by Megan Hart
“I haven’t yet decided.” Cassian resisted the urge to ruffle the boy’s hair. It was already a tangled mess, with bits of grass caught up in it.
“The pond’s got an eel in it,” Kellen said. “I’ve seen it. Just a wee one, about this long.”
Cassian studied the boy’s measurement. “That long? ’Ware, else you’ll find yourself the eel’s supper.”
“They don’t eat people!” Kellen’s small mouth rounded and he turned to his companion. “Do they, Leonder?”
Leonder shrugged. “If Master Toquin says . . .”
Kellen took a leap back. Leonder laughed. Cassian smiled. The boys began an argument over which was better, steamed or roasted eel, and the best way to catch one, and what to use for bait.
Cassian left them to their rough and tumbling, the sound of their boyish shouts following him. He’d wrestled with his brother much the same way. He’d sometimes even won, if his brother felt magnanimous enough to refrain from dirty fighting.
Now, he walked. And thought. He often sought the forest, but today he went through the grass and fields toward the pond. It had been hand-dug when the Order’s first manse was built. The original founders had thought to breed fish in it and eels, for which the depth and brackishness of the water was better suited. He didn’t think they’d ever thought of boating or ice-skating, though sometimes the sisters came out here to take part in such pastimes. But not today.
He couldn’t imagine the hours of labor that had carved the pond. Boulders lay piled around its edge, proof of how hard the ground had been, how difficult the effort. Cassian had never swam in it—nobody did except the sorts of foolish boys who might tempt an eel to nibble. But he had gone out to the center in a small skiff on a day so bright the sun had cut through the dark water like a flame. He’d seen the pond’s depth as well over a tall man’s head. It wasn’t over-large, but it was deep enough to drown.
Of course, it didn’t need to be deep for that. He knew of an upstairs maid in the home of a childhood friend who’d drowned herself in a bucket. Nobody had said why. As a man, Cassian could guess at any number of reasons she’d done so, especially since she’d taken her life in the bedchamber of the house’s master with a bucket dragged all the way from the stable. But as a boy, he’d only heard the tale of how she’d been found, facedown, her skirts not even wet. How she hadn’t struggled or fought but simply put her face into the few inches of water at the bucket’s bottom . . . and breathed.
Calvis had seen her himself, he claimed, and been the one to tell the tale. How he’d managed to get inside the bedroom and view the maid he never quite explained, but he’d told the story often and with few embellishments. The lack of frills convinced Cassian his brother had indeed seen the dead girl. He’d been envious at the time, thinking it some treat to witness the subject of the story that had the county buzzing.
“You don’t want to see it.” Calvis had said this with clouded eyes and a shake of his head. “Not really. It’s not a sight for the likes of you.”
Later, when they outgrew short pants and slateboard lessons and had moved on to the pursuits that would shape them as men, Calvis had told him a different version of the worn-thin story. Not frilled or furbelowed.
“She put a bar of soap between her teeth,” he said.
“Why that? Why a bar of soap?”
Calvis had shuddered, his mouth working. “To keep from screaming? I don’t know, little brother.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Standing at the pond, the dirt soft beneath his boots and water squelching around his toes, Cassian could still hear Calvis’s voice. He could smell the acrid scent of the soap his brother’d been using to clean his fingernails before eating the dinner their mother had called them to. And in the rippling water at his feet, he saw the reflection of his brother’s face.
An image from the looking glass. Reversed. They’d only ever been identical to any who didn’t look overclose or didn’t know them overwell. Now he looked, and then again, trying to put his own features in their place. The lines at the corners of his eyes helped. So did his hair, blown a bit by the wind around his face. Threads of silver had woven in the darkness. Calvis had ever been, would ever be . . . young.
“I miss you, brother.” The mouth in the rippling reflection moved, echoing the sentiment. “Ever and always.”
It wasn’t enough. A memory and a few words would never bring him back.
