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Celica scarcely recalled what Sir Mycen had staid to her upon leaving the Novis Priory, to return to the life she could no longer have. She had tried many times over the past few days to remember it, but couldn’t. The memory came ran to a muddy gray haze, all the words petering out into silence. Many points in the tapestry had turned to rot, and still more were so faded that were you to shine a light behind it, you would be greeted to a sight akin to the clearest of night skies, so full of stars was it.
Something about stout hearts and straight backs. That was what he had said. Celica could not remember how many times people around her had taken her silence for strength. She did not feel particularly strong watching him leave, watching the world gray out on the edges of her vision, so far from tears that she felt dry as a bleached bone, dead as a withered tree. Her silence had been taken for strength, regardless.
At least the Mother cared not for whether or not Celica shed tears before her idol, and the prior, Nomah, and the residents of the priory did not know her well enough to know what to take of her silence or her dry face.
Celica was uncertain as to just how many of the inhabitants of the priory knew of her lineage. Nomah knew, but he treated her just as he did the other children in the priory—and she was grateful; the last person to recognize her had tried to kill her and her friends (lost friends, gone friends, another dream to consign to the past), and she had no desire to draw that kind of attention again. Some looked at her with something resembling deference, but for the most part, she was left alone. That, by itself, suggested that there were those who knew her origins, for other novices had a much more rigorous schedule and Celica knew of no one who complained about her leisurely one, but…
She was grateful for her solitude. She would not spoil it by making complaints, or seeking to draw the voices of others into her silence. She was done with all of that.
-0-0-0-
The letters were supposed to provide Silque with some measure of closure, or catharsis. Rohesia tended to differ on which effect was more likely, depending on the day. It all came down to the same thing in the end, though; it was supposed to be something that would give Silque some measure of peace. Some measure of peace, and in the fraught space of those letters never being sent or read by anyone but their writer, some measure of safety.
Rohesia was a wise woman, possessed of good knowledge and good judgment. If there was a fault in this course of action, the fault must surely lie with Silque, rather than in Rohesia. There was a fault here, and it lived in Silque.
Peace. This was supposed to buy her peace. Peace was certainly something Silque had found in short supply just a few years ago, and in the first days, peace she had found from writing these letters, from pouring everything last stain on her heart into the ink that flowed across parchment like black bile. She had no other word for the exhaustion that gripped her when she scrawled her signature at the end than peace.
(The Novis Priory was a hive of foundlings and orphans and otherwise unwanted children. Silque did not even have to venture outside of her own dormitory to pick out more than half a dozen girls whose stories rhymed with hers. They did not write letters. They did not seem to have ever felt the need.)
And perhaps this was some facet of the road towards peace that Silque had not been aware of when Rohesia set her on it. Perhaps it was just another hurdle in her path, a hill to surmount before she could come to the end and find true serenity, before she could find it in herself to just not care about her origins, about the woman who had left her here and never returned, never sent word, never given any reason as to why.
Silque had many questions at her fingertips, but the answers to all eluded her. She could pray all she liked, and would receive nothing in the way of enlightenment from the Mother. This was a puzzle for her own heart. There was little she knew, but she knew that much. The answers would come from within. Some day.
-0-0-0-
The first meeting was such a small thing, something that would elude their minds years later, when they tried to look back upon past events. It did not even happen immediately, for Celica had been given her own room in the priory, far from the novices’ dormitories, and her path did not often cross the paths of the novices as they went about their chores and their devotions and their limited leisure time, for she did not seek them out. There were a couple that had sought her out, but while she was not opposed to their company on principle (already her heart made compromises; she wondered how long it would be before it split her heart in two, again), she did not seek them out in turn.
Oh, it wasn’t like she wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t like she didn’t itch to speak, at times. But Celica scarcely trusted herself to speak when she was around other children, and trusted herself not at all to appear normal to them. When she was around them, her skin started to feel tight; a scream would build up in her throat. So she kept to her own company, until the day came when the scream subsided.
