Page 91 of The Castle & the Cloister

Nikolau shook his head vehemently. “No. I won’t be nursemaid to your lover and the child you chose to replace our daughter with.”

“Watch your tongue or I will bite it out,” Fia snarled, finally ruffled.“Our daughter is my guiding light. There is nothing I do without Miriel’s good in mind. And the Priest as regent with Justus as king after him will be good for Honoria. It will be good for the cause of peace. With Orden Inver dead,someonewill fill the void. If it is a new king or queen, they’ll have to prove their power and legitimacy. They will redouble the war efforts in Vesper. Add to the pressers, rather than diminish them. Perhaps renew hostilities with Caervallion. All of Honoria will suffer as a result. And I have no intention of handing our daughter a world more broken than the one I was given. Whatever it takes, I will give her a life that is better and freer and closer to peace than mine ever was. If I have to alter the course of a nation in pursuit of that end, so be it. Honoria must move, because I will not.”

By the time she finished her speech, Fia was in a temper to match Nikolau’s, her chest heaving, the set of her shoulders and jaw defiant. But his anger died out as swiftly as it had come, while Fia’s remained.

“You were right when you insisted you didn’t love me as you should, though I always disbelieved you,” Nikolau said quietly. “I thought it was only your upbringing—that you couldn’t recognize love, even when it was something you felt. But if this is how you love our daughter, I’d never have been able to bear the force of it.”

“I was already too much for you when we were together,” Fia answered, reaching halfway across the table and leaving her hand upturned, a peace offering and an invitation. “And not yet enough for myself. But I became enough, for Miriel. You had a part in that. And anything we lacked, she has more than made up for. You’ll see it when you meet her. And I swear by my mark, that if you help me to help Honoria, youwillmeet her soon.”

“I want to meet her,” Nikolau admitted. Reluctantly, he reached for Fia, too. But when he took her hand, he didn’t hold it as a friend might, or a former lover. Instead, he clasped her by the wrist as he’d do to a fellow renegade, a comrade-in-arms, and Fia’s heart soared as she returned the gesture. It always sat ill with her, how she’d been with Nikolau, and how things ended between them. Now she saw that they hadn’t ended, only taken a new form, and it eased her mind greatly. “I want it more than anything.”

“I know.” Fia’s voice was low and soothing. “And I want my Priestand my Inver boy kept safe more than anything. You understand that I’m giving you that task because I trust you, Nikolau? There’s no one else I could say that of. I know it doesn’t go both ways, and you’rerightnot to trust me, but maybe it’ll help you forgive me a little for how I’ve gone about things. Besides, you always wanted me to need you, and I never did. Now here it is, at last—I need you for something. No one else will do.”

“I wish I’d never met you,” Nikolau said, but there was no ire in the words.

“Yes, well,” Fia answered. “I believe most people feel the same.”

XXVII

I would caution you against any friendship with or confidence in Orden’s new Priest. Of course, we both know he should not be alive—an accident of fate that I will someday rectify. But he has the king’s ear, and so his downfall must be planned carefully. Perhaps you could bring your political power to bear against him? I understand you are a man of great faith, but it would be a pity if I was forced to speak publicly of Darias’s involvement in your theft of Glora Inver’s lands. You’ve taken such pride in your ability to conquer any obstacle you set yourself upon—a shame if our clan learned that you went crying to the old king for help in suborning the interests of a woman, and one who is no better than a servant now. It would, I expect, damage the reputation for competence you have striven so hard to build.

—FROM LUCIAN INVER TO HADRIAN INVER

It was long past midnight, the Priest had been unable to prevail upon Fia to relocate herself and Justus to his cell rather than the queen’s rooms, and every minute that crawled by felt like a liability.

The great drawback to choosing Hadrian Inver as an ally—besides his stunningly low opinion of the Priest, which was, in fact, the point—was Hadrian’s chronic absence from court. After leaving the king’s company on the road home from the cloister, Hadrian had returned to his principal estate, eighty miles distant from Inverlyn, at the near edge of the westernforests. The Priest dispatched a message bird to him the moment he had Glora’s support, but though Hadrian was a man of action, decisive and fit enough for traveling at speed, the earliest he could be expected was the following night.

A great deal could happen in a night and a day and another night again. Priests and postulants and queens could be killed, and empty thrones taken. The Priest did not like waiting. He did not like it one bit. He paced his cell restlessly, unable to sleep and unwilling to subject himself to the outer cavern, where the sorias’ ghosts were every bit as discontented as him.

