Fires of the Faithful Read online

  “So what’s your theory?” Bella asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think the poisoned honey refers to literal honey, though. I think it’s some sort of disguised danger, but it’s disguised awfully well. I don’t have any idea what it’s talking about.”

  Giula didn’t even venture a guess. “I wish it had been the messenger service, instead of a man with a mysterious song,” she said.

  “Honestly, so do I.” For a moment, Bella’s face looked worn. “The news from my family last time wasn’t good.” The news next time was unlikely to be better, but anything was preferable to uncertainty. And perhaps the harvest would be better than expected, if only by a little.

  The supper bell rang, and we quickly packed up our instruments to walk over to the girls’ meal hall. I had expected Mira to join us for supper, but she wasn’t there. Celia was, though, repeating the words of the honey song to those who hadn’t heard them yet. Giorgi, the cook’s assistant, brought out heavy tureens of stew made from the vegetables we grew in the conservatory garden, and jugs of tea and wine.

  Celia flicked back a curl that had fallen into her face and took a sip of her tea. Celia didn’t like tying her hair back, probably because the curls framed her heart-shaped face so charmingly. Not that any of us were supposed to be trying to attract the attention of the boys, but Celia liked any attention she could get. “It’s a lovely song,” she said, “but I think it’s just about some feud. Some noble family sent a bride to another family with poisoned honey. Their children ate it and died. Maybe there was a son who refused to eat it, but—”

  This wasn’t far off from Bella’s theory, but her eyes narrowed. “Oh, come on, Celia,” she said. “You don’t really think the song is about literal honey, do you?”

  Celia arched one perfect eyebrow. “Why don’t you share your theory with us, Bella?” she said.

  “Eliana thinks the poisoned honey is a symbol for some disguised danger,” Bella said. “I think she’s right, but I don’t know what the danger is.”

  Flavia, a percussionist, looked up from her stew. “I think you’re right about the symbolism,” she said. “It’s a ballad rhythm, or I’d say that the Fedeli wrote the song.”

  “The Fedeli.” I put down my tea. “Why the Fedeli?”

  “Don’t you think the ‘poisoned honey’ could refer to a heresy of some kind?” Flavia said. “I could easily see the song reaching us well before we actually heard what heresy it was supposed to be about.”

  We considered that idea for a moment.

  “But, like I said, the rhythm’s not right. I would expect the Fedeli to write something that sounded like a hymn—not like something that sounds like a folk ballad.” Flavia took a sip of wine.

  “Eliana got a new roommate today,” Giula said. “From Cuore.”

  That diverted the conversation entirely, and after checking to make sure that she wasn’t standing behind me, I described Mira to the others and told what little I knew about her: born in Tafano, trained at a seminary in Cuore, and ignorant in the use of candles.

  “Do you suppose …” Bella said.

  “Why would you come all the way to the conservatory from Cuore if you were going to try to get pregnant?” I asked. Any pregnant girl student—and any boy student who was named as the father—was expelled from the conservatory. Clearly, if the Lady blessed your union, she wanted you to get married and settle down, not go off to join an ensemble.

  “Maybe she’s in love with one of the boy students,” Giula said.

  “How would she have met him?” I asked. We were kept well separated from the boys at the conservatory. The only place we were even allowed in the same room with them was the chapel. This encouraged a high degree of religious observance among girls like Celia.

  “That can’t be it,” Bella said. “Maybe she had a lover in Cuore, and she hopes she’s pregnant by him.”

  “Why would she have left, then?” Giula asked.

  “That’s obvious,” Bella said. “She was an initiate, wasn’t she? Maybe the boy wasn’t.”

  “Still,” I said. “Why would she leave Cuore?”

  “Maybe …” Bella closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “This is getting too complicated. Even if the relationship ended badly, if she has any reason to think she’s pregnant, then coming back to Verdia would just be stupid.”

  Celia tossed her hair back. “Clearly, you’ve never been in love.”

