Selfish Is the Heart

by Megan Hart

  Calvis laughed and a fresh waft of herb-scent drifted across to tickle Cassian’s nose. His brother’s weight, the heat of his body, pressed him. Cassian, bound tight by the blankets he’d pulled up so high, couldn’t move. With Cal at his back and the wall at his front, he could only twist a little.

  “As the elder brother, I can call you whatever I like.”

  “By no more than a moment or two.”

  “By the span of four or five good convulsions, according to our dear mother, from whose womb we were ejected. And I should think that dear woman would know the length of time between my first greeting to the world and thine, brother mine.” Cal snuggled close, his chin biting into Cassian’s shoulder. His arm slipped tight ’round his brother’s waist. “Be not angry with me. Next time I shall ask you to join us, I swear.”

  Cassian wriggled in the blankets and yet could not break his brother’s grip. Not without much struggle, anyway, and past experience had taught him such an effort would be useless. They were matched in strength and size, but Calvis would ever be the stronger in his desire to win.

  “Go to sleep, Cal. In your own bed.”

  “But why? When I’ve found myself in yours?”

  “Because it’s late and you snore when you’ve been drinking.” Cassian wriggled again, harder, to get past the blankets at least, if not his brother’s arm.

  “So do you. Snore when I’ve been drinking.” Laughter and hot breath caressed the space between them, until Calvis said seriously, “Let me stay. The hour, as you said, is late and I’m fair busted. Would you have me walk to my room in such a state? Waking the house? Subjecting our blessed mother to her beloved son in such a shameful state?”

  “Mayhap you shouldn’t have gotten yourself into such a state, if you’re so ashamed of it.” Argument was futile, Cassian knew, as was denying his brother what he wanted.

  Cal’s chin bit deeper as his nose pressed Cassian’s neck. “I am ever shamed over what I do.”

  This was the first time Cassian had heard such an admission, and he made no comment. Cal’s breath grew softer, deeper, slower. His arm relaxed, though it didn’t release him.

  “Next time,” Calvis said quietly, “I will ask you, brother. If you so wish. But I know you. You’d gain no pleasure from such jaunts.”

  That Calvis was likely correct in his assumption served naught but to twist Cassian’s determination to be included the next time. “You think me less a man than you?”

  Cal’s arm tightened. His mouth sought the flesh of Cassian’s throat, where he bit once, just lightly. “No, little brother. I know you to be much greater. Much, much, greater.”

  And with that, the bastard had fallen asleep, immovable and stinking, and had snored the night through while Cassian lay awake and trapped.

  Chapter 11

  There had been times when Cassian took great joy from discussion of the Word and the Law. The Book had been everpresent in him. It had led him to every path. It still did, he thought, catching sight of the leather-bound text on his desk. He didn’t need to open its pages to quote it word for word. He wished he could forget, sometimes, but never could.

  “I fail to understand,” he said now, “how you could have grown to such an age and have found such faith as to seek a position in the Order of Solace, yet be so unknowledgeable about the contents of a very basic passage.”

  Wandalette cleared her throat and blinked rapidly. The sheen of tears gave her away, and Cassian kept his sigh locked tight in his throat. He didn’t want to make her cry, but the bedamned chit would insist on allowing emotion to overcome her. He told himself it was a lesson she needed to learn and best taught by him rather than a patron, but it nevertheless left him with a churning in his belly that had naught to do with hunger.

  “Well?”

  “Sir, I . . . my parents weren’t of the Faith.”

  He studied her. All around, the other young women had paused in their scribblings to watch him test their novitiate sister. Annalise, the only one sitting in the back of the room, glanced up at the pause in his reply but looked away again, her pen moving smoothly over her parchment. She wasn’t studying, and he could only guess at what she was writing.

  Since the day he’d taken her letter, neither had made any pretense that he had anything to teach her, or she anything to learn.

  “Not of the Faith. They didn’t practice? Or they didn’t believe?” Cassian focused on Wandalette again.

