He’d always blamed himself for that.
If he were still alive, he’d pray even now, but the ritual words stuck in Helena’s throat.
Each wall was for one of the five gods of the Quintessence. The radiant, unconquerable Sol, giver of life, was at the centre, flanked by the rest. The altar brazier that should have been burning ceaselessly with a flame from the eternal fire was cold, its amiantos wick dusty and dry.
The Ferrons had probably had a chantry built for their private worship and interments because that was something the upper classes did—although given the number of spires decorating the house, it did seem that the family had been religious at some point. Paladians loved decorating in sets of five even though their venerations and celebrations were primarily for Sol and Lumithia.
Along the walls there were dozens of stones with plaques bearing names and dates. With limited land, Paladians kept the ashes of their dead for generations rather than burying them in cemeteries as some countries did.
Despite the visible neglect, the chantry was not entirely abandoned. One plaque was brighter than the rest, carefully polished. It sat beneath the altar of Luna, the lesser moon goddess.
ENID FERRON. ALWAYS BELOVED. A WIFE AND MOTHER.
Based on the celestial dates, she’d died during the war, 1785, three years into Luc’s reign. She must have been Ferron’s mother.
Helena studied the inscription, finding it ironic. However “beloved” Enid Ferron had been by her husband and son, it had not been enough to be granted the immortality they enjoyed.
Then again, the guilds had always been intensely patriarchal.
Ironically, the one thing the guilds thought the Holdfasts weren’t traditional enough about was women. Girls had been welcomed to study at the Institute for decades. There were female lecturers, instructors, and board members in the school. It had been with Principate Apollo’s blessing that Lila Bayard had trained from childhood to become paladin primary.
The guilds, for all their talk of progress and equality, and freedom from rigid traditionalism, had very specific ideas about precisely who deserved that equality and freedom.
A low view of women was common in the North, especially among those of faith. Prior to the pressure exerted by the Principate, the Faith regarded women as categorically lesser, and even after the official distancing occurred, the belief remained pervasive.
It had been viewed as a fact of nature. Men were of Sol, active, hot and dry, full of vitality, and the source of life’s seed. Women, it followed, were an inferior human form. Wet and cold, passively bound to the monthly cycle of Luna, the lesser moon. While their bodies were the necessary vessels for birth, it was their blood that was the source of all defects. Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”
Hence the long-standing obsession with creating homunculi even among the Faith, to erase women’s defective hold on humanity.
However, not all women were doomed to cold passivity. To avoid such categorisation, a girl could devote herself to the cult of Lumithia, goddess of warfare and alchemy, who’d been born from the heart of Sol. Women associated with Lumithia were not expected to be traditional; they could be alchemists, surgeons, paladins, anything.
But there was a price. Were they to marry or bear children, they had to give it all up. Lumithia was a virgin goddess. Mothers and married women were not welcome at her altar.
When Helena was done exploring, she stayed outside despite the cold, watching the winter sun sink behind the mountains. The stars appeared in the night sky, shining briefly before the moons rose. Luna first, a deformed quarter moon in the far horizon with her soft light, ushering in a gentle twilight.
Then Lumithia rose. She was a waning crescent, but still more than double Luna’s size and so bright it hurt to stare directly at her. She ascended into the sky like a white sun, the constellations vanishing behind her light until only the planets and a few stars remained visible in the black abyss of sky. Glimmers fine as diamond dust.
CHAPTER 12
HELENA OPENED THE DOOR, A PIECE OF crystal clutched in one hand, and found Lila sitting on the floor, curled up like a child trying not to be found. She was out of her armour. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her long pale hair cropped short, and when she turned to look at Helena, it brought the right side of her face into view.
A roping scar tore through the side of her face and throat.
“Lila. Lila, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Lila stared at Helena without responding for a long time.
“I made a mistake,” Lila finally said, her voice barely a whisper, “I’ve made such a mistake.”
“It’s—all right. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Whatever you’ve done—I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”
“No.” Lila shook her head. “I’ve been lying to everyone—”
Helena woke abruptly, lurching up as the dream was cut short.
The withdrawal from the tablet hit like a brick wall, and she collapsed again, emotions crushing her. Even breathing hurt.
She tried to ignore it, to focus on the memory.
What had Lila been about to say? And what had happened to her? The injury had looked recent, the scarring reminiscent of what was on Helena’s own chest, no vivimancy used.
Helena couldn’t imagine why. Lila wasn’t someone who’d ever refused healing. As Luc’s paladin primary, there was a tremendous pressure on her to keep him safe, to prove that she deserved her rank.
She would often grow short-tempered when she wasn’t allowed to recover as quickly as she wanted to, brushing off Helena’s warnings about the balance of things, that healing took a much greater toll on the body than natural recovery did; too much and it could kill her. That there was a price that had to be paid, somehow, by someone.
Lila never cared about any of that. Protecting Luc was all that mattered to her.
MOUNTAIN SNOW BLANKETED THE ESTATE a few days later, cutting Spirefell off from the rest of the world, and life fell into a monotonous routine until the third session of transference arrived.
Once again, Helena’s consciousness was crushed down to the brink of oblivion, all the way to that moment of singularity as Ferron enmeshed his mind with hers.
This time, she felt him blink, and her own eyes closed. She was being puppeteered not physically but across her now shared mental landscape. She could feel his mind orienting itself within the patterns of hers, his consciousness attempting to sway her.
With his presence, she could finally feel the strange shape of her thoughts, the unnatural ways they swerved.
Much of it was seamless, smooth channels of evasion that refused to veer from their course, but there was a fault line, as if one part had been constructed separately.
She felt Ferron notice it, and before he could push towards it, she reacted.
A self-destructive wave of desperation exploded from inside her, like a bomb going off in her head.
Ferron vanished. Everything vanished.
When she regained consciousness, she could barely form thoughts. The vibrations of her own breathing hurt like the tongue of a whip lashing through her mind.
She wasn’t particularly feverish, but she also didn’t get better after several days.
In her dreams, there were people crowded around her. Dozens of them. Each time she slept, they’d drag her underwater and drown her. Bloodless hands grasping at her. Icy water filled her lungs. Her arms and legs were twisted and wrenched at. Splintered nails clawing at her skin. Fingers hooking inside her mouth, pulling down on her jaw until it came loose. Fingernails sinking into her eyeballs, and she never died.