Life will bring what the Invisible Mother provides. Cassian had long ago ceased believing that. It hadn’t escaped him that in a faith based on the story of a man and woman split apart by betrayal, real or imagined, it might have been the male who created the world, but it was the woman who oversaw it. People might invoke Sinder’s name, but it was to Kedalya the prayers were sent.
There was no use in praying for his brother’s return. Death was a chasm not even the Invisible Mother could bridge. His brother was gone, whether to the Void or to the Land Above, both places in which Cassian had also ceased believing. He’d never see his brother again.
Whatever life brought, it wasn’t at the bequest of the Invisible Mother. And what did life bring him now, as he made his way around the pond to the gazebo on the pond’s far side. Annalise, her hair covered with a headscarf and her face scrubbed clean of cosmetic, her gown hitched at the sides and tucked into a belt tightened at her waist. She had a basket covered with a towel settled in front of her, and a loaf of bread peeked from it. A jug sat next to it.
She didn’t see him. She was Waiting, her eyes closed, her mouth moving but no sound issuing forth. Was she praying? That didn’t seem right. Handmaidens knelt in Waiting, not in prayer.
It felt illicit, this watching her when she couldn’t see him, but Cassian made no move to step away. The crunch of his boots on the gravel hadn’t yet alerted her, but if he moved now, would she hear and open her eyes? Would she think he’d been spying on her apurpose?
Did he care?
“. . . no greater pleasure . . .”
Ah, she was reciting the five principles. It wasn’t enough to learn them by heart, a novitiate must believe in them. Live them. Be consumed by them. Annalise did not impress him as a woman to be consumed by anything, but what did he know?
And still he stood, boots grounded to the earth as though he’d grown roots. His breathing soft, held tight in his chest, so as not to alert her. His hands curled into fists he noticed only when his fingers ached.
Move. He didn’t obey his own silent command. He drew breath after breath, ears straining for the sound of her voice.
Cassian had been with the Order for ten years, with another three before that in service to the priesthood and assigned to the Motherhouse. He’d been surrounded for years by women, inundated, immersed. He knew beauty.
Annalise wasn’t beautiful. Her features were too bold, her smile crooked, her eyes too shrewd. If she’d been perfect, would he have been able to ignore her the way he did the others, the many others? Cassian thought so, and cursed himself for being so swayed by what he’d long ago decided to forgo.
“Oh,” she said when she opened her eyes and saw him there. Nothing more, no accusation, no smirking smile to show him she’d known all along he was there. No alarm, either. Only curiosity. She gave him that tilt-headed glance that Cassian was equally as disturbed to discover he found as familiar as her voice.
“I plead your mercy,” he said.
“For what?”
For what, indeed. For staring? For not alerting her that he’d come upon her? Cassian cleared his throat.
Her mouth tightened. “Is this your special place? Have I encroached?”
“No, no. I often walk here, but no, it’s not . . . mine.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek and looked at the basket and jug in front of her. “I’m required to learn the five principles, front to back. I’m having difficulty.”
“Surely not in the learning. A child could memorize them.” He meant no insult and so of course that w
as how the words sounded.
She got to her feet, not with swift grace but a heave and a sigh. “A child can learn many things, sir. I’m not a child.”
“No. I daresay you’re not.” He stepped away from the gazebo’s wooden railing.
“My difficulty is not in the rote memorization, but in the acceptance,” she told him bluntly.
If nothing else, her honesty was what made her so much the lovelier. “Many find it so.”
“Well, Master Toquin,” Annalise said dryly, “I am not many. I am myself. And I struggle with this, knowing particularly that I’m not unique in it and yet unable to convince myself to go toward the other spectrum, of those who find no quarrel in such statements as ‘true patience is its own reward.’ ”
“Do you not find that to be the truth?” He watched her as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.
“What? True patience being its own reward? For what? How?” She shook her head and dusted her hands, then bent to tear a hunk of bread from the loaf and offered it to him.