  She swallowed hard and spoke in a voice thick with tears. “Not of . . . nor did they believe . . . I mean, sir, they didn’t practice it nor allow its practice in our house.”

  Cassian had heard of such folk, though few. Even those who didn’t have a heart-deep belief in the Faith most often at least celebrated the holidays. “And yet here you are.”

  “I wanted to make a difference, sir.”

  “Tell me, Wandalette, why you’d seek to make such a difference in the Order of Solace? Why not take up nursemaiding, instead? Why not raise a family yourself? Surely the birth and raising of children would make a difference.”

  Void take her, now she was weeping. He hadn’t meant to force her to tears, only an answer. He scrubbed at his face in resignation, palm over his eyes so he could gain a breath or two without having to look at her distress.

  “I had a vision.”

  From the back of the room, Cassian heard the sound of a chair scrape. He looked from behind his hand. Annalise was staring, too.

  “Of the Invisible Mother?”

  “No.” Wandalette shook her head. “Of her sons.”

  “In your vision she had more than one?”

  Cassian had heard many tales of visions. He believed those who’d seen them believed in their veracity as firmly as he understood not a one of them to be genuine. The Holy Family had gone away, never to return for any amount of solace provided the world they’d left behind. He’d never heard of a vision that was not of the Mother.

  “I know the text says there’s only one.” Wandalette gestured at the book in front of her. “I’ve read it front to back, sir. I promise you. But why does it not say she had two sons? Twins.”

  His gut twisted on the word. “No text states Kedalya had more than one son with Sinder.”

  Annalise spoke. “There are commentaries that say she had more children. After the first.”

  Wandalette looked back and shook her head. “The boys were twins. I’m sure of it. And Sinder’s sons.”

  There was a little-known commentary that stated much the same—that after Kedalya had left the forest and her god of a husband, taking their son with her, she discovered she was again with child. That the sons she bore after leaving were twins, identical in every way but for the fact that one was a murderer and the other a victim of his brother’s anger.

  But how could one such as she, not even raised in the Faith, know such a story?

  “Nonsense,” Cassian said in a voice that brooked no dispute. “Read the text in front of you for the answers. When you’ve mastered this level, you might move on. But know you it takes years if not a lifetime to fully understand everything and not a man yet who’s been able.”

  “Perhaps it’s not a man’s place to be able,” Annalise said from her seat at the back, “but there’s naught to say a woman is incapable.”

  “I don’t want to know everything!” Wandalette cried, alarmed. “Must I know everything to serve? Must I be a scholar of the Faith to be a Handmaiden?”

  “If your patron requires it, you shall be.” Cassian flicked a hand at her. “That, among everything else.”

  “Not every patron shall wish his Handmaiden to decipher dusty texts, surely.” This again from Annalise, whose tone might be sweet but whose gaze was most definitely meant to prick.

  “The best Handmaiden is not the one who knows everything, but understands what she does not know and how to best learn it,” Cassian said. “Besides, the patron who requires a scholar of the Faith will be assigned one who can so serve. No, Wandalette. You
need not know everything. But you must know at least something.”

  She drew in a hitching breath but looked him full-on without more tears seeping. “Thank you, sir.”

  He’d done naught. It had been Annalise who’d forced him to reassure the girl. “Study the texts as I require and the Mothers request, Wandalette. You can do no more than that.”

  “It was a true vision,” she said. “The Mothers-in-Service said so. They believed it was so.”

  “The Mothers-in-Service believe all visions are true,” Cassian said with a glance toward Annalise.

  Annalise cocked her head to look at him but said nothing. The chime sounded for the class’s release, and he watched them file out of the room, their chatter instant and exuberant and exhausting even in the few moments to which he was subjected.

  He ran his palm over his eyes again and gave a sigh, and when he looked, expecting the room to be empty, he found instead Annalise, still at her desk. She’d gathered her belongings but not yet stood. She was half smiling.

