Chapter 32 Maeve
Maeve
Maeve knelt before Oakmoor’s shrine. Rain and wind battered her from every direction, the mud soaking through her dress cold enough to burn. The saint stared back impassively as she bent her head before it. The act felt wrong. Blasphemous, somehow.
Anger fizzled in her throat.
It was all coercion. All manipulation. Stealing memories and calling them answered prayers. A structure built around discrediting the people who’d given their lives to support it. She’d been encouraged to stretch the limits of her piety in every way she could, and for what?
Her whole fucking life… gone. Taken from her before she even knew what it meant to live.
Digging her hand into her pocket, she withdrew her coined icon and laid it in the mud beneath the shrine. Pressed it deeper into the earth. After fifteen years of devotion, she was as sloughed smooth as the coin.
Footsteps sounded behind her.
She didn’t turn and look as she got to her feet; she didn’t need to. She knew he’d come. Knew he would follow her into the storm, into the reckoning.
Rain slid down Jude’s exposed nape and darkened his collar in splattering bursts as he knelt before the shrine. His knees fitted into the muddied divots hers had left behind. A saint turned penitent.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. He spoke his apology into the ground, into the shrine that had long governed their lives.
It wasn’t holy, but it felt like a prayer all the same.
‘Maeve, I’m so sorry. Taking the letter was a mistake.
I feared what it contained when I took it, and I couldn’t bear—’ his voice broke.
He scraped both hands over the back of his head, fingers digging in.
‘I wasn’t allowed to be brought gently to the truth.
Some part of me, mistaken as it was, hoped to be that safe person for you.
Even when I hated you. Even when I wanted you gone.
But who was I to be your anchor when I’d been the one to call the waves? ’
She stepped closer, sliding her fingers up the back of his neck.
A long exhale left his parted lips as he rested his head against her lower stomach, eyes shut.
She moved her hand to the side of his throat, felt it as he swallowed.
Rain coursed over his face, washing him clean.
The moment lengthened and stretched with unspoken possibility.
She wanted to pull at it until it unravelled.
‘Maeve.’ Jude’s voice was a harsh whisper. ‘I need to say it. I need you to understand fully. No more secrets between us.’
Her chest compressed, panic digging claws into her ribs, her sternum. She couldn’t.
She wrenched away, putting her back to him as though it could stop the words she knew he was preparing to say.
Behind her, Jude repeated her name, an edge to his voice this time.
Heat brushed against her back. The ghost of his touch skated down her arm, pressing something into her palm and closing her fingers around it. A coined icon.
She uncurled her fingers to look at it. Jude’s face stared back at her, etched in metal.
‘I don’t want you to say it,’ she begged. ‘Please… please don’t say it. I don’t want to know.’
Jude slid his hand down the sodden rope of her braid, pulling her head back against his shoulder. Around the jut of her hip, his finger dug in. Soft lips went to her ear. ‘They’ve marked you as one of us, sending you here. Nothing less than blasphemy brought you to me.’
Maeve trembled. He was an open flame. Any closer, and she’d burn.
‘There’s no difference between us,’ he said, each word hammering at her carefully erected walls.
‘In the eyes of the Abbey, you’re a saint, too.
Exiled for your ability. The elders take our magic for their own, sacrificing our memories along the way.
Prayers aren’t real, Maeve. No miracles have happened.
It’s all memory manipulation masked over with the mark of sainthood. ’
She shook her head, pressing back against his shoulder.
‘Look at what they did to Siobhan, worn thin by prayers. Look at your own memories. Even before this, before your exile, they were using you,’ Jude said against her ear. ‘The Abbey chose you long ago.’
A choked sound broke past her guard. ‘I’m not marked. I don’t have the tattoo. I can’t be a saint.’
‘The tattoo is a facade like everything else,’ he replied. ‘The elders can’t see who’s a saint. They can only see when the gold starts appearing. Then, they take you. They mark you as a sign of ownership. It’s a brand disguised as an honour. It means nothing. Nothing.’
The hand on her braid slipped around to press against her shoulder, right where the mark ought to lie. Rain coated her face, freezing on her overheated skin. ‘You’re still a saint, with or without the tattoo.’
‘Why let me go?’ she pleaded. ‘Why not mark me?’
Jude paused. For a long moment, only the harsh sound of his breathing filled the empty space around her questions.
‘You’re an iconographer. They need your skills perhaps more than anyone else, both as an artist and as someone with memory magic.
The Abbey knows they can use your work to control us.
They sent you here to paint me, didn’t they? ’
He turned her to face him. She tracked the path of emotion across his face – desperate for anything he’d give her, even disappointment, even hurt.
In a moment of helpless weakness, she thought looking at him would always feel like looking at the moon.
The darkest parts hidden behind brilliant light.
His hand brushed hers, their fingers twisting together. Despite the fear in her chest – memories of Siobhan, of the Goddenwood, of everything they stood to lose – Maeve squeezed tight.
‘Jude,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know how to bear it.’
He reached for her again, this time his touch was an offering. Arms banding across her back, pulling her tight to his body. His cheek resting atop her head. Merging them into one beating heart.
A hug. He was hugging her.
She pressed her nose under his ear, breathing him in. Her eyes drifted shut, thinking of a hearth long gone cold and wind carried from snow-covered moors. She slid her hand across his ribcage until her palm rested over the words etched into his back. Searching, finding.
‘Jude,’ she whispered again, pleading this time. For what, she didn’t know.
He held her for what felt like hours as she listened to the evenness of his breath.
Would she ever have the chance to be in his arms again?
Fearing the answer was no, she held him tighter, committing every heartbeat to memory.
She wanted to turn her head and place her lips against his neck.
Draw so close she would no longer be able to separate where he ended, and she began. But all she could do was hold him.
She, him—
Both of them saints.
Both of them in danger.