  Bella’s eyes narrowed and she smiled slowly at Celia, letting Celia’s words hang in the air as a pink flush crept slowly upward from the gray wool collar of Celia’s robe. “If I risk being expelled from the conservatory,” Bella said, “I want it to be for a man—not a boy. But to each her own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Celia said.

  Bella had started to turn back to her tea, but when Celia got defensive, she took that as an invitation to twist the knife a little more. “Why would it mean anything?” she asked. “I think your devotion to the Lady is very touching, Celia.”

  Celia went white. Naturally, she attended chapel daily to flirt with the boys there, but Bella meant something else, and Celia knew it. Magery was the Lady’s gift to humanity, but it decreased fertility. To counteract this tendency, the Lady encouraged Her children to try to make children of their own as frequently as possible. Of course, the Lady didn’t want conservatory students having babies—our celibacy, like the sterility of the Circle, increased the fertility of everyone else. But, still. “Honoring the Lady” was a popular euphemism for the sort of thing that happened secretly on summer nights in the shadows of the practice halls—and that occasionally resulted in expulsions.

  “The Lady rewards those who love Her with their whole heart,” Celia said, her voice shaky and her face still white. “You should try attending Chapel sometime when it isn’t required, Bella. The results might surprise you.”

  “Sure, Celia,” Bella said, and returned to her tea. Celia stood up to go, and Bella caught her by the dangling edge of her sleeve. “Just be careful,” she said. “You know what I mean.” She released Celia, clucking her tongue, and Celia flounced out.

  I tried to imagine Mira with a lover, and shook my head. Mira lacked the coy flirtatiousness it took to catch a boy’s eye. She was like me—a little bit intimidating. Besides, if she’d stopped using magery that long ago, why wouldn’t she have learned to light a candle by now?

  Mira was not in the room when I returned from supper, but her cloak and violin were missing. She’d gone somewhere to practice, late though it was. She’d taken the candle. I slung my own violin over my shoulder and went out to see if I could find her. I was curious how well she could play, after all these years as a seminarian.

  I listened carefully to the muffled cacophony in the corridor of the main practice hall. Two violins—but I recognized both. Not Giula, unfortunately—she needed the practice, but was probably studying for our music theory class.

  I left through the back door, and as I crossed the courtyard, I saw the flicker of candlelight in the north practice hall. Many students used candles rather than witchlight while they practiced, but none of us used the north practice hall. It was cold, first of all, and so drafty that small drifts of snow actually blew across the floor in winter. And the acoustics were terrible. Bella once claimed it was haunted, though she was telling a ghost story to scare Giula and needed a creepy setting for it. In any case, the candle had to belong to Mira.

  The front door of the north practice hall was ajar. I slipped in and paused in the shadow. Mira was playing in the ensemble hall rather than one of the side rooms; she had set her candle in a wall niche that protected it from drafts, but it still wavered, making her shadow dance on the wall. It occurred to me that sneaking around to spy on another student practicing was a little absurd, but I was curious about Mira. I put down my violin very quietly, sat with my cloak huddled around me, and listened.

  Mira started off with very basic études—finger exercises. Her fingers were
clumsy, and she missed many of the notes, which wasn’t surprising for someone who’d spent the last few years in a seminary rather than a conservatory. But as she warmed up and the fluidity began to come back to her, she began to make the études sound like something I hadn’t expected. She treated them as if they were music rather than a demonstration of technical skill; I realized, listening to her, that the world was slipping away around her, and nothing but each note existed. Her technique was raw, but the sound was beautiful. I wondered how she was able to bring herself to give this up, when she thought she had a calling—and if her calling was so powerful, how she had been able to give that up, now.

  Then she finished with her exercises and began to play a melody—and I froze.

