Compendium (22 page)

That clumsy canine would die if left to catch food on his own—that or he would have to turn herbivorous. Mia laughed at the thought of Hamish nibbling on a root or leaf, a wary look on his face as he first took a bite, then a horrified expression when he realized that this leafy green thing was nothing like a hearty chunk of meat and that he likely never would taste meat again. The image made her laugh, but when she rubbed her face, she realized she was crying hot tears as well. She missed Hamish so badly. She wanted to rub her face in the thick fur coat that shot hairs up her nose and have him lick away her tears. If she could just look into his eyes one more time, she knew she would see love and forgiveness.

Mia fell asleep again, thinking of Hamish and Father and trying to quiet her thoughts and tears. Life continued on this way—for how long, she had no idea. She had no visitors, save a cleric who dropped trays at her door and came to pick them up while she was unconscious. She used the chamber pot when she had to, slept, wore herself out thinking hard about everything, slept some more, ate again, and eventually, once her mobility started to return, paced slowly around her cell, running her hands along the walls. The boredom was torturous. She decided at some point, after maybe six or seven more days, that she didn’t really like herself at all. She had no desire to talk to herself right now, but she was forced into company with her insecurities and vagaries and betrayals and humors. And she had nothing left to tell herself that she hadn’t already confided. There was no one to apologize for, no one to make amends to—just her—and she hated the very sound of her voice rattling away inside her head. When she was almost on the brink of madness, with only her own mind to pick at, multiple sets of footsteps echoed outside her cell.

27
Infirmary

Lumin Cycle 10152

The
door swung open,
and several figures entered. Mia’s heart caught in her throat. One of them was Cedar. He no longer was dressed in the robes of an acolyte. He had taken his cleric vows. Mia was seated in the far corner of the cell with her knees up. She quickly averted her eyes from the three clerics, not wanting to look at them just then.

Brother Valentine stepped forward. “Ms. Jayne, please rise. We need to secure you.”

There was a clink, and she looked up to see him holding a wicked pair of leg shackles.
He can’t get his hands on Taryn, so he’s going to make an example of me.

“You can’t mean for me to wear those,” she said. She hadn’t intended her statement to sound rude, but that was how her words were received.

“You’ve been accused of stealing from the Order that took you in, betraying it, damaging the Crater Grove, and injuring others in the process. Do you deny these charges?”

Mortified, she shook her head. Those statements put the embarrassment of leg shackles in perspective. She climbed gingerly to her feet while the small group of clerics looked on. Cedar bent down to snap the shackles around her wasted ankles. She always had been on the scrawny side, but she had diminished further in this cell. The shackles looked comical, and she worried whether she would be able to walk without tripping.

“I guess they won’t be too tight,” Cedar said, standing to his full height and stepping back to retrieve the manacles that Brother Borus was carrying for her arms. Cedar had the good grace to avert his eyes. He hesitated briefly as he secured the manacles to her wrists, but he did his duty regardless, as he always did. It would be a mercy if the weight of the chains would drag her down through the floor and into the earth, never to return.

“You’ll be coming with us,” Brother Borus said in a perfunctory tone. A frown and cold voice replaced his usual friendly smile and playful banter.

“Where are we going?” Mia asked. She didn’t relish the thought of parading past the entire Order, grungy, injured, and disgraced.

“Save your questions for the Dominus,” came the curt reply from Brother Valentine.

Valentine and Borus each took one of her arms, and they proceeded forward, clinking slowly along. As Cedar fell in line behind them, his eyes seared a hole in the back of Mia’s grimy neck. Mercifully the clerics didn’t hasten her along, as she doubted she could have moved much faster. If the shackles hadn’t made walking difficult, her own deteriorated muscles would have. They plodded along through the corridors, turning here and there. Mia kept her eyes on her feet and moved as silently as possible without speaking a word. It was all in vain; the hefty chains clanked, and the sound echoed around the hallways with every step she took.

The occasional whisper reached her ears; other acolytes darted from their path at the edge of her vision; and heat rose in her cheeks. She wanted to raise her head and stare back at them defiantly, but as she had been left to rot in the dark, the fire had died in her veins. Now she possessed just self-loathing, shame, and a good deal of fear regarding what would become of her. It wasn’t the way of the Order to execute people, but she probably had challenged a lot of their standard practices of late. They wouldn’t keep her here forever. They could banish her, but given the severity of her crimes, she expected they would turn her over to the authorities of Willowslip for criminal proceedings. She hadn’t thought through the possibility of being jailed when she had devised her plan to steal the Shillelagh.

