Page 73 of The Castle & the Cloister

At last, in the loneliest hours of the night, Fia fell into a brief and fitful sleep. She dreamed in flashes, visceral and immediate. The king’s mountain. The foothill city of Inverlyn, spiraling up to the castle built half into cliffside stone. The narrow, hairpin streets. The little, squalid squares. She could smell waste and rot and damp rock.

The castle proper loomed before her, its front gates thrown wide, its central courtyard teeming with people, more of them spilling out into the streets beyond. A throb of bone-deep drumbeats sounded as the interior doors to the castle groaned open. Orden Inver swept out at the head of a royal procession with Ariana in his wake. But this version of the queen was terribly changed—in place of jewels, she wore chains. In place of latent fear, her face bore a ruination of bruises. They’d beaten her within an inch of her life, and as she passed through the gathered crowd to the center of the courtyard, the watchers shouted and jeered and spat.

Fia stood rooted to the spot as the royal party stopped before her.Orden was so close she could feel his breath and make out the old scar that ran across his face. Even in the realm of dreams, Fia knew that was not right—that it was Afon, not Orden, who bore the scar.

“We will make a byword of her,” the king said to Fia. “All the world will speak her name with scorn. We will make a sacrifice of him and let the gods finally drink of his deepest heart’s blood.”

As the king who was both Orden and Afon spoke, he pressed a knife into Fia’s hand. She saw, in glancing down, that it was no longer Ariana before her but the Priest, and that the knife she held was his. Not the short dagger he bore on his arm, but a longer and lethal thing—the Invers’ offertory blade, which rested on the altar of Tyrus, god of war.

Without hesitation, Fia grasped the hilt tight and plunged her blade into the Priest’s throat, even as he changed and became the queen once more.

A burst of light. The figure bleeding out before her was Ariana, was the Priest, was Ariana again. Fia dropped to her knees, and Lyria’s most perfect daughter let out a wet, sobbing breath in her arms before falling still.

The figure Fia had killed wavered as they dragged the body away, then doubled. At the castle’s outer wall, both Ariana and the Priest were hung side by side, lifeless and bloodless.

“Bright may we burn,” Ariana’s dead mouth whispered, worms crawling from it as she spoke.

“Long may we reign,” echoed the Priest, as a carrion crow swayed on his shoulder and tore at the decaying flesh of his face.

Fia woke gasping, alone in the half dark.

No one else in the cloister insisted on a light from dusk till dawn, but Fia did. She kept a small lamp burning, to ward off wretched memories of the mountains she’d come from, the frigid cellar she’d spent days and weeks confined to as a child. By the lamp’s small glow she forced herself upright, sitting cross-legged on her sleeping mat, and spared a single glance for Justus, who slept peacefully, before she fixed her eyes on her hands.

Her fingers trembled with leftover fear and anguish, and Fia counted breaths, though her pulse did not slow. She’d dreamed dire things about Miriel several times since her daughter’s birth. In the wake of each nightmare, she sat and waited, unable to settle until she was sure of one thing.

Time stretched on. Beside Fia in his bassinet, Justus let out a tranquil sigh. Beyond the window of her little cell, a nightcatcher sounded its liquid, trilling call from the topmost branches of a stone pine.

Slowly, Fia’s heart began to calm. Her panic to fade. The vise around her chest to loosen.

And then, like a spring from dry earth, blood welled in the cup of her unmarked palms. It pooled in her hands and dripped from her fingers as she twisted them into the fabric of her shift in an agony of frustration. The flow did not stop until she was slick and crimson from fingertips to wrists, the room filling with an unmistakable metallic tang.

If it weren’t for the dark and silence shrouding the cloister, Fia would have screamed, not with fear or shock or pain, but outrage and rebellion. A goddess-sent dream was meant to be a gift—a glimpse of foresight and an opportunity for obedience granted to the lucky few.

If this was a gift, Fia refused it.

Gathering up Justus, she hid her hands and the state of her shift beneath his linen blanket and pushed the door open with one shoulder. In the shadowy corridor, two Inver guards were waiting, mindful of their prince. They made to follow Fia, and she stopped them with a look.

“No. I’m not going far. Just down there, to the Priest. You can watch to be sure.”

She did as she’d said, slow fear churning in her stomach.

“Priest,” Fia whispered at his door, not thirty feet down the corridor from her own. She couldn’t even extricate a hand to knock, for fear of leaving a bloodstain, or being seen. “Priest, let me in. I need your help.”

If he slept, he did so more lightly than Fia herself. In a moment, the door was open and she was through, the two of them shut in together with the heavy smell of blood, which settled darkly on the air.

“Are you all right?” the Priest asked, with an intensity so focused she felt scorched by it. One of his hands was already on her face, the other on Justus’s small, sleeping form. “Is the prince safe? I swear by Mortis, if anyone touched you, they’ll be dead before dawn.”

“It isn’t like that,” Fia said, shrugging away impatiently. But a spark kindled in her at the ragged sound of his voice, and his assurance of swift retribution if she ever had need of it. “I dreamed.”

“You dreamed?” the Priest asked blankly.

“Yes. Do you know how I met Ariana? Or how I came to know Raea’s cloister existed at all?”

The Priest shook his head. Fia realized, for the first time, that he did not wear a nightshirt but had been in bed fully clothed, as if unwilling to be less guarded even in sleep.

“The goddesses sent me a vision,” Fia said. “Of the battle between Honoria and Caervallion and the path I must take to leave the mountains and go down to Corrin, where the wounded lay dying. I knew it was foresight because I woke from the dream untouched, with blood pooling in my hands.”

Tension left the Priest in a visible rush, his shoulders dropping, his face seeming to age ten years in a moment.