  “They . . . weary me.”

  “They would weary anyone, but I should imagine you’d be well accustomed to girls like that by now.”

  “I’m too old,” he said without thinking.

  Annalise looked faintly surprised. “Surely you’re not. You’re not old at all.”

  She didn’t sound combative, but he took no flattery from it. “I feel too old.”

  At this she laughed, and the light bell-tinkle of it made him want to join her. He held back. He waited for her to go, and when she didn’t, he pointed at the door.

  “You’re dismissed.”

  “I know it. I’m going.” She gathered her things and gave him another look before she went to the door. “I’ve read commentary that said Kedalya bore other children when she left Sinder, and that’s why the Holy Family will never be rejoined no matter what any of us do. Sinder accused her of infidelity and she proved him right when she came up pregnant.”

  The depth of her knowledge impressed him. “If you so believe, why are you here? There can be no use to your future as a Handmaiden if naught you do brings about the return.”

  “I didn’t say I believed it, I said there’s a commentary. There are many, as you well know. One can’t believe them all.”

  “What do you believe?” he asked, curious.

  Annalise gave her head the barest shake. “I believe whatever I shall be taught by you, Master Toquin, so that I might be released from this class to the immense relief of us both.”

  “Some do say Kedalya bore twin sons with Sinder as their father.” He’d not meant to share this, but his tongue tripped out with it and once spoken, the words couldn’t be called back.

  Annalise lifted a brow, her hands closing her pen flannel. “I’ve heard no such commentary, yet it makes sense.”

  “Does it?”

  “It makes . . . connection,” she compromised. “It fits with the others I have heard. Stories of what happened after Sinder’s accusation of her betrayal. For who, if Sinder created the land and the sea and the air, did Kedalya cuckold him with?”

  “Who created his lady wife, if not himself?” Cassian asked.

  “What happened to the twin sons?”

  “They went brother against brother,” Cassian said after a moment. “Spilled the first blood. The commentary says that’s where we come from. Us of the Faith. That we sprung from the drops of blood one brother drew from the other.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Does it make any more sense than that Sinder grew the first of us like flowers, plucked us from our beds, and thrust us out of the Land Above so that we might make merry for his amusement?”

  She laughed, and again he wanted to join her. “As I said, sir, I believe what you deem it fit for me to know.”

  “You already know much I’ve not taught. Or ever would.”

  “And why is that?” She chewed the softness of her lower lip for a moment. “What use is knowledge if you never share it?”

  “Sometimes it’s the having of a thing that gives it the most value.”

  “So instead of gold you’re a miser of your knowledge? Why become a teacher, then?”

  “I’m not a teacher. I’m—” Cassian stopped himself. He didn’t want to tell her he’d been a priest. Some knew it, but none who’d spread the truth. He shouldn’t be ashamed, and yet he always was.

  Annalise looked him over thoroughly but only nodded, didn’t speak. When she left, the door swung closed slowly behind her, and Cassian waited for some long moments before he went to it, so that he might be sure she didn’t wait on the other side.

  The days continued passing quickly. Annalise was grateful for the sunup-to-sundown schedule that kept her too busy for ennui. The skill she’d thought would be the easiest turned out to be the worst to endure. Annalise had ever chafed at bending to the command of another, and so when she first learned of what was called Waiting, the series of kneeling positions Handmaidens employed to center themselves, her gut had clenched along with her jaws.

  Waiting, Readiness. On her knees, buttocks resting on her heels, the back of one hand resting against the other’s palm.

  Waiting, Remorse. On her knees, buttocks resting on her heels, her hands this time placed palm down on the floor in front of her, presumably with downcast gaze as well, for a Handmaiden in this position was in an act of contrition.

  Waiting, Submission. The position that curled Annalise’s lip. On her knees, back straight, hands clasped behind her neck. There were women who craved such a place, but that would never be her, she thought as her skin crawled the entire time she was required to keep the stance.

