Page 26 of The Castle & the Cloister

At the back of the room, Corrin’s Arbiter and Arbitress stood near the door. Their inclusion in the council was a grudging concession on Orden’s part, and so Ariana zealously withheld her attention from them when they attended. Let Orden think they were present to be snubbed by the queen who’d abandoned their country in exchange for a throne. She wanted no more than for them to listen, anyhow, and to act in accordance with what they saw and heard. It was Ariana’s aim for every nation onthe Hand to have representation at Orden’s summer councils, save for Skandara, which lay beyond Honoria’s far northern border. Since the rise of the Invers, Skandara had cut itself off from all outside contact, managing its isolation with uncanny success. No one went in. No one went out.

Lastly, on the room’s south side, where a long bank of windows was thrown open to the midsummer sun, two figures stood in the blazing light. Caervallion’s ambassador, Gwylen, and Afon of Caervallion himself. The room was fraught with untested connections and unknown quantities, and awareness of it made Ariana’s skin crawl.

Golden-complexioned, with close-cropped dark hair, the Caervallin diplomat Gwylen had the most prominent goddess mark Ariana had ever seen. A milk-white patch on her neck formed the shape of a crescent moon, stretching from her jaw to her collarbone. Ariana had met traders from Caervallion during her time at Lyria’s cloister, and the ambassador dressed like most of their people—in loose robes, with a belt at the waist that held a curving knife in an embossed leather sheath.

Afon, by contrast, was fitted out for war. A powerfully built man several decades Orden’s senior, he still carried himself like a warrior. He’d donned studded leather and chain mail for the occasion, or perhaps had worn it all along the road. Despite the heat of Honorian summer, Afon had paddings of bear’s pelt beneath his armor, and while the sheath that had housed his sword hung empty—no weapons were permitted at summer council—even Orden had not dared to suggest his Caervallin guests lay aside their knives, which marked them as free citizens of their fierce northern nation.

Ariana knew all too well the damage a blade like his could do—a Caervallin knife had left the scar running from the corner of Afon’s right eye down to the edge of his mouth. She could recall every detail of the moment that wound had been given to him.

Raea and Silith’s daughters had withdrawn from Corrin, leaving only Lyria’s devout to oversee the very last of the convalescent soldiers. Both Honoria and Caervallion had sent word to Ariana’s Matria, Serafine—they would depart on the morrow, seeking the northward and southward roads.

Serafine and the rest of Lyria’s sorias were attempting to do something about the dead. There was a mass grave behind the sole remaining hospital tent, and bodies were heaped high in it. They could not be treated as the sorias usually treated the dead—the incaendium they used to desiccate a corpse and render it highly flammable had long run out. Neither could the fallen soldiers be left much longer. The smell around the grave was nigh unbearable, though Silith’s sorias had thrown layers of earth over the bodies as they were laid down. A great deal more of it was needed, and so Lyria’s daughters were digging.

Ariana was left alone to oversee the remaining convalescents, who would be collected by some emissary from their respective armies shortly. She’d been exhausted and feverish the last two days, and so Serafine had given her this lighter duty. Ari sat in the close, stifling shade of the canvas enclosure and felt utterly spent. Since Raea’s daughters had left, and with them the redoubtable Fia, it had been impossible to escape full awareness of what had happened to Corrin. Everywhere Ariana looked, she found devastation. Where once the hills of their small country had been green and lush and beautiful, they were now a wasteland of pitted, sere earth, scattered with overlooked corpses and abandoned machinery of war. Honoria’s witchsmoke had tainted the soil, and Ariana feared it would be a very long time before anything grew again.

She found herself humming unconsciously, a plaintive hymn to Lyria that cried out for peace. None of the soldiers spoke—the only sounds besides Ariana’s humming were an occasional cough or shifting weight on a camp bed.

Across the tent, the flap was drawn aside, letting in a shaft of pitiless summer light. Ariana did not look up from what she was busy with, knowing the messengers from either army had little interest in exchanging pleasantries with a Corrinian soria. She was considered beneath them, and content enough that they should think so. Her hands moved rhythmically, braiding together strands of dried meadowstar. She’d found a few withering stalks of the beloved plant while out scouring the battlefield for survivors, and had collected whatever she could. The barrenness of the fields pricked her, though surely elsewhere, Corrin remained green and lively. Still, looking at the blighted earth, she could not help striving to save some part of it.

A shadow cut across her, blotting out the sun.