Prayer was a comfort. Though Celica had yet to receive any revelation or moment of insight from the Mother, filling her mind with love for her holy mother was an effective distraction, for however long it might last.
There were many small shrines to the Mother set up around the priory; while group prayers were certainly a feature of life in the priory, and one Celica willingly took part in (crucially, no one tried to socialize with her while they were all praying, and she took up a position at the back of the group so as to make a quick retreat), the need for private devotion was still one that was respected here. So much the better.
Celica wandered absently into her favorite shrine—she had prayed in them all, but felt this one to be the most restful; it was, perhaps, something about being in a garden, with the sun shining gently down upon her—the path so familiar to her that she paid little heed to her surroundings. The rose bushes obscured the ground around the idol and the wind brought a scent of salt to mingle with the fragrance of roses, but if she had been more mindful, Celica might have heard a faint murmuring that couldn’t be attributed to the flowing water of the shrine’s fountain.
But when Celica rounded the final bend in the path to reach the idol, she realized she wasn’t alone.
The girl on her knees before the idol was a novice she hadn’t seen before, though given how much time Celica spent avoiding the other children in the priory, that didn’t suggest as much as it might have. Staring at the girl from the back, she couldn’t tell much about her, except that her hair was straight and powder-blue in shade, and that she might have been a little taller than Celica.
Celica paused, uncertain of what course to take. She wanted to pray. She wanted to pray here. She didn’t want to pray in front of another person, even if she prayed in silence. She didn’t want to sit under scrutiny. She didn’t want—
The girl looked up, and after a moment’s surprise, smiled gently at her.
“There is room before the idol for two, Princess.” Maybe she was a couple of years older than Celica. Her voice suggested as much; her voice was… Celica kind of wanted to speak, if only to hear the girl speak some more. “You don’t have to leave.”
“Please don’t call me ‘Princess.’” But there was no rancor in Celica’s voice as she knelt next to the girl before the idol. Some tiredness, some sadness. “I don’t want anyone to find out I’m here.”
At that, the girl grimaced, abashed. “I’m sorry; I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I… I like to be called Celica.” Very much in spite of herself, Celica snuck a glance at the girl out of the corner of her eye, though she was supposed to be praying. Her features were soft and rounded, her eyes a placid gray.
“My name is Silque. I…” She paused to consider her words. “I hope you like it here in the priory.”
To that, Celica could only shrug. In a voice that sounded wooden even to her own ears, she said, “I’m grateful for any sanctuary.”
Silque glanced at her, and in the moment when their eyes met, Celica thought she saw doubt in her eyes. But it was only a moment, and when it passed, Silque returned to her prayers, leaving Celica to do the same.
-0-0-0-
It was the first meeting, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Suddenly, Celica felt as if she was seeing Silque everywhere, and found herself interacting with her nearly as often. Perhaps they really had been crossing paths before now, and Celica simply hadn’t noticed her before, but that didn’t feel right. Surely she would have remembered her. Surely. She hadn’t been paying so little attention to the other novices as all that, had she?
Months of little nods and greetings to one another, months of glances at one another across a hallway or the dining hall, months of accidentally running into each other before an idol and praying together in silence. Months like this before Celica could work herself up to initiating a conversation.
In that time, she had grown comfortable in Silque’s presence, as comfortable as Celica could be, when she had no idea how long it would be before circumstances forced her to leave the Novis Priory and everyone she knew, again. It was hardly as if she knew her very well, when the words that passed between them had barely exceeded the most basic pleasantries, but thus far, there had been nothing in Silque’s behavior to put Celica on her guard. The girl was quiet, pleasant, usually smiling, and when not, wore an expression of quiet contemplation on her face more consistent with the adult clerics than with a girl close to Celica’s own age.
Celica was comfortable, and yet, it took her months before she could find it in herself to start a conversation any more in depth than ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you today?’ There really was something wrong with her, wasn’t there?
