The sisters held a formal ceremony to honor the dead. It was, by necessity, a truncated affair; the dark portended thunder and heavy rain. Rainfall was rare in the Rhean desert, but on the few occasions it did rain, it poured.
Before the rain came, the sisters convened at the stone terrace in the center of the convent gardens. Sam did not join them. She was not explicitly uninvited, per say, but she knew her presence would be unwelcome.
So she left them to their grief, watching the proceedings from the window seat in the second floor prayer room. From the little nook in the wall, she had a perfect aerial view of the funeral ceremony in the gardens. The sisters had eschewed their uniform whites for funereal black, and from above, they looked like crows, their robes flying out like wings behind them. Some wept openly in great, heaving sobs, clutching on to their neighbor for support. Some cried quietly, heads bowed in private grief. And some had skipped right past grief and gone straight to anger, evident in their stiff spines and squared shoulders. In the middle of them all stood the Arbiter, impossible to miss with her long snow-white hair against all that black. Her hands were raised to the sky and she seemed to sway with the wind. She was oddly mesmerizing.
Sam made herself look away and remember her surroundings. She wasn't allowed alone, of course; Kameko, assigned her temporary guard, was stationed in the prayer room doorway, studiously ignoring her. The tenuous camaraderie between them had disappeared into the gloom, replaced by a strained awkwardness. Neither had spoken a word to the other since yesterday's disaster of a morning.
Sam stole a quick glance at her cousin. Kameko leaned against the door, tapping out a staccato rhythm on the marble floor with the butt of her spear. Was she bored? Angry? Upset? Her cousin's balaclava hid her expression.
Not that Sam cared. The evening prior, she had overheard her cousin beg Nasrin to let her come with her on her hunt for the aliah. Kameko had thrown a proper temper tantrum when her mother refused, reminding Sam that her cousin was, in fact, only fifteen. It didn't matter; the mother-daughter squabble ended any illusions Sam had about their budding friendship. Kameko's loyalties lay with her mother and sisters-in-arms. And Sam's lay with Braeden, wherever he was.
Nasrin was long gone by now, along with a small party of her sisters. They'd departed at dawn, riding horses as fine as any in the Paladins' stable. The storm promised to slow them some, and if the Gods willed, the rain would wash away whatever trail Braeden and the rogue sisters had left them.
Sam sighed and pressed her face against the window pane. Gods damn him. She hadn't forgiven Braeden yet for leaving her behind with no way to find him. She was trapped in this Gods forsaken place. She doubted she'd come to any real harm; a duke's daughter was too valuable as a political pawn to eliminate. She was a prisoner in chains made of silk. And while she sat here, the ineffectual princess locked in her tower, Nasrin and her sisters hunted for Braeden as Thule inched closer to civil war. Sam hated feeling useless.
A roll of thunder rumbled in the distance. Lightning flashed, and the skies opened, the light drizzle quickly turning into heavy sheets of rain. Sam watched with some amusement as the sisters scrambled out of the gardens, covering their heads with their hands.
The rain didn't let up for three days. Sam stayed in her room until the third morning of the storm, when boredom forced her out. Kameko, who had assiduously stood guard outside her door the entire time, looked visibly relieved when Sam finally wandered out. If there was anything more tedious than doing nothing, it was watching someone else do nothing.
The monotony of the last few days must have loosened Kameko's tongue. "Are you well, cousin?"
Two days of nothing but her own company had loosened Sam's tongue too. A confession burst out of her. "I'm bored senseless."
"Oh thank the Gods," Kameko breathed. "You've been boring me senseless."
They shared a brief smile, and then Sam remembered they were supposed to be enemies. Kameko must have come to the same realization because her smile turned to stone. "Where do you wish to go?" she asked stiffly.
"I don't know," Sam replied with equal hauteur. "Where am I allowed?"
Two lines formed between Kameko's brows. "I don't know what you mean."
"I'm your prisoner. I assume there are some restrictions on where I can and cannot go."
Kameko looked away. "You're not a prisoner," she muttered unconvincingly.
Sam rolled her eyes. "Fine. Call me an honored guest if it appeases your conscience."
