Page 105 of The Castle & the Cloister

He pulled back at once, wiping his mouth on one sleeve and turning his face up to Fia as a question.

“I want to wait for you,” Fia said, stepping down from the altar. The Priest was on his feet at once. With a low, appreciative sound, he spun Fia so her back was to him, and she bent, bracing herself with both hands splayed out against the altar of the god of war. There was a moment of anticipation where Fia could feel and hear nothing but the vast silence of the cavern sanctuary, and then the Priest thrust into her, drawing a cry from Fia as she felt herself fill with him. She hadn’t owned, even to herself, how badly she wanted this—the Priest inside her, enveloped in her, the two of them born for antagonism but moving in perfect accord. One of his hands fell to her hip, and the other snaked around her, back to the place that Fia knew now would always, always be waiting for his touch.

Gradually, the rhythm between them built, growing quicker, deeper, more desperate. Fia was on the brink of distraction, driven wild by what was rising within her. She couldn’t bear up under it, she would fall apart in a fit of temper or anguish or the storm of weeping she’d been staving off, she would—

The Priest shuddered and groaned, and the sound raised Fia’s inner fire into an inferno. She drove herself against him and the light in her was a torrent, was a blaze, was a solar flare as the ecstasy of Raea’s Gift shot through her, a molten fount of pleasure surging through her limbs as she shook and came and the Priest came with her.

Briefly, they stayed as they were, Fia supported by the war god’s altar, the Priest standing on the spot where Silith’s last Matria had died. When they drew apart, Fia set to tidying herself with a clean altar rag the Priest handed to her wordlessly, before going to retrieve his shirt. It didn’t seem that there was need for speech between them—Nikolau had always wanted to talk afterward, but Fia preferred silence. Returning to her, the Priest pulled Fia into the protective circle of his arms, and they stood so for a long while.

“I left you something, in your cell,” Fia murmured at last. “A gift, to mark the beginning of Justus’s reign and your regency. Make sure you get it soon. It won’t keep.”

The Priest nodded, and reluctantly Fia stepped away.

“I’m going back up to the king,” she said. “I’ll see you tonight at the coronation, if not before.”

“Fia,” the Priest said, stopping her when she was halfway across the altar rise.

She paused, turning to look back at him. “Yes?”

A brief silence fell, during which she felt the weight of things unspoken between them, as vast and troubling as the Invers’ mountain itself.

“Nothing,” the Priest said eventually. “Never mind.”

Fia was already out into the darkness, her feet following the grooved path that led to the stairs and the upper tunnel, when the Priest caught up, taking hold of her and spinning her back into his arms. He held her once more, burying his face in her hair and speaking with barely restrained passion.

“I want you to know something,” he said roughly. “You may not trust me fully, and I do not ask that of you, but if I live, and if I hold the throne, someday you’ll look at Honoria and see what I’ve made of it. And you will realize that every move toward the better world you spoke of was for and because of you. Not for the gods. Not for the goddesses. Not for a cloister or a clan or any other power. For you, Fiametta Raeana, as you stand before me here and now.”

For a moment, Fia clung to him, everything in her singing at the force and goodness of his offering. She did not deserve it, but oh, it worked like balm on her wounded soul.

Without a word, she pulled herself away and melted into the dark.

XXXII

I will be still though the cruel thorn tears me.

I will not move beneath the blade of the knife.

I will not cry out though the burning dark blinds me,

For in perfect peace I pour out my life.

—A LYRIEN MARTYR’S PRAYER

If he was honest with himself, the Priest was trying to find ways to render Inverlyn and the castle a temptation to Fia. With the legitimization of Justus’s kingship only an hour away, and the Priest’s preparations for Ariana’s great reprieve in place, he could feel Fia’s departure creeping toward him. And though the Priest doubted there was any use attempting to push against her dogged, inflexible loyalty to Raea’s cloister, he couldn’t help but try to sway her. He could use Fia, not only because she was strong and clever and undaunted. He could use her because when she stood by him, he himself felt possessed of those traits. But she was leaving him, and he would not be able to make her stay.

The Priest stood near Orden’s bed, readying himself and Justus for the ceremony to come, while Fia lay in a copper tub by the hearth, submerged to the neck in steaming, lavender-scented water. A cup of summer wine sat on a little table beside her, and a woven robe Glora had produced lay close at hand, soft as an early spring cloud. The Priest had been precise in the instructions he’d given for the sake of his postulant’s comfort, and confirmed the arrangements himself.

“I’ve never done this,” Fia said idly, and there was a new weariness in her voice, which had been there since she appeared in the cavern sanctuary with a replacement for Ariana. “In the mountains we washed in the stream, if at all, and Raea’s daughters go down to the sea, or use a pitcher and basin.”

“I’m in agreement with your sorias, then,” the Priest said. “A bath like that seems too much of a liability to me.”

He’d had his own wash earlier and was dressing for the ceremony. Hadrian once again suggested—though his suggestions were pointed as commands—that the Priest ought to look the part of a king, even if the title would be held by Justus. But the Priest had decided at the last moment to flout Hadrian’s assumed authority. He’d never been anything but a Priest in that sanctuary, and he wouldn’t present himself before his gods and ghosts as anything else, whatever the Invers had to say about it.

“Wait,” Fia said as he moved to pull on his shirt, and there was a sound of falling water. She padded over to him, dripping wet and radiating heat. “Let me take the bandage off that wound I stitched. It ought to have air now.”

Obligingly, the Priest sat and let her unbind the linen circling his upper arm. Justus lay in his bassinet, resplendent in an infant’s gown intricately decorated with metallic thread. Carian had worn it, as Darias’s eldest son, and Darias had worn it as well. Fia had complained that it was an impractical mode of dress for a baby—Justus, she said, was fascinated by the glinting embroidery at his wrists, and kept vainly attempting to put the sleeves into his mouth.

Beside the Priest, Fia suddenly fell still.