“So…” They had finished praying before the idol at the same time (Celica may have rushed through the last few sentences of her prayers to keep up), and Celica was brushing sand from her skirt as the words began to escape her mouth, almost against her will. “I’ve heard you’re training to be a mage, too?”
Well, if you could really call what Celica was doing ‘training.’ No one was rushing her, and she was abashed by this, for she was in no rush, either. She was given books and gentle suggestions on problems and exercises to examine and spells to try to perform. It was a lack of gratitude, and nothing less, that saw her dawdling so much on her studies, but she couldn’t seem to motivate herself to move at any greater speed, couldn’t seem to motivate herself to concentrate better on her readings. Every time she tried, her mind drifted back to Ram Village and the friends she had made in her short time there, to Alm and Faye and Kliff and Gray and Tobin. Then, it drifted back a little further, to her brothers and sisters and to Lady Elfriede and to all she had lost to the fire and the sword, and she could concentrate on nothing but the black cloud buzzing in her mind, the cloud that drained color from the world.
One day, she would do better. She wanted to do better.
Silque paused, her hand stilling over the skirt of her habit. “I suppose I am.” For the first time since Celica met her and then continued to meet her, at so many scattered spots across the priory grounds, she seemed uncertain. The smooth lines of her round face drew up ever so slightly, like the prelude to a rope being pulled taut. “I have of late been contemplating purely studying white magic, instead.”
“You… just want to become a cleric, instead?” Celica couldn’t imagine that. Well, she could imagine spending the rest of her life in prayer and devotion. That was something not at all difficult to contemplate, especially not when prayer provided her with the only peace she ever felt. But she couldn’t imagine putting away the gold-hilted dagger she had taken with her from the royal villa, couldn’t imagine learning magic that had no application for combat, or, for the one combat spell clerics were taught, being restricted to use it in defense of her own life, only.
She was supposed to rely on the Mother. She was not supposed to interfere in what was the Mother’s domain. The Mother would provide all, in the end—food, comfort, the satisfaction of justice. To even contemplate otherwise felt blasphemous, felt like a river carrying Celica far away from the lessons the priory was meant to teach her, but Celica could not help the thoughts brewing in her mind. If she was ever found in this place, she needed more ways to protect herself than just a dagger.
To that, Silque nodded, though there came a sudden shadow over her face whose origin Celica couldn’t begin to guess at. “Yes, I think I do. Though I am uncertain as to whether I truly possess the temperament for it. I think a cleric needs to possess a clearer heart and mind than what I have.”
Celica froze, staring at her with a frown on her lips. “What… What do you mean by that?”
But Silque only smiled gently at her and left the shrine, leaving Celica to her confusion and, flowing beneath that, her concern.
-0-0-0-
Now, Celica found herself seeking Silque out by design. In the dining hall, in the shrines. She had even ventured into some of the dormitories on a couple of occasions, looking for her; she did not find Silque there, but she did find Mae visiting some of her own friends, and talking with her had been… nice. Nice, and enlightening.
“Oh, sure. A lot of the kids here got dumped by their parents. I wouldn’t be surprised if Silque wound up here like that; she’s been around for as long as I can remember. I mean, she’s nice; she’s really nice. But she’s a bit…” Mae hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders. “You can tell she’s been here a long time. You can tell no one’s ever come to visit her.”
This only redoubled Celica’s efforts to find Silque in a private place again, to try and open another conversation. Her reticence had fled her; worry pushed many things out of her mind, when it took hold within her.
But this was the opening of a floodgate within her mind, and now she found herself more aware of everything and everyone around her, and not just Silque. Celica now found herself examining the faces of the other children in the priory, and the same question inevitably flared in her mind: Were they left here? Did they choose to come to the priory, to devote their lives to the Mother, or were they abandoned here by uncaring parents?