Surprised, he took it. She tore another for herself and chewed it thoughtfully. He kept his in his hand but didn’t eat.
“Obviously you’ve not gained the skills yet to become a Sister-in-Service.”
The look she shot him was full of disdain he could not begrudge her, as his statement, bald as it had been, had also been stupid. “Surely you make merry with me, sir, for I thought I’d take my vow upon the morrow, so that I should be the first to attend the Order and join its service in so swift a time.”
Knowing his own words had brought forth such a response didn’t keep Cassian from bristling. He’d been too long revered, even feared, to accept such a reply with a different reaction. He made a half bow, hand upon his stomach. “Your mercy at the interruption. Clearly, you’ll need hours more of meditation before you come even close to understanding the most basic tenants of the duties you claim to so long for.”
Her gaze flickered at that and her chin lifted. “Everyone needs hours of meditation.”
“Not everyone. I’ve known novitiates to earn their vows within a sixmonth.” Not quite a lie, mayhap a slight exaggeration, and yet he could still not be certain why he told her such a thing beyond that something about this woman set him on edge and he found himself incapable of doing otherwise.
“You think it’s a matter of strength of will,” Annalise said flatly.
“I would call that an apt description, yes.”
“And how long,” she asked with narrowed eyes, “would you estimate it will take me to fully embrace these principles?”
Tension coiled in his gut at the way her voice dipped low. It scratched at him in places he hadn’t known itched. Cassian swallowed, throat tight, and kept his voice steady, without emotion. His face carefully blank, as had served him so well, so often.
“You ask me to make judgment on when you’ll be ready to take your vows of service?”
She nodded. “You seem the man to ask.”
“Have you spoken to any of the Mothers? The other Sisters? Surely they’d be better judges than I—”
She laughed, tipping her head back, nary a trace of irony in her chuckle. When she looked at him, her eyes gleamed and her mouth twisted into a smile that had too little humor to be pretty yet had him wishing to take another step back. “Ah, ah, ah. False modesty, sir, is as unattractive as boastfulness, if not more so, for arrogance can never play at being anything other than what it is.”
By the Arrow, she forced his blood to boiling. He felt the heat of it rush to his cheeks, and only by serious strength of the will she so claimed would lead her to her service was he able to keep his voice from shaking when he replied, “You think me arrogant?”
“I ask your judgment on how long it shall take me to be worthy of being called to service.”
She’d taken not a single step in his direction, yet touched him all over. Cassian had no five principles, no mantras to repeat in times of duress to bring his thinking back to the Faith, and even if such practice had been a habit during his time in the priesthood, he’d have long forgone it now. So he reacted as he’d taught himself—by snip-ping the threads of his emotion, one by one, the way a weaver would clip the extra strings from a garment to keep it from unraveling.
“Do you ask to hear the answer I’ll give, or the one that will spare your feelings?”
She laughed again without humor. “Oh, please, worry not of sparing my feelings. I’ve known you too short a time for you to grant me favors, sir, and long enough to know you’ve never worried of sparing me anything.”
Cassian drew another breath and let it out. Neither peace nor calm filled him, but rather a welcome blankness. This was how he acted best, devoid of emotion that would lead him to rashness. “I think, Annalise Marony, that you could study for the rest of your life and never become a Handmaiden.”
She blinked rapidly and took a single, staggering step back. One hand went flat to her chest, over her heart. Her fingers clutched just once before her hand fell to her side. Her back straightened. She looked him in the eye.
“I’ll prove you wrong.”
“Prove nothing to me,” Cassian said, “as I care little for the outcome. Take your vows of service or not. You’ll not be the first to leave before you have, nor would you be the first to remain here until you die without ever being granted a patron.”
Her mouth parted, but in the next moment her teeth clicked together as her jaw clamped. It didn’t make her ugly, this fierceness. If anything, it gave her the beauty she normally lacked.
