by Megan Hart
Cassian leaned on the fence railing to watch as Calvis slipped on his shirt. The warmth had frozen inside him at his brother’s words. “Your work? You plan on leaving us?”
Calvis paused, expression unreadable. “I would never leave you, brother. Not entirely.”
Cassian forced a laugh to shadow the hint of tension. “When you said your work—”
“Ah, I should’ve said my Art, but it’s not mine, is it? I use it now and again, but I shouldn’t claim ownership of what belongs to everyone.”
“Not to everyone. Not to me.” Cassian laughed, shaking his head.
“Oh, and aye, even to you, brother. Come here and let me show you.” Calvis gestured.
Cassian moved forward, reluctantly. “You’ve ever been the fitter of us.”
“Bollocks. We’re the same, as the Allcreator made us. Yes? What I have, you have.” Calvis tugged Cassian by the wrist to stand beside him. “Now. Plant your feet like so.”
It felt awkward, the stance, the stretch. It had been too long since Cassian had even tried these positions. The first few passes left Cassian unsteady and easily knocked off-balance by Calvis, who even pulled his strikes. By the fifth or sixth time, though, Cassian managed a block.
“Most well, brother! Most well indeed!” Calvis looked happier than Cassian had seen him in years. Since they were boys, perhaps. It was better than anything, to see his brother with such joy in his eyes.
“Again,” Cassian said. “This time, I’ll knock you on your arse.”
They went again, in darkness that deepened. Lights from inside the house provided some bare illumination, enough to make this battle all the more challenging. It still ended up with Cassian on his back and Calvis atop him, fist at his brother’s throat.
“Stop that!” Bertricia’s voice, acrack with fright, rang throughout the yard. She lifted her lantern to shine the light on the brothers. “Stop that at once!”
“We were only playing,” Cassian tried to tell her as his brother helped him to his feet. “Naught more.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She strode toward them, a picture of feminine fury. She lifted the lantern, and in its flickering light Cassian could see her features had twisted, making her a woman he didn’t know.
She slapped Calvis across the face so fiercely his head rocked back. For a man so well-versed in the Art to take a blow he could so easily have sidestepped meant much, if only Cassian could determine the meaning. When she slapped him again, blood trickled from Calvis’s mouth. It looked black in the lantern light, black but bright.
“Enough!” Cassian stopped his wife’s hand from a third blow. “By the Arrow, Bertricia, what are you about? Have you gone mad?”
She was shaking, indeed, as though madness had overtaken her. She even snapped her jaws at both of them. Her eyes rolled, a wild horse at the first touch of a saddle.
“I told you I would never hurt him. I told you that.” Calvis spit a mouthful of blood into the dirt at her feet. It left a mark in the frost.
Mayhap Cassian had always known from a place deep inside, even back in those garden days when Calvis had called her she-hound the second. Mayhap later when Calvis had hired a whore for his brother’s pleasure. But if he had not known so long ago, Cassian surely knew it now.
He stepped away from both of them and tasted sickness so sour he thought he might spew it. “Calvis?”
Calvis’s shoulders slumped, but he never looked away from his brother’s face. “I will not plead your mercy, brother, for I deserve it not.”
“Plead you nothing,” Bertricia said in a low, haunted voice. The lantern shook, making shadows dance among the three of them. She wasn’t wearing a cloak against the cold.
Cassian held his place on the surface of the world only because to lose it would mean perhaps losing his mind, as well. And that he refused to do. Not over this. Not for her.
“Go into the house, Bertricia.”
“I will not! I will not stand aside and let you—” She choked and wept.
Both brothers looked at her, but her husband was the one who spoke again.
“Inside the house, or by the Void, I will make you wish you’d gone of your own accord.”
Bertricia went.
Cassian looked at his brother. “What’s yours is mine and mine yours, is that it?”
“No, brother. Not like this. Believe me, a thousand times I’ve regretted this.”