Celica had spent enough years in the degenerate pit that was the royal court to know just how little people were capable of caring for their children. She had seen noble children with wealthy parents who went about in threadbare clothing they’d outgrown long ago, because their parents could not be distracted from their wine or their gambling long enough to order new clothes for them. She had watched noble children waste away from illness without their parents ever appearing by their bedside or ordering a physician to see them—Celica herself had called for a physician more than once, but alas, there was little she could do as regards to the parents.
That was the royal court, the highest nobles of the land, the crème of the crop. (Her father had been… Celica did not wish to speak of her father.) If that was what they were capable of, what about the rest?
And there was Ram Village. Ram Village, where Kliff’s father had abandoned his mother before he was even born, where one of Gray’s sisters was a foundling, where the most common gossip was about which girl in the next town over had been lied to and abandoned by which merchant or which mercenary. Ram Village had been a far cry from the degenerate court, had been such a kind, lovely place, and still those tales abounded. What was the rest of the world like?
And she thought about Silque, kind, quiet, nice. Powder-blue hair and gray eyes—she was actually kind of pretty, though Celica could not pinpoint which feature it was that made her think so. Silque who had lived here for as long as any child Celica’s age could remember. Silque, who never received any visitors from outside the priory.
The world was so full of injustice that Celica had no comprehension of how to grapple with it all. Injustice surged toward her as a great, black wave. When it finally struck, she had no idea whether or not she would even be able to tread water.
(This all had the side effect of making her, perhaps, a little more serious about her magic studies than she would otherwise have been. Celica had no idea what to do about the injustice of the world. She did, however, know that there was nothing she could do about it if she did not even have tools in hand. And she was grateful, more now than ever, that she had never seriously considered becoming a cleric. Healing magic was certainly a boon, but Celica did not think she could ever make any progress with an arsenal of white magic to be used only to heal others and preserve her own life.)
When finally Celica found herself alone with Silque again, it was not in one of the shrines. The priory had many gardens, both flower and vegetable, and one of the chores allotted to the novices (those who weren’t refugee princesses living in hiding, in fear for their own life) was the maintenance of these gardens. More experienced clerics took the more intensive tasks onto themselves, but even the youngest of the novices were trusted with watering the plants, and it was in one of these gardens, filled with yellow rose bushes and beds of asters and anemones, that Celica found Silque, holding a ceramic watering can painted white with green vines wrapping around its broad body and slender spout. Silque watered the flowers with the same quiet composure she put into everything, as if there was nothing in her life that could bother her at all.
Well. Maybe her hands around the watering can were just a little tight. Maybe that was Celica’s imagination.
Celica stood mute in the entrance to the garden, the cobblestone path feeling oddly hard against her feet, though there was nothing wrong with the soles of her shoes. At length, Silque looked up from her watering; when her gaze rested upon Celica, she smiled gently. “Good morning.”
“…Good morning.”
Celica’s tutors in the palace had loved to go on about how advanced she was for a child her age, how mature. By the Mother, if they could see what she was reduced to now…
Celica resolved herself, and took another step forward. Then another. She steeled her resolve until she was standing next to Silque, and trying her best not to obviously hover. Finally, Celica found it in herself to speak, and to speak of something normal, too, which was probably a step up from where she had been when she first arrived. “Is watering plants difficult?”
Silque gave a barely perceptible shrug. “The sun can be a bother, and you must take care not to give any one plant too much water, or too little. But these are small matters. I can’t give complaint.”
Celica had met girls years older than Silque who did not speak so eloquently, or so much like an adult. For the first time, Celica thought about what might have driven that, and her stomach churned. “Oh. I’m glad.”
“—find you?”
“Wh-what?”
“How do your studies find you?” Silque asked her patiently.
“I—well. Thank you, Silque.” Celica linked her hands in front of her, tried not to twiddle her fingers. “Silque… May I ask you a question?”
A soft laugh. “That depends on the question.” At the look on Celica’s face, she added, “Yes, Celica, you may.”