  There were a few songs once used in old village ceremonies that still circulated at the conservatory. Playing ritual music from the Old Way was illegal, of course. And it would have been dangerous in a city conservatory, because of the Sudditi Fedeli della Signora, the Faithful Subjects of the Lady. But the Fedeli avoided backwater areas like Verdia, and most everyone shrugged off the danger. I certainly did. I knew a wedding song and a healing song, and I played them regularly. The Old Way music had an undercurrent that more recent music completely lacked. Most Old Way songs were in a minor key, but they were fast, with rhythms that felt like the heartbeat of the earth underneath me, and they stirred my blood like strong wine and cold wind.

  I had never heard the song Mira was playing, but I recognized it as Old Way music from the peculiar rhythm: da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. Da dat da da dat da wham wham wham. Listening intently, I could see Mira throw her head back as she played, raising the violin like an offering, and I thought, she was studying to be a priestess?

  Mira played the song through twice, picking up the tempo as she played. A cold draft touched my feet where I sat, and I curled my toes up inside my boots, clenching and flexing my hands. Then, midphrase, Mira stopped. She set her violin down carefully on the floor, and straightened for a moment, looking at the candle. Then she bent over and vomited on the floor, and vomited again, and then fell to her knees, still retching. I jumped to my feet. “Mira!”

  She should have been startled by my presence, but she didn’t even look up. When I reached her, she was curled up on the cold stone floor, clenching her fists and wrapping her arms around herself. “I’ll get the physician,” I said.

  “No,” she gasped, and grabbed the edge of my robe in her fist. “No, it won’t do any good. Stay here. Don’t leave me. This will pass. It will pass.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I was afraid she might be dying, and she might die alone if I left her. So I dragged her away from her vomit on the floor, then covered her with her cloak and sat down beside her. She was shaking harder than I’d ever seen anyone shake from cold. After a moment I covered her with my own cloak, as well.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, between spasms of shaking. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Lady’s tits, Mira,” I said. “Let me get the physician. Or Giorgi, the cook’s assistant—he’s the village healer.”

  “No,” she said. “I just want you. Stay with me. Please, don’t leave me.”

  “But I don’t know anything about healing,” I said. I touched her forehead with the back of my hand to test for fever, but it was cool, even chill.

  “I don’t need healing,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  “What do you want me to talk about?” I asked.

  “Anything,” she said. “Just let me hear your voice, so I know I’m not alone.”

  So I talked. I told her about my family—about my favorite brother, the second-oldest, Donato, who taught me to fight and used to make me clay whistles. I told her about my friends at the conservatory—Giula and Bella and Flavia and Celia. I told her about the song that had arrived so mysteriously, about poisoned honey and dead children. I told her about my teacher, Domenico, how he was one of the handful of great teachers still left at the conservatory. Domenico had been educated at the Central Conservatory in Cuore and had actually spent several years playing at the Imperial Court before he gave it all up to come live in Verdia and teach at our conservatory. No one really knew why. Domenico told me he’d hated court, and from his descriptions of it I could understand why, though I still dreamed of playing there myself.

  Mira shuddered, but this time she didn’t stop. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she shook as if invisible hands grasped her shoulders and wrenched her back and forth. I had seen one other person have a convulsion—one of my nieces, when she was a baby and had a high fever. My mother had poured cold water over her and she’d lived. But Mira had no fever; her skin was as cold as the stones underneath us. I grabbed her and tried to hold her still, but her jerks pulled her out of my grasp. Then a moment later it was over, and she lay still. I held my hand lightly over her lips; she was still breathing. I sat back silently, clasping her limp hand. Mira’s hand was like carved marble—cold and impossibly smooth. I rubbed her palm with my thumb and suddenly my own blood turned cold. Mira had no calluses on her hands—not even the sort she’d have had from light garden work.

  One of my brothers had trained for the priesthood for a while. He’d given it up after falling in love with a girl in the village, but I clearly remembered his complaints to our mother about the work. The elder priests and priestesses talked a lot about communing with the Lord and the Lady through reaping their bounty, but my brother thought that was just an excuse to stick the novitiates with all the heavy farm chores. I’d grown up on a farm and my brother was no stranger to hard work, but after a year at the seminary his calluses were thicker than my father’s.

