Page 2 of The Castle & the Cloister

This wasn’t what Fia had expected. She’d anticipated smiles and embraces from a few of the higher-ranking sorias waiting to hear her fidelity oath, as they’d done for Soria Beatrice two months back. She sat in silence, suspicion growing in her like a shadow as Matria Dolenza finished writing and scattered sand across the page.

At last, Dolenza looked up and fixed Fia with a searching stare. The Matria wore a soria’s headscarf much of the time, bound with the woven band that marked her station as head of the order, but Fia had seen her without the scarf once before. Though Matria Dolenza’s ebony-skinned face was smooth and hardly lined, her hair had been an exuberance of curling iron gray. There was something unknowable and canny about hereyes, too, and Fia was no closer to guessing the Matria’s age now than she had been upon first arriving at the cloister.

“Fiametta Raeana,” Matria Dolenza said by way of greeting, and Fia bowed her head. “Is there something you need?”

For a moment, Fia said nothing. The Matria had sent for her, after all. And it was, to the very day, the end of her four-month term as a postulant. Nothing stood between her and the protection of the cloister now, save for a single oath. But when Dolenza let the silence go uninterrupted, the question she’d asked hanging on the air, Fia fixed her gaze on Miriel’s sweet face. She needed the courage her daughter afforded, and wanted, too, to draw Dolenza’s attention to the baby. If she could not be moved for Fia’s sake, perhaps she might be for Miriel’s.

“My postulant’s term finished this morning, Matria,” Fia said.

Dolenza looked past Fia, to the lively courtyard beyond. Aurelia was leading the tenant farmers away, their voices already better humored, their postures speaking of anticipation now rather than irritation. One of the cloister’s fosters wandered quite close to the breezeway, a little black-haired and ivory-skinned girl with a birdlike way about her. She wove back and forth between the vegetable beds while a dutiful soria followed in her wake, holding up a crepe sunshade and occasionally smiling down at the child.

There were dozens of fosters like this at Raea’s great house by the sea—Corrinian children, whose parents had fled the tiny, beleaguered nation to the north and found no safe harbor elsewhere. Across much of the continent of the Hand, it was forbidden to offer shelter to those who’d left Corrin in the vain hope of building a new life. But in Fia’s homeland of Honoria, parentless cloister children were considered citizens by default. Corrinian families occasionally left their precious young ones behind in the dead of night, entrusting them indefinitely to Matria Dolenza’s care as they traveled on, searching for a haven they were unlikely to find. And Dolenza welcomed every foundling as an unlooked-for gift, making space for each new arrival in a cloister that was already full to bursting.

Let it be so with Miriel and I, Fia thought briefly, before cutting her eyes back to the Matria.

It wasn’t only Corrin’s children Dolenza concerned herself with—the troubled country to the north consumed the bulk of the goods andalms Raea’s cloister formerly returned to their tenants. Dolenza insisted on propping up the people of Corrin as best she could, either by open-handedness to the refugees who passed through her halls, or by covert shipments of foodstuffs, cloth, and coin to those still doggedly clinging to life on Corrin’s barren hills. Tools would do the Corrinians no good—their soil was stripped of virtue, their people wracked by plagues. Only the kindness of patrons like Dolenza kept anyone alive there. A remnant of Corrin’s citizens doggedly refused to leave, knowing the laws that governed the continent of the Hand would render their land open to claims by neighboring nations if it lay empty for long.

“You still wish to become a soria of this cloister?” Dolenza asked Fia sternly, showing none of her prodigious kindness now.

Fia fought to hide a growing sense of panic. “Yes, Matria.”

“That’s what you want, more than anything else?”

“Of course.”

Dolenza’s eyes caught Fia’s and held them, and Fia nearly flinched, the Matria’s gaze was so sharp.

“There’s no certainty about these things. Is this life—a cloistered life, a soria’s life, dedicated to work and our community and Blessed Raea the Sun—what you want above all else?”

Fia chose her words carefully. “What I want is peace and security for myself and for my daughter, Matria. I know a soria’s life can grant us that.”

“Just yourself and your daughter?” Matria Dolenza asked, shaking the sand from her letter onto the study’s flagstone floor. With deft hands, she folded the page, not bothering to seal it. “Is there no one else you care for? No one else for whom you want—what is it you said? Peace and security?”

“You’ll think me very hard-hearted, I’m sure,” Fia answered, not fool enough to lie. She’d seen Dolenza divine the truth behind deception in merchants and nobles and sorias alike. Even if it hurt Fia’s cause, she would be honest. “But no. To me there is no one else I strive for, beyond myself and my daughter.”

Once more, the Matria fixed her eyes on Fia, but her gaze had softened. “I don’t think you hard-hearted. Shortsighted, perhaps. Ignorant of the world. But those things can be remedied. A loveless heart cannot.”

Fia gathered her courage and her wits one final time. If this was to be the end of her respite at the cloister, she’d speak in her own defense. She’d come too far and lived through too much to do anything less.

“What is it you want from me, Matria? You’re the one who summoned me. Is it to tell me you won’t hear my oath? That I’m no longer welcome at Raea’s house and must take my daughter and go back out into the world? You know how I came to you—with nothing and no one but the child in my belly. If you cast us out, we’ll be destitute again.”

Dolenza got to her feet. She crossed the study’s shady interior and pushed back the crescentcloth tapestry by the door, so that more sun filtered in, and a fresh sea breeze blew through the room. “Come here to me.”

Reluctantly, Fia obeyed, moving to the Matria’s side.

“Do you see that child?” Dolenza asked, gesturing to the little black-haired girl. “Do you know her name?”

“Celina, I think. Forgive me, Matria, I’m still learning all the fosters’ names.”

“No, you’re right,” Dolenza said. “Has anyone told you who her parents are?”

Fia frowned, glancing down at Miriel. The baby had one fat, dimpled hand stuffed into her mouth and sucked on it happily, dribbling frothy saliva down the front of her tiny linen kirtle. Instinct moved Fia as she wiped Miriel’s chin with one of her own sleeves.

“I assumed Celina is an orphan,” Fia said. “Or that her parents are Corrinians who entrusted their daughter to us. There are so many of their children here, after all.”

“Celina’s father is Orden Inver,” Dolenza said, her voice even.

Fia’s head snapped up. “The king of all Honoria is that child’s father? What’s wrong with her? Is she a bastard?”