Page 12 of Down Comes the Night

Shuddering, she pressed onward, following miles of the Muri’s oil-slick path through the city until it led her past the gates and into an open field. There, mist-veiled and crouched like a gargoyle in the shivering grass, was the abbey that housed the Order of the Maiden. The sight of it struck her as cold as the wind battering her face, stripped her down to a hopeless longing. When she was twelve years old, readying herself to leave for the military academy, she had gathered all her robes and sunk them in the river. Dramatic, admittedly. But it was as good as a promise to herself. She would never come back.

Now, facing down the enormity of it, Wren wondered how she’d ever believed she could escape the abbey’s gravitational pull. Her fingers and shoulders ached from cold and the weight of her luggage. Only another mile to go before she reached the abbey’s gates.

With every step, the Order of the Maiden loomed closer. Its bell towers and turrets scraped the clouds, and the tracery of its massive rose window shimmered like a spider’s web in the gray sunlight. It depicted the face of the Maiden—the first face of the three-headed Goddess alongside the Mother and Crone—with her golden hair woven with wildflowers. Once Wren passed through these doors, nobody but the queen could free her.

I hope you’re as persuasive as you think you are, Una.

She couldn’t bring herself to take another step. These walls could not be her world; she had seen too much beyond them to be contenthere. Standing in the courtyard, the wind tugging at the hem of her traveling cloak, Wren swore this place remembered her. She could feel it like the chill of a lingering gaze.

Because someone was looking at her.

She snapped her attention to the west gallery, where a dark silhouette waited in a window. Wren staggered back a step—but then, as she let herself focus, she saw who it was.

Mother Heloise.

Dressed in her dark robes and wimple, she held a cracked leather belt loose in her hands. Wren had never felt its sting, although she likely deserved it. She’d never had the constitution for hours of adoration, for reading the borderline erotic devotional poetry of saints. She’d even tried to escape a few times in her first weeks there. But Heloise believed in implied threats. The promise of punishment controlled her students far more effectively than its execution. Lectures, however… Those, she did not hold back.

You have a gift,she would tell Wren in her stern, rattling voice.No family. No faith. No prospects. Only your magic. Will you waste your life here, making mischief and wallowing in self-pity? Or will you make something of yourself?

Heloise had given her an opportunity, a gift more precious than any gem. An education in medicine and magic. And with it, a chance to be valuable. Not a royal bastard hidden away behind the abbey’s walls, but a healer of the Queen’s Guard. Someone who could be useful if she couldn’t be loved.

Now, Heloise stared down the slope of her nose with a look of palpable disappointment. Then she turned away from the window and slunk into the shadowed hallway. Wren flinched as if Mother Heloise had cracked the belt over her knuckles.

Drawing in a steadying breath, she approached the front gate. The stone tympanum perched above it, and all she could see in the weather-beaten carvings were anguished faces and blank eyes upturned to the Goddess. And higher still, the predawn sky was scattered with stars that glittered cold as shards of ice.

Wren rang the bell at the front gate and waited until the woodendoors creaked open. Tried to stand tall as their shadows stretched toward her, inevitable. On the other side was a woman—Sister Mel, who’d caught Wren weeping more times than she cared to admit during her first month there.

“By the Goddess! Is that you, Sister Wren?”

“Yes.” Wren blinked away the sting of tears. She wouldn’t be caught out again. “I’m back.”

The sickbay of the Order of the Maiden echoed with consumptive coughs and groans. On a backless stool, Wren worked on her third patient of the day, a woman sporting a broken wrist. Truly, the universe had a twisted sense of humor—or a sense of cruel justice she had to admire. She’d spent all afternoon trying not to dissolve into hysterical laughter, which seemed to concern her patient some. Even now, her forehead was pleated with worry as Wren worked with her mouth screwed tight.

Awash with the glow of a hundred healing hands, the room seemed to swim with cold candlelight. Rows of beds stretched from wall to wall like pews in the nave. In too many ways, being among them felt like being a child again, the eternal discomfort of her hunched back, the tension in her hands, the infuriating rasp of rough-spun fabric. Her habit, as horrible and itchy as she remembered, was earthy brown. The color represented the symbol of the Goddess’s fundamental mystery, the dirt in which things grew and were buried. Wren, however, simply thought it was ugly.

Acolytes of the Order of the Maiden believed healing to be a divine pursuit. A goodness done so that the Goddess’s favor might magnify threefold. Although she hadn’t lived here in years, memories of her lessons still plagued her: cold stone walls at her back, hard wooden benches beneath her, crumbling theological manuscripts in her hands.

The Goddess has bestowed the world with a gift most holy, the embodiment of her divinity,Saint Gia, the Order’s founder, had written.Immense knowledge—one that, without her light, grows cold. Forevery step toward understanding our impermanent forms, let us take three steps toward understanding her Mystery.

But Wren had never found comfort in faith. Here, healing was nothing but a grim obligation. Over the past week, when she crawled into bed with her every joint aching from the overuse of her magic, Wren’s older Sisters told her it wasn’t always so awful, so busy.

In three hundred years of war, there had been quiet periods. But devout Queen Isabel had renewed military efforts with an unprecedented fervor, and those left behind still suffered. Honorably discharged soldiers, seeking management for chronic pain. War orphans, wallowing in illness after nights spent in the cold. Common people, injured on the job but unable to quit.

As she worked, Wren felt a familiar prickle on the back of her neck. Staring. Her Sisters’ eyes burned, not always unkindly, with the same question.Why are you here?

The weight of their judgment piled on her shoulders. Maybe she was imagining it, but she swore it felt like pity. It wasn’t exactly undeserved, when her failure would be circulating in every gossip column and tavern in the city by now. She could imagine the headlines now:Paper Queen Isabel finally wearies of keeping her sister’s bastard on the government payroll.

Wren pushed away the bitterness and tried to settle into the familiar process of healing. Tried to find it in herself to feel satisfied, but it was mindless, grueling work. She would go mad with it, the repetition of her days, how the scope of her world coiled around itself smaller and smaller. Yes, she was helping people. But what was treating one man’s gout, one woman’s broken wrist, against countless dying in a war?

This was just so far from what she wanted. So far from where she belonged, tracking down whoever took Byers from her. Whoever might still take Una from her. Even if Una survived and traced the disappearances back to Vesria, war would come. Una would see combat again—without Wren to keep her alive.

No matter what,she thought,I have to be reinstated.

Wren forced a smile for her patient as the glow of the Healing Touch faded from her hands. A weary numbness washed over her in its wake. “Alright. You’re healed.”

“Thank you.” The woman’s eyes were round with wonder. “I can’t ever repay you, Sister.”

Before Wren could reply, gnarled fingers wrapped around her elbow. Wren turned to find Mother Heloise looming over her, a string of wooden prayer beads clanking around her neck. Exactly as Wren remembered, Heloise looked like an angry rook, although time had stolen more of the color from her hair and wrinkled her golden-brown skin. To see her again brought on an emotion Wren couldn’t articulate. This was the woman who had raised her, who had trained her alongside the other apprentices. But there was no joy in this reunion. Only a cool recognition.