  I touched Mira’s soft hand again. She had never been an initiate priestess. That whole story was a lie.

  Why would she make up a story like that?

  I lit a globe of witchlight to get a closer look, and Mira threw her free hand over her face with a groan. “Hurts my eyes,” she muttered. “Put it away.”

  I dispelled the witchlight with a flick of my wrist. Mira drew her hand away slowly.

  “Play for me,” she said.

  Her violin was in reach and in tune, while mine wasn’t, so I picked hers up.

  “Play the funeral song,” she said. “The song I was playing earlier. I know you were listening.”

  So it had been a funeral song. I added that mentally to my repertoire and began to play. I have always been able to pick out tunes quite easily, and I experimented a little as I played, adding a forceful downstroke to the strong beats and pairing them with the same note an octave up. Domenico had told me to hold still while I played, but Old Way songs always made me want to use my whole body, and I swayed back and forth with the music. I closed my eyes, watching the flicker of the candle against my eyelids. Then I opened my eyes.

  For the first crazy instant, I thought a third person had silently entered the north practice hall, dressed in the uniform of a soldier. Then I thought I recognized my own face around the dark, riveting eyes. I started to my feet, and then realized that all I was looking at was a crumbling fresco. This was one of the oldest buildings at the conservatory, and had once been lavishly decorated.

  I forced out a laugh. “I’ve been listening to too many of Bella’s ghost stories,” I said. Mira was silent. Slowly, I sat back down on the stone floor, more shaken than I thought I had any call to be. “The candlelight is making me jumpy.”

  I set down Mira’s violin and took her soft hand again just as the candle went out.

  I stayed beside her through the night, talking when she roused enough to ask to hear my voice. Mira seemed to waver from consciousness to unconsciousness like a sputtering flame, but when she woke she seemed glad to have me there. In the last part of the night, her tremors calmed, and I asked if she’d like me to help her back to the room, where she might be more comfortable. She sat up, still shaking a bit. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.”

  I packed up her violin and slung both hers and mine o
ver my shoulder, then wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and slipped my arm under hers. If anyone was out and about at that hour, they were on their own business and pretended not to see us; I helped Mira up the long staircase and into our empty room, then helped her sit down on the bed. Mira lay down and pulled her blanket over herself, closing her eyes. Her shaking had finally eased.

  There was an hour or so before I’d have to get up, and I quietly slipped my boots off. As I hung Mira’s cloak up, something fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and kindled a tiny witchlight, hoping that it wouldn’t disturb Mira; it was a letter of some kind. You stupid fools, it said. We don’t want your money. We want our daughter back. I flipped it over; it was signed, Isabella and Marino of Tafano, Verdia. I slipped the letter under a musical score on her desk, ashamed of myself for reading it.

  “What?” Mira said, and I jumped, flicking away my witchlight and nearly scattering the papers again. In the darkness, I lay down on my own bed, curling up under my blanket.

  “I’m leaving,” Mira said, her voice as clear as the bells we rang at the Viaggio service.

  “What?” I said, but Mira went on without heeding me, and I realized that she was talking in her sleep.

  “You’re wrong, Liemo,” she said. Her voice was contemptuous. “I’ll break the chains you’ve bound me with. The Lady promises freedom and I’m going to take it. You can lock me up, you can even kill me, but you can’t make me serve you again.”

  She was quiet after that, her breathing low and even. I lay awake, shivering. I told myself that I was still cold from the practice hall, but the fierce steel in Mira’s voice had cut me to the bone. I didn’t know whom she was speaking to, or what she was talking about, but I hoped I’d never find myself standing against her. In the end, I didn’t sleep at all that night. At dawn, Mira opened her eyes and looked over at me, giving me a slow smile that warmed me to my feet. “You will keep my secret?” she said.

  I didn’t even know what her secret was, but looking into her eyes, I would have done anything for her. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”