CHAPTER 13
The call to afternoon prayers rings out from the convent’s bell tower. I stand, grabbing the untouched ginger cookies to take with me. “I’d better go. It won’t be so long before my next visit, I promise.”
Magister Thomas is right. It probably won’t be much longer before I can’t visit her at all.
Mother Agnes accompanies me back to the gate. My parents—the subject of our argument from months ago—remain unmentioned. She lets me outside without a word, and I shade my eyes with my hand as she replaces the keys on her belt. I’m wondering if she’s even going to say goodbye when the prioress suddenly leans forward, her nose pushing out between the bars.
“Catrin.”
“Yes?”
She exhales heavily as if bracing herself for whatever she has to say.
“Your parents are dead. That was always true. But they loved each other, and you were very much wanted.”
My heart creeps upward in my chest as I wait for her tocontinue, but she doesn’t say anything more. “That’s it?” I finally burst out. “That’s all you’ll tell me?”
She shifts back, withdrawing like a battle is over. “Those are the only things that matter.”
Not a word about why the rest of my family abandoned me while I still had the cord knotted at my stomach. No explanation for the hissed warning to Magister Thomas the morning he escorted me from the abbey that there would be consequences if “they” perceived I was mistreated. Almost as if she believed they would want me back someday.
The biscuits dissolve into crumbs in my clenched hand. “Maybe those are the only things that matter to you,” I manage through gritted teeth.
Mother Agnes shakes her head. “Your family truly believed you belonged in the Light.”
“Well, I don’t,” I snap. “I don’t belong behind high walls and locked gates. I don’t belong in a cage.”
“We all live in cages, Catrin. Only those of us who are lucky get to choose which one.”
The prioress turns away and heads in the direction of the chapel, humming the prayer song the sisters have already begun singing.
Anger and bright sunshine combine to plant the seed of a headache which rapidly grows to wrap my temples with tight vines. By the time I reach home, pain is in full bloom, and I go straight to my room and lie down. My window faces south and slightly east, and over the next few hours, noise from the Sanctum gradually fades as workers finish their tasks for the day. First will be the blacksmiths, who cease pounding out chains and nails and iron frames. Then they brush soot from the day’s creations andargue with craftsmen over whose needs are greatest tomorrow. Stonemasons and carvers are next, putting aside their chisels to finesse the precise edges of blocks and statues with sandcloth. Laborers raising and placing stones high on the walls complete their last load. Finally, the carts roll away—hawkers and tool sharpeners pulling theirs by hand while oxen ease wagons down the hill one last time.
The city sighs and relaxes. Smoke from hearth fires wraps the buildings with its woodsy scent, punctuated by a thousand pipes being lit after the evening meal. Mistress la Fontaine knocks and peeks in to announce supper. I pretend to be asleep, and she goes back downstairs. Bells from the Sanctum and numerous chapels throughout Collis call the religious to evening prayers. Mother Agnes will lead the sisters, half her mind listening for missing voices. Later those who skipped the liturgy will be polishing chalices and candlesticks. I did a lot of that.
Many girls at Solis Abbey were children of prostitutes—often women who’d left the convent only a few years before. Others were the result of infidelity—young noblewomen who allowed themselves to be seduced or servant girls who succumbed to the wiles of rich men. Saying my parents loved each other takes me out of the former category. I don’t know if it puts me in the second or in another entirely, like Marguerite.
Your family truly believed you belonged to the Light.
My jaw tightens at the idea. They had no right to make that choice for me.
Wait. Mother Agnes said they believed I belongedinthe Light, not to it. Is that difference significant? The prioress never saidwhenmy parents died, either. Was it they who left me at the abbey, or someone else? And then there was the bit about everyone living in cages. Was she saying they believed the convent was a better cage than the one they lived in?
I roll over to watch the deep blue-violet sky stretch up from the horizon. With the darkness, the tension behind my eyes finally begins to ease. Remi comes up the stairs and continues to the third floor and his room. Mistress la Fontaine isn’t far behind, but I hear no sign the magister is going to bed yet. Perhaps he’s piecing together another stained glass window. By the time the moon rises high enough to cast a shaft of pure silver on the floor, my headache is only a memory, and now I’m thinking of something else entirely.
What had the moonlight done to me that night in the alley?
The further I got from the realization that day with Simon, the more ridiculous it seemed, so much that I had forced the idea of moonlight and magick from my mind. Now it comes back to me whispering,What if it was real?
Over a thousand years ago, people of the Hadrian Empire considered the moon cursed, believing its constant changes meant it had something to hide. The fullest moon rises at dusk and sets at dawn because it cannot face the Blessed Sun, which is why Selenae—who keep the same hours as the moon—are often considered heretics. Modern Gallians know the moon is harmless, and the high altum preaches the same, but many hold on to the old notions.
It’s only superstitious people who fear magick, describing it as something blasphemous and unnatural that can only be done in darkness. Until recently, I considered the entire idea nonsense.
The rectangle of moonlight glides slowly across the room, shrinking until it reaches its peak, then stretching longer again. Another hour and it will be gone. I order myself to move, sitting up in bed and placing my stocking-clad feet on the floor. A board sighs with my weight, but no more than what could be the house settling. I hesitate, chewing on the ragged edge of my nail. It’s the one which had caught the splinter, mostly healed but for a circular bruise which spreads out from where it bled.
I drop my hand and tiptoe through the darkness to the window and stand just outside the light, partly because that’s how I was in the alley that night, and partly because of a strange hunger which wells up as I approach. Hunger isn’t the right word, though. The urge is so much deeper, spreading out from my very core to my skin in tingles of anticipation. I don’t know what I expect to happen, but Iwantsomething, and that worries me a bit.
If magickisreal, maybe I’m risking my soul. After all, if magick was good, wouldn’t it come from the Sun?