“Yet you didn’t end it. What did she think you were going to do? Kill me so that you might wed her in my place?”
“By the Void, never. I told her as such.”
“She asked it of you?” Horror tried to sweep him into silence, but Cassian forced it away. “Did she?”
Calvis gave him no insult with lies. “Yes. She was crazed. She loves me overwell, brother. Again, I can plead no mercy for it.”
“Did you mean for her to love you overwell, Calvis? Did you seek to make me the cuckold you warned me I’d be even before I married her? Tell me you sought this to hurt me, or to . . . compete with me . . . or to have me,” Cassian said unsteadily. “Tell me even that, and I will forgive you.”
“I would tell you if it were true, but I swear to you, Cassian, she came after me. Always. The first time she acted as though she thought I were you, and I let her because I wanted you to see what a bad choice she would be.”
“And now? Surely she can’t pretend she thinks us the same now.”
“No. Nor did she so believe then, I’d be willing to wager any amount of coin. But I found myself weak, brother. She is very lovely, your lady wife. And well-skilled. And I thought she would never be able to ask of me what other women might—to give myself more to her beyond my cock. I thought she’d be unable to ask such of me.”
“But she has?”
“Yes.” Calvis shuddered. “Sinder’s Blood, I wish . . . I had never gone with her.”
“Still? You’ve been with her recently?” Cassian shuddered, too, throat closing on bile but needing to know.
“Every day.”
Cassian muttered a curse so vile he’d never have thought himself capable of taking the Invisible Mother’s name in such a fashion. “Why? By the Blood, Calvis, how could you?”
“She threatened to tell you if I stopped, and brother, I didn’t want to hurt you. I could not bear it if you hated me. I simply could not bear it.” Calvis’s eyes flashed. “I already know there’s no place for me in the Land Above, but by the Arrow I swear to you, no crime I’ve committed has sliced me as much as this I’ve done against you.”
The clearing wasn’t silent. The breeze soughed through the trees. The waterfall pattered into the basin. Still, Cassian could hear the sound of Annalise’s breathing. He turned to her.
“I was angry, and I turned away. My brother left in the night. I never got to tell him I forgave him, or that I would ever have had him in my life rather than her.”
Annalise leaned against him, her small hand warm in his. “He betrayed you as much as she. Mayhap more.”
“It didn’t matter. I could find another wife. With my father passed into the Land Above, I could never have another brother.”
She stroked his hand. “What happened to him?”
“He died in a bar fight a few days after he left. He could’ve easily won any fight against any man. The one who killed him said, in fact, it was as though Calvis fell upon his blade apurpose. It was an argument of no consequence, a drunken fight over dice. The man who killed him hadn’t meant to do more than threaten. Witnesses held out his story. He never was convicted.”
“Oh, Invisible Mother, Cassian, I am so sorry. So, so sorry.” Annalise kissed his hand.
He wanted to pull away from her kindness, but forced himself to stay still. She would offer him herself and he would be no fool, refusing. He could no longer afford to be a fool.
“Bertricia said she’d gone to my brother because she thought she could help him. She tried to make me believe I’d sent her into his arms.”
&n
bsp; “But he said—”
“With my brother dead, there was only her word. And though I didn’t believe all of it, I did believe she thought she could help him. Ease his burden, somehow, even as she eased her own. That might not have been how she started it, but I believe it was how she meant to end it.”
“With you as her husband, what burden could she have?” Annalise sounded sour.
He looked at her. “I long ago ceased to imagine her reasons. They only hurt me too much. She entered the Order a fortnight after Calvis’s death. She said it was because she’d failed with him and wanted to atone by bringing solace to some others. She found herself well-suited to it.”
“And now she’s back because she finished with a patron?”
Cassian drew a deep breath and got up to pace, his boots scuffing dirt. “No. She’s back now to claim her son.”
“Her . . .” Annalise fell silent.