Celica nodded, setting her jaw. “Alright. When you said you weren’t certain you have the temperament to be a cleric, what did you mean by that?”
Silque froze. She didn’t stiffen, didn’t go limp, didn’t fall to her knees; she just froze in the middle of walking over to another flower bed, the watering can balanced in her hands. Finally, she said, in a voice that could almost have passed for normal, “To become a cleric requires a heart free of any shadow or doubt. If I become a cleric, I must be able to devote all of my heart to the Mother, unreservedly, without any part of it anchored to anything else. And to learn white magic requires a heart and mind free of anger. If you feel any sort of anger while trying to cast a spell, that anger will taint the results.” This time, the shrug was more than barely perceptible; it was something Celica could clearly mark out. “The path of a cleric is not one trod upon lightly.”
“And…” A childhood spent at court had taught Celica the value of choosing her words carefully, but she was at the moment at a loss to determine how she would have worded this carefully. “…And is there anger in your heart?”
This earned Celica another pause, while Silque scrutinized her, wearing an unreadable look all the while. Her gray eyes were, suddenly, not cold, not exactly, but there was a definite distance there, a distance that had sprung up between them like the yawning of a gorge. “You’re well supplied with information, aren’t you?”
Celica shook her head, abashed. “Not so much as you think. I’ve just…” She ground her teeth. “I’ve just learned lately that a lot of the children here were abandoned here by their parents. And you’ve been here for a long time.”
Silque relaxed, ever so slightly. She set the watering can on the ground with a slight, almost musical clink, sighing. “After a fashion, I am a girl with a multitude of brothers and sisters. You did not come here under the most ideal of circumstances yourself,” she added pointedly.
“The royal court wasn’t a place you would have wanted to live,” Celica muttered, scratching sharply at her left arm. The prickle of pain from fingernails dragging against her skin was frankly soothing. “My father wouldn’t have noticed if I had contracted plague and died; I doubt he misses me now.” She wondered, sometimes, what it took to make a man so uncaring. But for the most part, his absence from her life went utterly unlamented.
“And so the circumstances that led you here are not so different from the ones that led me to this place,” Silque said gently, and did not seem to notice that there had been such a large gap of time between the fire and Celica’s arrival here that she surely could not have come straight to the island.
“So you really were left here.”
“Yes.” Somewhat lamely, “It was a long time ago. Truth be told, I have no memory of my mother. I know only what others have told me. And it is…” Silque stared down at her hands. They were flecked with soil from her watering, and she flexed them into fists, then carefully, deliberately relaxed them again. “It is not something I have ever been able to understand.”
Celica found herself scratching at her arm again, a little harder, this time. (Lady Elfriede had always tried to get her to stop. Nothing she did had ever helped.) “Why do so many people treat their own children as worthless?” she hissed, more to herself than to Silque.
“I don’t know.” Though it was clear that Silque couldn’t tell the difference, as far as Celica’s intent went. “I suspect we’ll never know. We can only try to forgive. That is what the Mother teaches.”
A bitter spike of guilt cut through Celica’s heart. “Yes,” she muttered. “The Mother teaches us to forgive.” And she could never truly serve the Mother until she learned how to do that. Perhaps she would never truly serve the Mother at all. “Does that put them beyond justice, then?”
“I…” Silque picked at her sleeve cuff. “I don’t know. There is more to justice than the courts. There’s more to peace than bringing those who have done wrong to justice.”
Which sounded very much to Celica like something someone told themselves when they realized there was nothing they could do to bring someone to justice—a sentiment she was entirely too familiar with. She had been too well-trained in decorum to reach forward and grasp Silque’s hand in her own, but she hoped the smile she directed at her would relay the meaning just as well. “I’m willing to help, if you need it. That’s what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it?” It was the least she could do.
A startled smile appeared on Silque’s face, just then, and at the sight of it, Celica blushed. That had been too forward, surely.
“I think you need help, just as much as I might,” Silque murmured. “But thank you. It really is all we can do, in the end.”