  And finally, Waiting, Abasement. On her knees, stretched so her forehead rested on the floor, arms stretched out, palms down, on the floor in front of her.

  “Why would anyone require such a stance?” she asked upon its demonstration, appalled.

  The other novitiates had taken it at once, following the Sister-in-Service’s command. Annalise, whose knees and back ached, thought it would at least stretch her muscles and provide some relief, but the concept of the position’s necessity lifted her gorge into her throat.

  Sister Merriment looked at her. “One hopes one must never need to use such a position. This is the position for a Handmaiden who’s failed so grievously in her function that she has disgraced herself and the Order.”

  Annalise couldn’t hold back the curling of her lip this time. Remorse she could understand. Submission, tolerate if necessary—she was, as one of the five principles stated, a woman at the start and the end, and femininity had well trained her for submission no matter how she might despise it.

  But abasement? Failure? Dishonor and disgrace?

  Watching the others bent forward, their faces pressing the floor, Annalise shook her head and didn’t move. “What could possibly be so horrible that a Handmaiden would feel it necessary to proclaim herself so disgraced?”

  Sister Merriment neither laughed nor frowned. “Would that you will never know, Annalise.”

  “But I would like to know, now.” Annalise Waited in Readiness.

  Merriment faltered, her mouth pursing. “I honestly can’t tell you, I’m afraid. If any of my Sisters has so failed in her function, I’d not be privy to it.”

  “Surely there are stories. There always are.”

  Around them, some of the other novitiates shifted but didn’t remove themselves from their Abasement. They’d not been told to get up, and so they did not. Annalise looked at Merriment and waited for an answer.

  “We don’t speak of such things.”

  “Of failure? When learning from another’s folly we might gain knowledge of how to prevent our own?”

  Merriment frowned, now, and shook her head so the end of her pale braid swung against her hips, one to the other. “A Handmaiden who’s been so shamed would be unlikely to return to the Order.”

  This raised both Annalise’s brows, even if it didn’t bring her off her knees. She’
d discovered in the hours required of her that Waiting, Readiness, was an infinitely comfortable position to hold. “Even more reason to have heard tales. Women talk, Sister. Women we begin and women we shall end, yes?”

  Though nobody else had dared raise a head, there was no doubt all were listening. Annalise watched Merriment carefully, her intention not of rudeness or rebellion, but curiosity. Merriment paced a few steps and set the hem of her gown swinging.

  “I . . . I don’t know of any, personally,” she said finally before halting her steps to look back at Annalise. “I would venture I hope to never know of any.”

  “Yet by teaching us this, you put the notion of its possible requirement in our heads.”

  Merriment blinked rapidly. “I can do no less than to prepare you for whatever you may encounter, Annalise. Perhaps if this is too much of a burden for you, you might reconsider your desire to serve.”

  Annalise sighed and drew back her questions. She shifted herself, hands and forehead on the floor, and closed her eyes.

  “I will never,” she murmured so softly none but she should have heard, “perform this for a patron.”

  Cassian made his way through dim, quiet halls and out a back door into the courtyard, past stone benches and flowerbeds being tended by a pair of lads dressed alike. Like brothers, but not brothers. These boys were Blessings, children born to Handmaidens in the service of a patron. Fathered by kings or thieves, rare in their existence, but well-loved for it.

  “Good day, Master Toquin!” Kellen, the smaller. Blond hair fell over one dark brown eye and his merry smile tilted on its side. He waved.

  His partner, Leonder, nudged him. Taller, with dark hair the color of harvest leaves, he’d outgrown his last pair of trousers and exposed a full finger’s length of limb between the hem and his clog. “Don’t bother him. He’s on his way somewhere, can’t you tell?”

  “Where are you going?” Kellen dusted his hands on the seat of his trousers and hopped along the crushed stone path to make it to Cassian’s side. “For a walk? Out to the pond? Or to the forest where the waterfall is?”