Maeve traced her way across the fields towards the orchard. Her breath puffed out in white clouds, frost crackling under her feet. In the distance, the moors were dusted with snow like powdered sugar. The sun barely seemed to crest their slice of the world before setting again, leaving their post-lunch walks to take place in a soupy, bruised dusk more often than not. Even on a morning walk like this one, the heat of the sun was weak and insubstantial on her skin.
She squinted towards Jude’s figure as he wove between the apple trees. His coat swept against his ankles, catching on the patches of hardy grass that clung on through the frost. The low light of winter cast a long and meandering shadow behind him. He’d been quiet today. Brooding, even more so than usual.
She didn’t want to admit how his stern glare affected her.
Maeve wondered how his contained intensity transcribed to other parts of his life, thoughts she hid like a stolen toffee, sweet under her tongue. She pictured how the tendons in his neck would stretch tight, how his eyes would grow hazy with pleasure. How she’d press her palms flat to his back and pull him closer, how he’d dig his fingers into her hip in a hold just the right side of pain.
Her dalliances back at the Abbey were hardly common occurrences, maybe a handful of times a year when she felt particularlytrapped within its limestone halls and craved human connection. They had never been more than a satiation of lust made thrilling by the fact they were so forbidden. As an acolyte, celibacy was expected, even if it wasn’t always maintained – Maeve knew she hadn’t been the only one who occasionally sneaked out to sample what Whitebury had to offer.
The drifting heat she felt towards Jude was different. She’d rarely experienced want directed at a specific person. It was strange and unwieldy in its refusal to abate. Not when he stretched his arms over his head at his desk to reveal a narrow strip of stomach marked with ink-black tattoos in symbols she couldn’t make out. Nor when he tapped a pencil against his lips, the wood scored from his teeth. Especially not one memorable time she’d been reaching for a flat of paint tubes that had somehow ended up on a high shelf, and he’d come close behind her, chest brushing her back as he stretched to retrieve it. She felt the ghost of his touch for hours later. Remembered it that night when she was alone with her face pressed into the pillow.
She ducked her chin into the collar of her coat to hide her flushed cheeks as he neared. All her belongings had begun to lose the salt-soaked, dusty smell of the Abbey and take on the scent of the house. Hearth-fire and windswept moors. Apples and sloe berries.
The tip of his nose was pink, lips reddened. His red scarf had unwound from his neck. Behind him, clouds tumbled through the sky on a far-off breeze, bringing the faintest strain of salt.
Maeve shivered, her teeth clacking together. As he brushed by her and headed back towards the house, he draped his scarf around her neck. It smelled of him, warm from his body.
She watched the hunched outline of his body as he stepped carefully over a half-frozen puddle, unable to stop her heart’s transformation into a warm, desirous thing. Made useless with hopeless longing.
She returned to her makeshift studio alone. The scarf slid slowly off her neck to pool in a puddle of red wool on her lap. Maeve stroked her fingers over it, thinking of hazel eyes turned bright, of the brush of fingertips over her pulse. She draped it carefully over the stool Jude normally sat on and picked up her brush.
The icon was nearly complete, but something was missing.
A familiar sense of heady devotion found a home behind her sternum as she touched her brush to the canvas. She’d missed this: the act of worship that was painting. The most honest part of her, the truest commitment she would ever make. More than the Abbey, more than her prayers offered up to saints, more, even than her desire for a hand guiding her as she walked through life, was Maeve’s love for painting. Ever since she’d first begun studying iconography as a girl, as she’d moved through training and honed her abilities to a fine point, she’d known that her craft was entirely separate from her faith, despite the similarities.
There was a steadiness to her devotion, a surety. She could sit in front of her easel and release every part of her to the canvas, knowing it would take her faith without judgement. Her anger and her despair, her confidence and her joy. Her work welcomed everything the same. And no matter where she found herself when her time with Jude had run its course, if she fell back to her knees at the foot of the altar or decided to fend for herself without the saints to guide her, she would always have her craft. She couldn’t find it in her to be upset at the linking between her painting, her iconography, and her magic. Picking up a brush had always felt like a transcendent experience.
And that was the difference between faith and devotion, Maeve thought as the first stirring of gold began in the corners of her eyes, as her fingers started the tell-tale tremble on the brush.
Her faith in the Abbey was the foundation she had been placed upon as a girl, its branches threading upwards into her thoughts, her beliefs, even her memories. Branches that helped her grow, yes – but also branches that choked.
Her devotion to her craft was her faith made manifest. A deep commitment that required action and intent. It was something she’d chosen again and again. Something that made her feel powerful. Capable. Accepted for who she was.A talent she had fought to make hers and hers alone.
The Abbey could rock her foundation, her very faith, but they could never take her devotion. She could hold tight to her art – what made it sacred, what made it divine – and call it entirely her own. Something the Abbey could never strip from her, as much as they may try.
With that thought swelling in her chest, she set her brush to the canvas and finally gave her magic the freedom to sweep her away into the vast and gold-hued unknown.
24
Maeve
The faintest strain of gold lingered in the air as Maeve set down her brush and examined her work. As in life, Jude looked stern and forbidding, his angled face and intelligent eyes seeing through every guard she’d erected against him. She’d depicted him on a wooden stool with his legs outstretched. One hand on his thigh, his fingers long and elegant against the blackness of his clothes. The other hand was upraised in the sign of the saints. Thumb and first two fingers outstretched, the last two curled inwards towards his palm.
Finished and fully dry thanks to her magic.
Would this work – having Jude pray to his icon?
The idea that they were missing something wouldn’t leave her alone. What did it mean if itdidwork? Not every person who had their memory tampered with was a saint, herself included, though she still held firm to her idea that her iconography linked her to the icons as much as sainthood did. Would Jude’s prayers restore any memories Maeve might be missing too?
She tipped her head back and screwed her eyes shut. So many questions and not enough answers. Every step shrouded in darkness with little more than a candle to find a path through the mire. She sighed, digging her knuckles into her lower back. A haziness lingered behind her eyes.
The door holding back her doubt grew thinner by the day. It wouldn’t be long until it disappeared entirely. When she had firstcome to Jude’s house, she’d been committed to fulfilling her Abbey-given goals and returning home, ready to claim her spot as lead iconographer.
And now… Now, Maeve could only think of finding answers.
She leaned forward and scribbled her signature onto the corner. Her abdomen twisted with the motion, a low ache starting between her hips. She ignored it as an uninvited mixture of trepidation and anxiety swirled in her stomach. It was like she’d suddenly become privy to the structure of a house when previously she’d only seen the outside adornment. Nearly her whole life had been dedicated to maintaining the facade – it was high time she saw in full what she had worked so hard to build.
The pain in her back had spread further into her lower stomach, cramping her muscles with a vice grip as she got to her feet. When her belly gave another painful twist, she quickly did the maths. As usual, her monthlies had arrived with nothing less than stellar timing.