"You aren't a prisoner," Kameko insisted. "You can go anywhere you want in the convent."
"But not alone."
"Well, no. Either I or another novitiate must accompany you."
"And I can't leave the convent, with or without you."
"It's for your own good," Kameko told her staunchly. "Vigilant prayer will reveal the truth to you. The Arbiter believes your soul can still be saved."
Sam bit the inside of her cheek and managed a thin-lipped smile. Any reply she made would be dripping in sarcasm.
Kameko placed a hand on Sam's shoulder, oblivious to her internal struggle. "Faith in blood, cousin."
"Faith in blood," Sam repeated dully. If she'd learned anything in Rhea, it was that blood meant nothing.
Though her soul was in no need of saving, Sam decided to attend the morning prayer. She'd learned something of the Rhean faith from her motherâbut not enough. Tsalene had kept a tattered copy of the Book of Light by her bedside, but Sam never bothered to read the prayer book. Deciphering the Rheic took far too much effort, or so she'd thought as a child. She regretted it now. Know thy enemy, as her father would sayânot to her, but to his men.
Sam did know the Book of Light was broken into seven segments. The sisters held seven daily prayer sessions for each segment, which made Sam wonder how they had time to do anything but pray. When did they train, and where? To think she had been here more than a week, and so much of the convent remained unknown to her.
The morning prayer was the longest of the seven devotions, as well as the most formal, held in the solarium where Braeden had been put to trial. With the sun hidden behind a dark cover of clouds, the solarium was transformed into a gray, joyless place. The rain, lessened in intensity than during the first few days of the storm, pattered against the glass. It was the desert wind that had not yet gentled, howling a mournful tune as it whipped up swirls of sand. Sam's mother used to say that the weather was a mirror of the Gods' emotions. If that were true, then today the Gods were raging.
The solarium was half as full as it had been during Braeden's trial, a stark reminder of the sisters who were dead and those who had betrayed them. Sam was greeted with hostile stares and angry muttering. She wasn't the aliah, but in Braeden's absence, she was the closest thing to it. She'd expected as much, but it was still an uncomfortable feeling to be hated. Hunching her shoulders to her ears, she made her way to the farthest corner of the farthest pew. Kameko followed reluctantly behind her.
The Arbiter did not, to Sam's surprise, lead the prayer session, though of course she attended. The service was led by an elderly woman with short, iron-gray hair and a deeply lined face, leathery from too much sun. She hobbled to the altar, hugging a slim leather-bound book to her chest. Her faded blue eyes skimmed over the congregation, lingering on Sam a long, discomfiting moment before clearing her throat.
"Today we begin anew," the sister said in a voice thin from age but quietly commanding. The room fell into a hush. "We are reborn from the ashes of the dead, strengthened by their blood. We carry on their blood in our veins, and though we do not forget them, our hearts continue to beat. And so on this day of new beginnings, let us start at the first beginning, when there were only the Three."
Beside her, Kameko reached for the heavy tome hanging from a chain slung over the back of the pew in front of them. Stealing a glance through her lashes, Sam tried to make sense of the line of symbols on the worn cover. The Rheic alphabet was nothing like Thulian, written in geometric characters that represented entire words instead of consonants. While her command of spoken Rheic, though dusty, was practically fluent, she'd never mastered the written word. But these words she recognized: The Book of Light.
Kameko nudged her shoulder. "Read your own copy," she hissed, nodding at the identical book hanging directly in front of Sam.
Sam spared a glare for her cousin before reaching for the prayer book. She opened it carefully on her lap and thumbed through a few gold-leaf edged pages. Rheic symbols danced in front of her eyes, a sea of indecipherable lettering.
Kameko nudged her again, clearly irritated. "You're on the wrong page."
"I can't read it," Sam whisper-snapped back at her.
Kameko cast her a look of such disdain that said everything she couldn't in the quietude of the solarium. "Then just shut up and listen."
A/N: Sorry this took a while, struggled with this chapter! I'm not so great at chapters focused on world building and not action. Writing is hard, man! Anyway, look forward to your thoughts, and get ready for the next chapter to be some old fashioned storytelling.