Fires of the Faithful (26 page)

A
rrested?” Lucia sucked in her breath. “Why?”

“Disloyalty—conspiracy—everything.” Rafi was visibly upset. “They came here. To my tent!”

“Did they take Giovanni, as well?”

“Don’t you think I would have told you that? No. Just Jesca and Beneto. Giovanni was here, but they didn’t seem to want him. But I’m afraid they’ll come back. Lucia, Eliana, you need to hide somewhere. Not here; this is where they’ll come back to look. Isabella’s tent—go there. Hurry! I’ve sent Giovanni into hiding as well. It’s best you don’t know where.”

“Here,” I said. “You should take this.” I thrust the sack at him. “There’s tea and ration chits. The soldiers passed the hat after I played.”

Rafi paused in his panic to take the sack and give me a hug. “You’re a good woman, Eliana. Now go!”

Lucia dragged me back through the sea of tents. “Arrested!” In the starlight I could see that her face was streaked with tears.
“Arrested.”
Her voice dropped and I
couldn’t understand what she was saying; after a moment I realized that she was praying in the Old Tongue.

Isabella’s tent was on the opposite side of Ravenna from Rafi’s, and we had to go around the piazza rather than through it. “Isabella!” Lucia hissed, poking her hand in through the folds of the tent and waving. “Isabella, are you awake?”

“Yeah,” a voice muttered. “I’m always awake in the middle of the night.”

“Isabella, it’s Lucia and Eliana, and we need somewhere to stay!” There was a pause, and a rustle inside the tent. “Now!” Lucia hissed.

“Come in, then.”

We crawled into the tent. Isabella’s tent was made from sewn-together grain sacks; it was smaller and lower than Rafi’s, and very crowded. In addition to Isabella, there were four other people asleep in the tent already. They rolled out of the way and pulled the edges of their cloaks over their faces with half-asleep surliness. Isabella flipped her cloak back from her face and propped herself up on one elbow to light a candle. “What’s going on that you’re waking me up in the middle of the night?” Isabella was an older woman, perhaps my mother’s age; she wore her gray-streaked hair in long braids. As she lit the candle, I noticed that she had broad peasant hands, tanned and callused, with the scattering of small scars that came from being careless with the kitchen knife.

“Beneto and Jesca have been arrested,” Lucia said. “We weren’t there. Rafi was afraid they’d come for us next.”

“If they want you, they’ll find you,” Isabella said. “You can’t hide for long in Ravenna.” Lucia started crying again and Isabella patted her shoulder. “There, now. This means they aren’t interested in arresting you, doesn’t it?”

“But Beneto and Jesca—what will they do to them?”

“Get some sleep, Lucia. You too, Eliana. You’re up far too late for clear thought.” Isabella moved over to make room for us to lie down. I wrapped up in my cloak and squeezed in between Lucia and Isabella.

The tent emptied out quickly in the morning. Lucia and I each gave Isabella a ration chit, and she brought us back bowls of gruel. “You’re the musician, aren’t you?” she asked me. “I’ve heard you play. You’re good.”

“Thank you.”

“And don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about, like the rest of your audience.” Isabella gestured toward the tent flap. “My own mother was quite a musician, though she never played in an ensemble. I can’t play a note, but I know what to listen for.”

“Did your mother go to a conservatory?” I asked.

“Never,” Isabella said. “Stayed at home her whole life. But she played
beautifully
. Taught all my children to play, too.”

“Did any of them go?”

Isabella shook her head again. “One of my daughters showed promise. But she died, during the war.” She sighed, and brushed some of the dust from her dress. “I should go see Rafi. He’s probably more upset about the arrests than anyone, and with you two gone, he’s got no one to distract him. You stay here. Keep each other company. I’ll be back before sundown.” Isabella ducked out of the tent.

Lucia and I were left alone. I leaned back against my rolled-up cloak. “Is Isabella a reformer?” I asked Lucia.

“Not exactly,” Lucia said with a flash of a smile. “She sympathizes, but she won’t take orders from Beneto. She kind of has her own faction of old-guard troublemakers. Sometimes she comes by to tell Beneto that he’s just a child who doesn’t know what he’s doing. They’ve had some disagreements. We can trust her, though.”

“How long do you think we’ll have to stay here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Lucia said. “Giovanni got detained once, but it was just so Teleso could put a scare into him.” She lowered her eyes, looking worried again.