He watched her throat as she swallowed hard, and her mouth closed over whatever words she’d meant to speak. She would cry now, he thought dispassionately. They almost always did, and even though he hated it, he hoped she would weep so that he might be justified in his disdain.
Annalise didn’t cry. She blinked again and drew a breath. Then another. She turned her face so as to look at the ground and not him. She gave her head the smallest shake.
She was, incredibly, dismissing him.
“You don’t know me,” she said in a tight, hard voice, sharp.
It would’ve been easier had she cried, for tears he could despise. If she’d railed, or sought to insult him, that, too, he could’ve swept off with ease, for nothing anyone ever said could hurt him when it was all most likely true. Her disdain he could’ve also borne as well-deserved, even if not for the reasons she thought.
Instead, she unmanned him with pity.
“You could never know me,” Annalise told him. “Do you know anyone? Have you ever?”
He had, too well and more than one. Cassian stepped away from the gazebo. Away from her. He gave her another half bow he knew she’d see as mockery.
“I plead your mercy for the intrusion.”
“Have you?”
Void take her, she moved toward him, following. She put a hand on the gazebo railing and a slipper to the gravel. It crunched beneath her foot, as loud as anything he’d ever heard.
“Is this another test?” Annalise asked in a voice too gentle to be borne. “Have I passed it?”
Cassian shook his head and let her gaze catch his. It tried to burn him and he refused to let it. “No test. Not this time.”
She made as though to move toward him again and stopped herself, a hand on the railing. Her gaze swept him up and down, but Cassian had found the place inside that allowed him to remain cold. Unmoved. It hurt, this place, but it was an old and familiar pain and one he welcomed. One he would always welcome.
“Another time?” she asked as though she’d never been denied an answer in her life. “You will test me another time, yes?”
“If the Mothers call me to do so.”
“And will I know when you are testing me, or must I guess?”
“I daresay you will know.”
Her pale eyes flashed then. “Mayhap by then you will have sought to know me, so that you might better judge my performance.”
Cassian slowly, slowly shook hi
s head. “But as you said, I could never know you.”
At that, at last, he turned on his heel and left her behind him. She didn’t call after him, for which he would later be grateful, though at the moment he could feel nothing like gratitude.
At that moment, Cassian made certain he could feel nothing at all.
Chapter 12
Every day they met after the noon meal in Cassian’s dim-lit room, scented with incense, the texts of fine paper and tang of ink adding to the weight of the air. Bellies overfull, eyelids drooping from rising early, no matter how the students struggled, coherence was difficult and yet apprehension kept them on their toes.
Well, all of them but for Annalise. She understood the other girls’ fear. Cassian was not only a man, which had become to seem a strange enough creature in a house full of women, but he was also a discontented man. Eager to scowl rather than smile, of a mysterious past about which she could unearth no amount of gossip. He was a brooding puzzle.
He was, Annalise thought, watching him through the fringe of her lashes, delicious.
Every encounter made him more so. Annalise had ever been one to crook her finger and gain the attention of men she desired—she’d learned early on how to provide those sorts of pleasures. It was one of the reasons she’d believed herself capable of at least pretending she wanted to become a Handmaiden. But not this man. He balked her, always. He insulted her. He ignored and chastised her, infuriated her.
He quite possibly despised her.
She watched him now as he stared out the window, lost in his own thoughts. What fantasy would a man like that use to occupy his time? Did he dream of carnal pleasures, or did he set his mind to loftier pursuits? Annalise craved knowing.
Not a one of the young ladies in her group could handle him. His gruff voice sent them into knock-kneed twitters, and his slightest glance set them writhing. The worst part of it, she thought as her pen scratched out nonsense syllables in the parchment booklet, was that he knew it, and encouraged it. He set fear into them like a diamond in a ring, something to be admired and cooed over. Something to be coveted.