“What is that?” a harsh, dry voice asked. Ariana peered up but could not make out the face of the man addressing her. All she could see was the Caervallin blade he wore, and that he was armored. The rest of him was cast into silhouette by the brilliant sun.

“Meadowstar,” she answered quietly. “A curative we value greatly. I thought I might—”

Casually, the man reached out and plucked the wreath from Ariana’s hand. He let it fall, and ground it beneath the heel of one boot.

“A curative? There will be no cure for Corrin in the coming days.”

Ariana fell silent. She’d learned it was the wisest course when faced with hostility or disdain from the armies still inhabiting her land.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked. “You would not remain seated or address me so insolently if you did.”

“Forgive me,” Ariana said, looking down at the seeds of meadowstar now scattered across the hospital tent’s packed earth floor. She could gather them up later, she thought. It would be no trouble to sift them from the soil and store them in a leather pouch. Really, she ought to have done so in the first place, rather than strive to save the plant entirely. “I’ve been weak with fever; I mean no disrespect. Your men are to the northward side of the aisle. North for your home.”

“I am the north,” the dry voice said, and the man standing over her shifted so that the light gilded his profile. He wore a crown of iron and the bear crest on his shoulder. Ariana had never seen him to know him, but she’d heard Afon described. How he strode across the battlefield with a greatsword notched and pitted by the bones of those he slew. How even witchsmoke seemed unable to harm him. How in the battle’s aftermath, he gutted three of Lyria’s sorias, who dared to question his treatment of recovering Caervallin soldiers. Afon had strung the women’s kirtles up like standards and dumped their naked bodies among his own dead. Ariana had known them—Viana, Ylena, and Inora. Viana had danced her prayers to Lyria, moving like the divine. Ylena had been their most talented herbalist, white-haired and wrinkled, with decades of knowledge to draw upon. And Inora had been the youngest of them, barely out of childhood, but sweet-voiced and willing. Matria Serafine had not so much as made a complaint about their deaths. It was not the Lyrienway—they were all to understand that martyrdom in the cause of peace might come at any moment.

Her whole life, Ariana had been taught to crave a sword and the opportunity to become a perfect sacrifice. Now, when she turned inward, she found only resistance to the idea of giving this hateful warlord pleasure in any way, and surely he took his pleasure in the suffering and fear of others.

“Forgive me, my lord,” Ariana said, remaining seated. “I did not recognize you.”

Afon let out a disgusted snort. “You know me now. So kneel.”

There was anger radiating off him in waves. Ariana could not have caused such bitter fury, and yet it all centered implacably on her. In that moment, she saw her death.

Corrin had no predators to speak of. An occasional gorhawk came down on drafts of wind to seize sheep, but for the most part, it was a gentle land. Only once before that summer had Ariana witnessed the work of a creature bent on destruction. A mountain cat had somehow found its way into the valley and, crazed with the unexpected abundance it found there, killed many of the Corrinians’ yearling horses and young kine. The cat had not eaten most of them, either. It disemboweled its prey for amusement, devouring the fallen animals’ tongues and eyes and nothing more. Matria Serafine was forced to send a missive to Gileta and have a Silithien soria dispatched to poison the beast.

Ariana could remember the way the slain animals looked, smeared with blood, their faces twisted in pain and bewilderment. She remembered the body of the cat, too, sleek and muscled and frightening even in death. Its incisors had been the length of her hand, and somehow, there was still fire in its lifeless eyes.

She understood now how Corrin’s sweet, soft weanlings must have felt when confronted and toyed with by that animal.

“No,” Ariana said softly, and smiled despite the fear singing through her veins. “I will not kneel.”

Afon reached down as if to force her to her knees, but at the last moment, he seized Ariana by the throat. His gauntleted grip bruised into her flesh, and he hauled her to her feet, holding her high enough that she must stand on her toes to snatch each gasping breath. The Caervallinking’s eyes fixed on her, and they were full of raw fire, just as the cat’s had been. His gaze was every bit as animal and dispassionate—he was not harming Ariana because of who she was, but because it was his instinct and his nature.

Ariana’s field of view narrowed until all she could see was Afon’s livid face, swimming in a sea of red. She would die here, on Corrin’s ruined ground, like one of the soldiers or like her sisters who had displeased Caervallion’s fearsome king.

“Beg for your life, or for your death,” Afon rasped. “Which you choose doesn’t concern me. But I want to hear you plead. The old woman from your coward’s house screamed, you know, when I spilled her guts onto the earth, and the girl child pissed herself, both of them praying to be martyred quickly. I chose for them to linger, so beg me for the mercy they never saw.”