“Are you and Giovanni really cousins?” I asked. If I could change the subject, maybe Lucia would feel better.

“Yes.” She sighed. “Our fathers are brothers. And we’re both from Varena, even though Giovanni likes to style himself ‘of Cuore’ because that’s where he studied at the university.”

I didn’t understand this obsession that the university students had with being university students. Before Ravenna, I had met one person who’d been to the university: the physician at the conservatory. In lectures at the conservatory they’d explained that university scholars staffed the civil service, keeping things running smoothly so that the Circle could concentrate on keeping us safe and the Emperor could concentrate on ruling. Peasants didn’t go to the university; it cost too much and it just wasn’t done. Bright peasant children might go to the seminary; talented ones went to the conservatory.

“Is your father a government official?” I asked.

“No,” Lucia said. She rolled onto her side and held out her hand. “Give me your sash for a moment.”

I untied the strip of red cloth and handed it to Lucia. She stroked the wool gently, then rubbed it against her fingers and checked for a stain. She closed her eyes and smelled it, breathing deeply. She folded the cloth tightly and creased it, then allowed it to unfold. “The wool is from Verdia,” she said. “The cloth is of average quality; the wool was probably spun in one cottage and woven in another. The red is quite a high-quality dye, imported from the East.” She gave me back the sash and winked. “That’s
the sort of vastly useful information you learn as the daughter of a textiles merchant and importer.”

I gave her a skeptical look as I retied the sash. “You could have made all that up and I’d never know.”

Lucia smiled, tipping her head to look at me sideways. “You could show your sash to Giovanni. He ought to be able to tell you the same thing. It’s the family business—my father does the imports, his father does the sales.”

I took her hand, flipped it over. It was small and delicate, but deeply tanned and heavily callused. “You don’t look like a city girl.”

“Thank you.”

“What happened in Varena? You said it was a long story. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Lucia leaned back, resting against her own rolled-up cloak. “When I was fourteen, I decided I had a vocation; I wanted to become a priestess of the Lord and the Lady.”

“Why?”

“I felt …” she gestured, then dropped her hands back into her lap. “I felt an emptiness inside that wanted to be filled. I thought that the Church would fill it. I thought that was what a vocation meant.”

“How long did you stay at the seminary?”

“Three years.” She sighed heavily. “Three years of porridge and living in a bunk room with fifty other girls and owning no more than would fit into the pockets of my robe.”

“As opposed to now?”

A smile lit her face. “As opposed to now, when I have all I could ever need.” She looked at her tanned hands and her smile faded slowly to a wistful gaze. “The emptiness grew worse and worse, those three years. I thought if I believed
enough
, if I prayed and worked hard enough, I would feel the joy of the Lady and the peace of the Lord
that my teachers spoke of. I used to—” her hands began to twist her skirt. “It got so that I rarely slept, but I could barely rouse myself from bed, even so. I felt like I was being walled inside a room with no door—” She took a deep breath, let it out again. “The end came when I spent four solid days and nights in vigil, praying in the chapel. It was this cold stone building, and I spent my vigil in this tiny room in the cellar, in almost complete darkness. Truth was, my teachers were tired of my sad eyes and bad attitude. They sent me down there and told me that if it turned out I
didn’t
have a vocation, I should just say so.”

Lucia’s eyes were closed now. “The first day and night I spent on my knees. The next I spent pacing. Oh, I was fasting, too—water but no food—so then the third day I was too weak to pace or to kneel. I lay in front of the altar and tried to pray. The fourth day I couldn’t even do that. I lay on the floor in the darkness, because I was also too weak to summon witchlight.”

“No one even came to see if you were all right?”

Lucia shook her head. “That wasn’t how it was done.” She paused and collected her thoughts for a moment. “While I was lying there, I felt a burst of light, like sunlight breaking through a cloud. I felt the darkness inside me recede, although the emptiness was still there. And I heard a voice say, ‘Daughter, why do you seek me in darkness? I am here, as I am everywhere, but why fight your way through darkness when I will come to dance with you in the light of the sunrise?’ ”

“You weren’t dreaming?”

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t dreaming.” Lucia opened her eyes to meet mine. “I wasn’t dreaming. And I said to the voice, ‘Why do you leave me alone?’ And I heard, ‘You are never alone. But if you come into the light, I will dance with you.’

