.
“Beg,” Afon said. “On your knees, the way you knelt for him.”
Overhead, the stars shone. Beyond them, the cloister gleamed.
“No. I will never beg for you.”
Afon gestured to his guards. From among them, a dozen women were led forward, bound with ropes and gagged with strips of linen. To a one, they wore sorias’ kirtles. At their head, white-haired and slight and unbending, walked Matria Serafine.
“Lock them in,” Afon said carelessly.
As the women passed Ariana without resisting, Matria Serafine met her eyes. The old woman inclined her head, not so much a nod, but a bow. Then they carried on into the cloister that meant so much to all of them, and to Corrin, and the Hand.
The doors were shut and barred. Another guard stepped forward with a torch and a glass orb of oil that glinted strangely in the light.
Taking the oil, Afon threw the orb at the foundations of white stone.
It shattered, and a slick spread across the threshold before the doors.
Ariana watched without breathing as the torch followed.
Fire roared up from that strange oil, burning hotter and fiercer than any flames Ari had witnessed before. It engulfed the doors entirely, spreading to the walls with voracious hunger. From inside, a hymn rose, punctuated by screams.
“I expected you would be stubborn,” Afon growled. “So I arranged a reminder for you, of the price of disobedience.”
Ariana said nothing. She refused to speak.
She would not offer him another word. But her heart was an open wound within her as she thought of the sorias she’d known, and the small daughter she’d entrusted to their care.
Where was Ellimere? The thought throbbed in her, like a second pulse.
Where was her youngest daughter, marked by the goddess of stars?
“Burn any other doors you find, and set fire around the windows,” Afon ordered. “Be sure no one gets out.”
Men fanned out around the cloister to do his bidding. Only then did he fix his eyes on Ariana again.
“Well,” Afon said, striding to her and speaking low, just for the two of them to hear. “I have one last gift for you. Ewan, bring the child.”
Of course. He was too wicked and thorough not to have found Ellimere and recognized her at once.
She was her mother’s image in infant form, and a broad-shouldered guard stepped forward with the baby in arms. Ellimere had changed already, grown out of earliest infancy like Justus, the little stars so white against her skin.
When the guard settled Ellimere into Ariana’s arms, she could not help the tears that ran down her face as she held her daughter close.
The screams of sorias rose to the night sky, and Ariana looked down at her child, knowing even for this, she would not kneel. If Afon consigned Ellimere to the flames, it would be the ruin of Ariana’s heart and soul and sanity, but until whatever end, she would refuse to plead before him.
Let all the world burn. Ariana Lyrien would never give Afon the submission she’d offered to her goddess and her king.
But in this, the Beloved Three were with her.
“Ewan, Alfric,” Afon said with a sharp gesture, “you’ll see to it no harm comes to the woman or the child. If they require rough handling, so be it, but their lives are in your hands. Should either die, you and everyone you love will be forfeit. We ride for Caervallion.”
Ariana held Ellimere to her as if the child was the sole axis on which the world turned. Anguished brown eyes met starry blue, and despite the smoke and the sounds of the dying, Ellimere Lyrien smiled up at her mother.
“Enjoy her while you can,” Afon rasped, snaking an arm around Ariana’s shoulder.
She fought the urge to shrink away, thinking desperately of Fia and channeling the postulant’s unbending nature.
“When she’s a little older, she’ll take her place at my side.
I will teach her of blood and death and the dark secrets of the moon, and make a worthy successor of her.
Until then, you may manage her raising.”
Ariana fell in silently behind Afon as he set off, and guards flanked her to prevent any attempt at escape. As they went, her lips moved in a soundless oath.
By Gentle Lyria, goddess of my daughter’s mark, let her be a blazing star.
Grant her endurance that never falters, belief that will not shatter, strength that is beyond understanding.
Let her withstand and outlast tyrants, and be a harbinger of peace wherever she goes.
Should I be anything but a support and a shield to her, may the merciful stars strike me dead.