And perhaps because of Carina and Renault’s protests, as well as the testimony of so many people I’ve healed or helped in some way, who view me as modest and God-fearing. Even when They delivered a not-guilty verdict—heavily influenced by Renault’s marriage proposal, just as we’d hoped—one of the High Ecclesia stepped forward.
In front of half the city, They told me just how disappointed They were to see a foundling taken under Lumendei’s wing betray Their trust like this. Hadn’t the First Son given me everything—including my life, all those anni ago, in that decimated village?
A log crashes in the fireplace, making me jump out of my skin, though the fear also crystallizes a thought rising in my mind.
“I have to get a Saint to grant me the Mysteries,” I say before I realize the words are leaving my mouth, my gaze meeting Renault’s again.
He startles, his eyes narrowing, hooded in the fireplace’s shadows. Dusk paints the room in shades of blue and purple, bruise-like.
“My position will always be questionable otherwise. You can’t spend your life defending your bride. I’ll care for the Lupa Nox, of course—do what They tell me to. But if I’m granted the Mysteries, then of course I wasn’t performing goetia. Icouldn’thave been.”
Renault is looking at me strangely now, his head tilted to one side. “That would be excellent, yes. But Ophelia, you’re to be an Amadeus wife. An Apostle. You can’t say the wrong thing to the wrong person.” He trails off, examining me as he shifts away, the ancient floorboards creaking.
My breath halts in my chest; I have no idea what he is trying to say. So I press my mouth into a firm line and wait, hands curling around the elegant arms of the carved chair.
“You do know, Ophelia,” Renault eventually says, leaning forward onto the table, making the wine in the carafe tremble, “that the Saints aren’t real?”
Chapter 7
“No Saints,” I rasp, hands curling into fists as though I might manage to grasp onto my old reality one last time. “Renault, I have?—”
“I know,” he says, his voice so quiet in the firelight-hemmed space that I almost don’t hear it over the hammering of my heart. “But your devotion hasn’t gone unnoticed.”
The fire sputters in the hearth, strangled and spitting, and I imagine the same kind of sound leaves my throat. I say nothing of meaning, errant syllables darting across my tongue like a rabbit in the hedge. My chest feels as though it might cave in, worse—so much worse—than the attack I suffered back in my room. And directionless, too, I realize as the parlor spins around me. For my sins, there is always an opportunity to purify, to confess, to be forgiven.
But forthis? There is no retracting the bells I’ve spent at Saintess Lucia’s marble feet, the prayers I’ve uttered in desperate, tear-choked whispers. The twelve-day-long services I’ve undertaken in His Holy Church, the marble floor cold beneath my knees as I sweated through my garments, feverish for salvation.
“What about all the mortals who pledge themselves to the Saints?” I ask, sounding wild now, my legs trembling. The fine, high-backed chair suddenly feels like a prison or a vise, the walls of the pretty room closing in until I am choking on hearth smoke. “The rituals, the prayers, the rites? Who is interceding on our behalf with the First Son if not the Saints, Renault? We are not permitted to speak to Him directly. Do you mean to tell me?—”
“Yes,” he says definitively, his shoulders straight, his eyes dark pools in which I can see no bottom. “Our Lord cannot be bothered with every trivial wish and hope of the common people, Ophelia. The Saints were created as a way for the lesser souls of our Church to feel as though they have a channel of communication to the divine.”
My hands grasp near-violently at my skirt beneath the table. A chasm is opening in my chest, so wide that I fear nothing can span it. There is no prayer, no Catechisma passage, no pontifex’s advice that can account for having my world torn out from beneath my feet. For so many anni, I’ve thought Saintess Lucia would save me, would finally bestow favor upon me and grant me the Mysteries. I thought she understood me—she, the only female Saint, the only one who served our God by tending to the garden and baking the bread and birthing the babies.
“Ophelia,” Renault says, and I have little idea how long I’ve been trapped in my own thoughts, a thicket-dark spiral that slashes at my skin like brambleberry thorns. “That does not mean He is not listening.”
My head snaps up then, and I stare at my betrothed, the hearth-light turning his auburn hair to flame. “He . . . Heis?”
“Yes,” Renault replies with a warm smile, reaching over to grip my shoulder. The weight of his large hand is almost comforting.
“But how am I to be granted the Mysteries,” I begin, my tongue too thick in my mouth, the wine I’ve drunk gone sour on my palate, “if there are no Saints?”
Renault releases my shoulder and leans back in his chair. “You must convince the First Son Himself.” He speaks the words like a son of the Twelve, a titled nobleman who was born with Apostle blood in his veins. Of course he successfully drew the attention of our God to grant him the Mysteries—his family has been faithful to the Church for hundreds of anni, before even the War of the Sundering.
My lineage, however, boasts little but sin. “How is someone like me meant to speak directly to our Lord?” Just saying the words out loud feels like sacrilege; I’ve been taught all my life that unproven souls such as my own are only to petition the Saints to intercede on our behalf. Someone like me is not worthy of speaking directly to the King of Kings.
“Actions, my dear Ophelia, are much louder than words,” Renault replies, swirling the wine in his glass again. Dusk’s shadows deepen outside, turning the liquid to something viscous and black, nearly blood-like.
My heart races, flies swarming across my vision. Forcing air into my lungs consumes all of my energy, to the point that I almost miss what Renault says next.
“I have little doubt our Lord would happily bestow the Mysteries upon you,” he muses, his tone light, though his eyes are locked on mine, predator-bright, “if you converted the Lupa Nox.”
bells later at Midnight Mass, my heart still flutters in my chest like a broken-winged bird. The heady, sticky resins of the Evening Devotions incense are cloying, sitting heavy as thunderclouds in the air. My mind twists and scatters, the pontifex delivering his homilia distantly, as if through a wall of seawater.
My gaze jumps around the Church of the Host—a cavernous chamber of gleaming marble and intricately carved wood and burgundy velvet banners and the city’s emblem of a crown, sword, and white lily. But it always seems to return to the enormous mural behind the altar. The painting depicts the First Son, seated at a long dinner table with His siblings. Like me, all of them know what they must do. Unlike me, not a single one of the gods shows an ounce of fear. They are resolute. Their focus is directed where mine, too, should be—upon their eldest sibling, the Lord.
One last meal. The final moment the First Son shared with His beloved family before summoning the strength to consume all twelve of His siblings.
I swallow, my breath tight. My Lord’s siblings went into His maw willingly, reverently—for it was the only way to defeat the Creatrixes of our land, who had gone mad and rotten with power. Once, Moryx and Vitalia had dreamed Sylva and all life upon it into being—a miraculous thing. But that sacred, wonderful ability to create as they pleased caused a vile darkness to overtake the Creatrixes, requiring their children to make that horrible sacrifice. It was the only way the First Son might gain the power to overthrow the primordial goddesses and save Sylva from their wicked plans.