“So somehow I found the strength to stand up and stumble out of the chapel. It was dawn, the sun was rising, and no one was in sight. And when I came into the sunlight, it was as if my mind exploded into light. The emptiness was filled. And I knew this was what I had been seeking all my life. I shouted, ‘Dance with me, dance with me!’ There aren’t words to describe how this felt. But for the first time, God was truly with me.

“The ironic thing is, I thought it was the Lord and the Lady, finally showing up to tell me that I truly had a vocation. But when I shouted, the teachers came running and saw me dancing. I was singing this tune that came into my head—” she hummed a few notes, and I recognized the music from the Mass. “And they grabbed me and hustled me inside and started shouting that I had lost my mind, that only someone as twisted and evil as me would sing that inside a seminary of the Lady. I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong at first, but finally I realized that I was singing an Old Way song and dancing the dance that goes with it. But the problem was, I wasn’t sorry.” Once again, a smile lit her face.

“So that’s why the Fedeli don’t like you?”

“Not quite,” she said. “The teachers finally decided it was the fact that I hadn’t eaten or slept in days that was causing me to be so obstinate. Up until then I’d always been this meek, sad girl, you see, and terribly eager to please. So they gave me something to eat and told me to go sleep for a bit. But instead, I went out to tell all the other initiates that we’d been looking for the wrong gods in the wrong places, and that if they’d follow me—I didn’t know the first thing about the Old Way at the time, of course—we’d find the true God and the true worship and dance together in the light. I’m sure I sounded as cracked as Amedeo.” She laughed, genuinely amused. “Fortunately, I had friends
who warned me that the Fedeli were on their way, and so I left, barefoot, with nothing but my robe. It was early summer and I headed south. I remembered from classes on the spread of the Faith that Old Way superstition was most prevalent in the remote regions, particularly among peasants, so I headed to Verdia. And that’s why I can’t go back to Varena. They’d get me for apostasy and blasphemy and spreading evil doctrine. Back then the Fedeli weren’t going after the Old Way followers that much—mainly they were trying to root out heresy within the Church—but they made exceptions for crazed ex-seminarians who tried to recruit their classmates.”

“So how did you survive, barefoot and penniless?”

“Oh, I got by. People fed me here and there. Once I got to Cuore, I tracked down Giovanni and blackmailed him into giving me some money to go away. He was horribly embarrassed by me. I used that to head deep into Verdia. That was about a year before the war started. I’ve been learning dances, and teaching them to others ever since.” She stretched, cracking her back. “So that’s what happened in Varena.”

“I can see how you got on the Fedeli’s bad side.”

“Yeah,” she said, and grinned. She was tremendously proud of her notoriety, I could tell. We sat in silence for a moment. “Your turn,” she said. “Why did you leave the conservatory?”

I shook out my cloak and rerolled it to make a better backrest, then leaned back again. “Well,” I said. “I was at the Verdiano Rural Conservatory, which is in Bascio.” Lucia nodded. “Last fall, a new student showed up … Mira.” I told Lucia about Mira, and Bella and the Fedeli, and what Mira’s secret turned out to be.

“Why did she leave the Circle?” Lucia asked.

“She found out what had caused the famine,” I said.

“All the Circle knows what caused the famine,” Lucia said.

“And her grandmother died.”

“Ah.” Lucia looked at me speculatively.

“How secret is it that magefire caused the famine?” I asked. “I mean, I didn’t know until I heard Mira say it. But at the conservatory, we’re so isolated—”

Lucia sighed. “In Cuore, it’s something that everyone knows but nobody says, because to say it aloud is heresy, and the Fedeli are always listening.” She rubbed her forehead. “I told you it was discovered at the university? The Circle tried to cover up the knowledge by killing the ones who knew. Fortunately, they missed a few. The survivors started the reform movement. This is part of why Giovanni is so suspicious. Some of his friends died in that purge.” She looked up again. “So, I’m sorry. I interrupted your story. The other mage came for her?”

I found my voice shaking as I told Lucia about waiting in my room as the light slowly faded, Mira standing in the doorway, Liemo forcing Mira to use magic to save me. “After that—” I clenched my fists; I still didn’t understand this. “Mira just seemed to collapse in on herself. She started crying, and she followed him downstairs. They got on horses, and they rode away.”