It was their singing, muffled by the door but rising to a sudden wail, that warned him someone was crossing the cavern. With his breath coming hard and fast, the Priest pulled his blade from its sheath and pressed his back to the wall on one side of the cell door. Whoever came through, he’d sell his life dear. If they were guards, he could kill three easily, and as many as half a dozen, with luck. The guards were blunt instruments, trained to throw their weight about with the citizenry while the bulk of the Inver army was in Vesper. They had none of the desperation or precision a king’s son or daughter must learn to survive. They might wield blades, but they could notbecomeone, as the Priest was able to at need.

A brisk knock punctuated the sorias’ keening, and the Priest’s pulse slowed at once. Assassins didn’t knock.

But neither did Lucian the spymaster wait to be invited in. The moment his knock had died out he was through the door, the faint warmth of a lantern settling between him and the Priest.

“I think you’ll agree that this has been a woefully unsatisfactory assassination,” Lucian said without preamble, sounding for all the world as if he and the Priest had long been co-conspirators and held each other in fond regard. Immediately, the Priest’s back was up. Whatever the spymaster had to say, he did not like camaraderie from Lucian. It went against the natural order of things. “Have you heard from anyone that they’re planning to move on the throne?”

The Priest had indeed been busy assessing potential challengers, and it did not matter to him if Lucian knew the information he’d gleaned. In fact, it served him well for the spymaster to believe that they had trulyclosed ranks in an attempt to determine Orden’s best successor, little though he enjoyed cozy chats with the odious man.

“Safira Inver has her personal guard on the way to the city—they’re two hundred strong, and can’t possibly arrive until three days from now,” the Priest said, moving to stand by the bureau. He set his knife down but kept it very near at hand. Lucian, by contrast, had settled into the wicker chair by the door, and a soft sound signaled that he had put his booted feet up on the Priest’s bed. Fastidious in all his habits, the Priest fought an urge to grit his teeth.

“Charin Inver is working on a plot to enlist the serving staff and a number of city residents as a temporary force with which he might overthrow the castle guard—it will never succeed, but he’s enthusiastic. Melian Inver claims to have poisoned Orden, which is possible, given the abrupt nature of his death. She has no succession plan, but she’s adamant that the death was her doing.”

“Melian the mad?” Lucian asked with a snort of disbelief. “She’s tried to poison half the people on this mountain. She never succeeds.”

“Not anymore. She used to be more lucid, and better at it,” the Priest said bitterly. He’d been subjected to two particularly nasty poisonings as a boy, and was certain Melian had been behind them.

For the most part, what the Priest had found in his questioning of the Invers was a body of nobles who’d been entirely unprepared for Orden’s death, and any fight for the succession. They’d grown contented and lazy, secure first in the iron-fisted reign of Darias, followed by Orden’s confident and decisive rise to power as he slaughtered his father and siblings. No one had expected anything less than a long and prosperous reign from Orden, followed by one of his children seizing the throne as was tradition—if not Justus, then Celina, for she was Inver too, and an upbringing by sorias was no guarantee the girl wouldn’t end up as ruthless as her sires.

The Priest told Lucian as much, and the spymaster heaved a weighty sigh.

“Well,” Lucian said with studied indifference. “If there’s no fit contender for the throne, I suppose we could invite Afon to take it. In the interest of preserving stability and keeping the nation intact. You’d be surprised how well thought of he is, among the people.”

There it was, the Priest realized with a pang of dull shock. The heart of all this maneuvering. How long Lucian had been in Caervallion’s pocket didn’t especially matter. What did was the man seated opposite him, suggesting something that was as good as anathema, even to a Priest with very little faith. The Priest knew that from this point on, he must choose each word and step with exquisite care. Lucian had shown his hand, and any hint that the Priest was a threat to his true aims would undoubtedly have lethal consequences. Yet he must not appear too eager to support the spymaster, given their long enmity and the radical nature of Lucian’s succession plan.

“You would find a great many people opposed to that course of action,” the Priest warned. “Even if Afon has made inroads.”

“Perhaps not as many as you’d think,” Lucian said, still in that same uncaring tone. It did not take a student of human nature to realize that this was what he greatly desired—what he’d likely schemed toward for years.Damn. The Priest had suspected Lucian might be feeding Caervallion information in order to line his own pockets, but this went far beyond that. “There is more to Afon Caervallin than meets the eye.”