Cassian faced her. “Bertricia was one of the few I’ve ever seen who took her vows almost immediately upon entering the Order. She was sent to her first patron within a month of arriving. She came to me a month after that, her belly not yet swelling with a child she wanted me to claim as mine.”
He didn’t blame Annalise for looking sick. He’d felt sick then, too. She tangled her fingers together, perhaps to keep them from making fists.
“You didn’t?”
“I’d scarcely been to my lady wife’s bed in months, so consumed was she with fucking my brother,” he said bluntly. “The child wasn’t likely to be mine.”
“It could’ve been your brother’s boy.”
“And it could’ve been her patron’s get,” Cassian said. “She’d not been with the Order long, remember. It’s possible the herbs Handmaidens take had not yet begun their job. And Handmaidens who become pregnant while in the service of a patron give birth to—”
“Blessings.” Annalise put a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. “Oh, Cassian. Oh . . .”
“The boy appears to have my brother’s eyes, but all else belongs to his mother.”
“He has your eyes, then,” Annalise said.
“I don’t know the looks of her patron. He could have his eyes, for all I know.” He sounded angry. Was angry, though not at her.
Annalise rose, then, and went to him. She knew him so well she didn’t touch him. He couldn’t have borne it, a gentle, pitying touch.
“All this time, you’ve stayed here so that you might watch over him?”
“So that I might be able to tell if he belonged to my brother. Or me. Yes. But the longer I waited, the harder it was to convince myself he was indeed my nephew, as much mine as a son would’ve been. Harder still to convince myself he belonged to some unnamed face. The boy is a Blessing, a true Kedalya’s Blessing, and he has a life here in the Order. When he’s of age, he’ll be provided for as handsomely as any prince and set to make his way in the world. Who am I to hold him back from such a future? Who am I?”
She touched him then, and he suffered it without allowing himself to overthink his reasons.
“Someone who loves him,” she said.
He clasped her fingers in his. Pulled her close. Stopped himself from kissing her to look into her eyes, instead.
“She’s back to take the boy for reasons she hasn’t yielded, and I don’t aim to allow her to do it.”
“No blame will come from me on that account. She sounds vile. And I say that not only because she was your lady wife,” Annalise added with a slow smile. “Woman I begin and all that. Her behavior shames us all.”
“You needn’t be jealous. My love for her ended a long time ago.”
Annalise raised a brow. “Good.”
She kissed him, and Cassian found it was nothing to suffer, but to enjoy.
“Am I still banished from your classroom?” she murmured against him.
“Well, yes. This has naught to do with that.”
She tipped her frowning face to his. “No?”
“Annalise, you need to be with a true teacher, one who can challenge you. You’re already far more educated in the Word and the Book than any I’ve ever taught. You should never have been placed in my class to begin with.”
She opened her mouth to say somewhat, but seemed to change her mind. “I don’t want to leave. I doubt there’s anyone who can teach me more than I know, anyway. I would find it more useful to continue assisting you. Teaching others. Especially now . . .”
“Now what?” He asked her, falling into the deep pool of her loving gaze.
“Now that I understand what it is to really believe. I spent my whole life with the Faith being forced into me yet never once really believed it. And now . . . I do.” Annalise had never sounded shy to him. It didn’t suit her.
Cassian studied her face, so earnest and sincere. “Sweetheart, I’m not the man to help you on that path.”
“Don’t be silly. Former priest and all that? You’re perfect, in more ways than one.” She gave his arse a squeeze he’d have laughed at if her words hadn’t so disturbed him.
“Former priest,” he told her carefully. “Look at me, Annalise. I am not the man to help you in your newfound faith. I have none.”
She blinked and frowned. “I don’t like you when you make sport of me, Cassian.”
“I’m not making sport. I’m telling you the truth.”
She stepped out of his embrace. “You have no faith?”
He held out his hands, fingers spread. “No.”
“But . . . but you . . .” She stepped back again, and again, expression twisting. “You’re a teacher of the Faith! Your purpose is to instruct novitiates in the Word of the Book, to teach them . . . how can you take on such a task with a clear conscience when everything you tell them feels to you a lie?”
