Page 111 of The Castle & the Cloister

“And I swear,” she said, her chin jutting out defiantly, her eyes sparking, “that whatever it costs—my own body or blood or conscience—I will see peace flourish across all of the Hand before the span of days granted to me has ended. ButIwill pay the price for it. Myself, and no other. If I fail in this oath, may the sun strike me dead.”

Dolenza let out a slow breath. “An ambitious oath, and more than any of us have asked for in centuries. I see you’ll be a Matria of my own bent. One who never chooses to do things simply, when you can walk a harder and thornier path instead.”

“I was born for hardship and trouble. How could I have it any other way?”

And thinking of all she’d done and all she had yet to do, Fiametta Raeana smiled.

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 stepat 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 stillsprang 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.