Underneath all her stress and anxiety, she was just as egotistical as any common criminal, assuming she would never get caught. She had no one to blame but herself. Just as Taryn had warned, she had let herself believe Compendium made her invincible. It solved problems for her, including some very complex ones. It never talked back, never told her she was wrong, never called her names. It never turned its back on her or betrayed her. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t her family. And yet she herself was just a human and had betrayed others and been betrayed by them.

Compendium didn’t change her life. Its companionship was an illusion that she had allowed herself to see as the truth. She bit the inside of her lip as she walked, thinking about how she had used it as a crutch, a means to avoid truly finding a place here, a way to avoid being direct with Dominus Nikola about her feelings and concerns, a way to avoid confronting Brother SainClair about his actions. She took a tool that could have been used wisely to augment her time here or unwisely to dismantle it, and dismantle it she had. Her choices didn’t benefit her, her family, or those around her. And now she no longer belonged anywhere. She had no family; she had no friends; and she had no place here in the Order. Mia sighed, the sound lost amid the clang of her steps.

Just as she was working herself into a full frenzy of self-flagellation, they arrived at a nondescript door set into a stone corridor. She didn’t recognize either the corridor or the door. It was a terrible and currently inconvenient propensity of hers to tune out her movements through the hallways if someone else was leading her. Brother Borus rapped twice on the very old wooden door. It creaked open a little, and he pushed it open farther. Cedar tapped Mia on the shoulder, and when she turned, he grasped the manacles around her wrists and held them still while he applied the key.

“The leg shackles will have to stay on,” he whispered.

She nodded in acknowledgment of his words and turned back toward the open door. Mia pushed it farther open with her now much-lighter arms. The room was barely large enough to contain two beds and a couple of stools. Dominus Nikola sat on one of the stools, a cane clasped in his hand, as if he were going to use it to row himself across the floor. In the bed closest to the door lay Brother SainClair. He was even whiter than usual, which made his angular features look as if they had been carved from marble. Dark blotches stained the skin beneath his eyes. Two pillows that clearly didn’t have beans in them cradled his head.
They’re bringing me here to show me the damage I wrought with my actions.
Mia’s eyes wandered toward the far bed, where she expected to see another injured cleric.

When she saw who was in the far bed, it almost brought her to her knees. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream. She opted to scream.

“Father!” The leg shackles clanged loudly as she stumbled into the room.

“Mia,” a muffled voice called from the far bed, “is that you child?”

“It’s me,” she said.

As she rushed forward, everything else in the room faded away. She grasped Father’s hand. Even given her own decrepit state, she was appalled at how much he had wasted away.

“Dominus,” Father said, his voice thin and small, “can you and the others leave us?”

“She is a prisoner,” said Brother Valentine. “She is not to be left unattended.”

“I hardly think she’ll get far in those leg shackles,” the Dominus replied.

Mia’s eyes didn’t leave Father, but she heard the others retreat from the room, closing the door with a thunk. Father’s eyes were unfocused and meandered toward the ceiling. He wasn’t making eye contact with her.

“Mia,” he said. “I shall not survive long now. We must talk.”

“Don’t say that. You’re still hanging in here.”

Her words were downright lies. He was gaunt from head to toe. Every inch of his strong, dark frame was shriveled and ashen, with bones protruding like twigs from a bundle of sticks. His once-thick black hair had grown gray, lank, and thin, splayed across the hospice pillow as if making to crawl away from the horror of his scalp.

“They told me you were dead,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Who told you that?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. They remained staring upward.

“Brother SainClair.”

“Ah,” he said, as if those words explained it all. “Well, he exaggerated my departure. If I recall, he’s prone to hyperbole.”

“Really?” Mia asked. “You know Brother SainClair?”

“Yes, my dear. There’s much we need to discuss, and I haven’t much time left. Now, now,” he said, and patted her hand weakly. “There’s no need for tears.”

“Father,” Mia said, “if there was ever a time for tears, it’s now. I’ve made a complete muck of everything, and it was all for naught. My actions have changed nothing. You’re still ill, and I’m a prisoner here.”