“Teaching the Word is my purpose. It need not be my pleasure.” He reached for her, and she recoiled. He withdrew his grasp.
Her mouth thinned. “I don’t understand you.”
They’d spent some few hours in love compared to the many they’d spent at odds. His own mouth twisted on his reply. “If your lack of understanding surprises you, Annalise, I fear I will find you quite foolish.”
He knew just where to poke her, to prick and stab. To his shame, Cassian discovered he wanted to. He wanted to force her away from him.
“Then I am, indeed, a fool.” Her voice broke and, Void take her, she began to weep. “And I am not at all surprised.”
He could have gone after her. It would’ve taken two of his steps to reach her, one arm’s length to grab. Instead, Cassian watched her go.
He was not surprised, either.
Chapter 23
As a girl, Annalise once stumbled upon a bright-plumed bird that had flown into a window and fallen stunned to the ground. No bigger than the palm of her hand, all big eyes and gaping mouth, it had peeped pitifully in her cradled hands. Tiny feet, hollow bones, feathers of blue and red and green. She’d never seen so lovely a creature from so close a view.
She held it only for a few moments, long enough to feel the rapid patter of its heartbeat and the scratchiness of its brilliant feathers. It had seemed a precious and wondrous thing, that tiny bird. Recovering its wits, it had struggled in her fist. Rather than hold it tight to keep it, as she’d wanted to, Annalise had let it go.
Perhaps her relationship with Cassian was like that bird. Precious and wondrous and fragile, fighting against being held so tight. Yet she found herself unable to open her fists and let it go.
She found him in his classroom alone behind his desk, the scent of ink still in the air. “Cassian.”
He looked up from the pages he’d been turning. She’d grown overused to his smile upon the sight of her; it stung worse than she wanted to admit to see the old wary coldness in his gaze. He set aside the book and stood.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Yet here I am,” she said. “I’d like to speak to you.”
He didn’t move toward her even a hair’s distance
. “You’ve said it all, I think.”
“Then you’d be wrong.” She moved between the rows of desks and stopped in front of his. She wanted to kiss him.
“I stand corrected.”
“Why must we ever be at odds? Why must everything between us be a battle?”
His dark eyes showed no glimmer of emotion. He shrugged. “Perhaps it ought to be a lesson to us.”
“No. I don’t accept that. I won’t.”
“Annalise,” Cassian said, “you have no choice.”
“Is that your answer to me, then? I have no choice? You’ve decided for both of us that we shall remain at a distance from each other? Is that what you . . . want?” She’d aimed to sound strident and managed until the very last, when her voice cracked and broke.
“It was foolish for me to respond to your advances. I know that now, and plead your mercy for it. I ought to have known better. There were other men here who might’ve taken the place of me—”
“I wanted no other man, and you know it. I made that clear from the first. You might’ve refused me, but you didn’t. Because you wanted me!” She forced the words from a raw throat.
He bent his head a little, eyes closing so that he didn’t have to look at her. “Wanting something is not always the best reason to take it.”
“I came here believing in little, and much has changed. Because of you, Cassian. Don’t tell me you haven’t changed as well, for I’ll call you a liar.”
“You’ve already called me a liar.”
Ashamed, Annalise swallowed against the pain. “I misspoke in anger. I beg your mercy. I was wrong to say such a thing.”
“No. You weren’t. It’s true. I’ve been a liar for the past ten years. I’ve lied to the Mothers and Sisters-in-Service who were kind enough to grant me a place. I’ve lied to the novitiates entrusted to me. And most of all, I lied to myself.” He looked at her, eyes bright and hard and cold enough to burn her. “I tried to lie to you, too.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Only because you would not allow it.”
She reached but dropped her hand when she saw he wouldn’t take it. “Are you familiar with the commentary written by Benvolo Deleon?”