He gently grasped her hand and gave it the barest squeeze. “Mia, I didn’t send you here in exchange for a cure. We both know the purple spores are fatal. In the letter I wrote Dominus Nikola, I instructed him to tell you that, but it was always the intention that you were to serve within the Order.”

“Are you delirious, Father?” she asked.

“I suppose it was irresponsible of me, knowing you were destined for this place from the start. My delay in sending you here was my one act of rebellion against the plan that I was to carry out, the plan your mother made. She wanted you here, but your grandparents would never have agreed.”

“This makes no sense.”

“I promised your mother that, if anything happened to her, I’d make sure you were sent here to serve. It was the last wish she asked of me, and I couldn’t go against her on that.”

“Why would Mother have wanted me to become a cleric of the Order?”

Every additional sentence from Father’s mouth added to her confusion rather than alleviate it. Mia looked into the eyes gazing upward toward the ceiling. They watered slightly, as if he were opening a box inside himself that he had closed a long time ago, a box he’d thought he had lost the key to open. But open it he did, and what he told her then changed her life forever.

“
I
’m not your father,” he said.

Mia’s body tensed. They had their differences, physically and otherwise, but shock ripped through her muscles at the statement. It was simultaneously impossible and entirely obvious.
Then who are you?
her mind screamed, even as she sat inert with surprise.

“I’m a childhood friend of your mother’s. We came up together in the Northlands. My father was a servant in your mother’s household. Unconcerned with—and largely unaware of—the social boundaries between us, your mother, her brother, and I were constant companions. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.”

His hazy eyes softened as he described how he and Mia’s mother had played and built forts under the cold forest and stolen furs from the floors to blanket their interior. Words tumbled forth from his strained voice, as if a tidal wave of memories were breaking free from a dam somewhere deep inside his heart. She wanted to ask who her parents were, but she didn’t want to interrupt him. She was worried if he stopped talking, he would never start again.

“As a young woman, your mother joined the Order, was expected to by her family. There she met your father, and they fell in love. They hadn’t been together long when Willowslip fell into civil unrest. You know this story,” Father said, his voice growing hoarser.

“Father, you should drink something,” Mia said, and urged him to sip some water from a nearby gourd. He took a few sips but then, losing patience, waved the gourd away.

“As the political turmoil grew, the internal debate among those in the Order escalated as well. Eventually certain clerics—your mother and father included—decided they couldn’t sit idly by as Willowslip devolved into chaos. They elected to leave the Order to enter a resistance faction. By this time you had been born, their only child. Not wanting to involve you in the dangers of the war, they sent you to live with your mother’s parents while they fought with the resistance. They visited the Northlands when they could, but the civil war in Willowslip intensified. Your parents died in an ambush of their camp. It was a small mercy, because had they lived, they might have been tortured before they were hanged for treason.

“The last time your mother visited her family estate, she came to my cottage and said that if anything should happen to her, I was to ensure that when the time was right, you would be sent to the Order.” A pained expression crossed his face as he shook his head slowly. “Even after she was thrust from the Order and her family was divided over the conflict, she still wanted her daughter to take up the family mantle. Your grandparents were firmly against the idea. The family line was dwindling, and you’re the only grandchild. After your mother’s death, they decided it was time to break ties with the Order.”

Mia sat dumbfounded at this information. The words flowed out of Father. It was as if he were rushing to say everything he could before the spores took him from her. She couldn’t process all this.

“So to keep the promise I made your mother, I had to leave the Northlands and take you with me. You were still a small babe when we left your family estate. It ended up being an act that saved your life. The entire estate was burned to the ground not long after our departure, and your grandparents were lost in the blaze. Everyone assumed you perished as well. As I was the current groundskeeper, the neighbors of the SainClair estate blamed me for the fire and held me responsible for your death. I didn’t burn your family’s home, but that fact didn’t change much for me. I already had stolen you.

“So we traveled around at first, not staying too long in any one place. But eventually we made a home in Hackberry. I admit I was very satisfied with the life we had built for ourselves. I was loath to send you here. Some of it was perhaps fear that I would be imprisoned for my crime of kidnapping and likely for the murder of your family. That wasn’t the only reason, though. Over the cycles, I’ve grown to love you like the daughter you’ve been to me. Some days I told myself it didn’t matter whether you joined the Order.” Father’s voice cracked, and tears rolled from his unfocused eyes.