Compendium (30 page)

“Not without this,” Mia said, shaking the Shillelagh at her. “Now! We have to go now!” she called to her companions. Mia carried the Shillelagh over to Cedar and gently grasped his inert hand. It was cool to the touch but still held a faint pulse. Borus and SainClair were at her side in an instant, each grasping on to one of them in a chain formation.

“One, two, three!” Mia brought the Shillelagh up. “Take us to the outer courtyard of the Compound of the Order of Vis Firmitas,” she yelled, and knocked the stick twice against the hardwood floor. A howling vortex opened up around them the moment the staff stuck the solid wood beneath Mia’s feet.

She felt rather than saw the crack of the explosion, and a wave of nausea washed over her. The bile rose up from her gut and threatened to burst forth from her throat as the world spun and churned around them. She tried desperately to close her eyes, but they were frozen open in her head, her body rigidly locked into position. A moment later, the movement ground to a halt, and they were outside among the trees, the forest silent except for the echoing of the crack of the Shillelagh. The rigidity in Mia’s body subsided, and they all collapsed to the ground, groaning.

“That was awful,” Mia said, her voice cracking and gasping. She willed herself not to be sick.

“Cedar had the right idea traveling with his eyes closed,” said SainClair, and promptly vomited.

Mia’s vision was a blur.
Did the traveling do something to my eyes?
She rubbed them and realized tears were streaming down her face. After that, all she could manage was a sob. A sob for Compendium, a sob for Brother Mallus, and a sob for Cedar, who lay broken and bruised beside her—all of it a product of her carelessness. The sobs wracked her body, and she curled into a ball, face pressed into her knees.

“There, there,” said SainClair’s voice near her ear. “We’re home now,” he added, but Mia could no more stop the tears than dam an ocean. SainClair lifted her body off the ground, and she let herself be carried in a way that she hadn’t since she was a small girl cowering after that stalker attack. Her carelessness had been at fault there as well. With Mia weeping in SainClair’s arms and still clutching the Shillelagh, and Cedar unconscious and slung over Borus’s shoulder, they made for home.

Through hiccups and tears, all Mia could say was, “I saw it burn.”

36
Cleric

Lumin Cycle 10153

Mia sat alone in her chambers
looking out over the mountainside visible between the thicket of trees shading her open window. Upon their return with the Shillelagh, she was removed from the barracks and settled in her own rooms. She wasn’t quite sure whether she was a prisoner, but she hadn’t felt much like leaving her chambers and rarely ventured forth. A full month had elapsed since their confrontation with the Druids. Since then, time had passed in a haze. She spent some time recovering from her arrow wound. The medics had to remove a number of Shillelagh splinters from it. This caused the others to joke that her arm might go off on adventures by itself while she slept.

“Perhaps they missed one,” Brother Cornelius said to her after she woke in the medical ward, his eyes sparkling. “You’d best keep an eye on that appendage,” he added with a chuckle and patted her face gently. She smiled weakly but couldn’t muster a laugh. Not much was funny these days. As far as she was aware, Cedar was still in recovery. It took two weeks for him to regain consciousness, and Brother Borus told Mia the ruined right eye couldn’t be saved. This didn’t surprise her, given the pulp that haunted her memory when she thought of it. She visited him as much as she could at first, held his hand, stroked his hair, and talked to him, but she couldn’t bring herself to go back once she had learned he was awake. She never had shared with him her feelings, but what was the point now? It was all ruined. She couldn’t bear to have him look at her, supposing he still wanted to. She wasn’t sure what she would say to him when she finally saw him again, but she never let her mind dwell on it for long.

Compendium, also, was never far from her thoughts. She had watched it singe, its pages browning and wrinkling. Her legacy, her family, her history. All gone in a spark. She wanted to vomit every time the image of the book charring to ash in the hearth flashed into her mind. She grieved for Compendium and the companionship it had provided. False or real, it didn’t matter. It had become an extension of her; Taryn could have cut a lung from Mia’s body with the same effect. SainClair tried to console her, but his gentle words and concern only compounded her guilt, for it was his family and legacy lost as well as hers. And so she hid from the Order and told herself they didn’t deserve the pain her face would visit on them.

Lost in her piteous musings, Mia didn’t hear the first knock at the entryway to her sitting room. A loud throat clearing followed by a stern but steady knock alerted her that she had company. Normally Hamish would have signaled her long before anyone bothered to knock, but the silly fluff face was off having a romp with SainClair. She sighed and looked back to the doorway from her chair by the window. Dominus Nikola was standing inside the entrance.

“May we discuss something?” he asked in his calm, firm voice. It reminded Mia of Compendium, and she swallowed hard.

Silly, for there was emotion behind Nikola’s words.

“Certainly, sir,” she replied, gesturing to the chair by the hearth. She pulled her own chair to sit next to the one already hearthside and sat down. Dominus Nikola crossed the room in his deliberate, slow manner. She sometimes wondered whether he had to think through every step before he took it. That, or perhaps he had a touch of arthritis. In either case, she found herself absently rubbing her neck as she waited for him to take a seat.

“Are you still suffering some ill effects from your wounds?” he asked politely, his eyes following the motion of her hand.

“Ah, no,” she said after a moment’s thought. “At least I don’t suppose I do.”

He nodded at her response and gave her his usual smile. Although it was warm, Mia couldn’t tell what he was thinking deep within. “Is there anything in particular you wanted to discuss, sir?” she asked, adopting a cordial but distant tone.

His eyebrows rose slightly at that statement. “Are you trying to rid yourself of me so expeditiously? I just seated myself. And you have yet to even offer me any tea.”

Mia’s eyes grew round, and she frowned softly. “Ah, yes, my manners apparently suffered more than my shoulder did,” she replied, her sentence trailing off in a mumble. She stood to move toward the stones warming in the hearth. “Would you like some tea, Dominus?”

“Oh, no, I’m quite fine,” he said with a chuckle. “I was just having a bit of fun at your expense, my child.”

Mia wanted so much to smile and chuckle along with the Dominus, but she couldn’t muster the energy or mirth for it. With a tight grimace she fervently hoped didn’t look ungrateful, she settled back into her chair.

“To the matter at hand then?” she asked, rubbing the back of her neck again.

“Ah, yes,” Dominus Nikola said, clearing his throat and settling back into the chair. His gray eyes held hers in a steady gaze. “I wished to discuss with you your continued role with the Order.”

At the Dominus’s words, Mia lowered her head and fastidiously examined a thread dangling from the wrist of her robes. Since her return, she had been wearing her acolyte robes and sash every day, but she hadn’t participated in life at the Order. She stayed away from Brother Cornelius and the Archives. She ventured down to the dining hall only at odd hours, and she rarely stopped to talk to anyone when she did. She had made so many promises. She had stood before the Order and asked them to take a chance on redeeming her, and she had let them down. They may have succeeded in bringing the Shillelagh back, but at what cost? There was no unkindness or pity in the eyes that tried to meet hers in the halls. There were no broken conversations as she passed. And yet she knew she hadn’t earned her place among them. She had worried that this day was nearing. After all, they had moved her away from the other acolytes into these beautiful but remote chambers. She told herself that perhaps it was to aid in her recovery, but deep down she sensed it was because she was no longer welcome.

“I’m so sorry, Dominus,” she said, her voice low and words struggling to emerge. “I tried, but I failed. Just say the words, and I’ll pack myself and Hamish and be off.”

“Why would you do that, my child?” the Dominus asked. He folded his hands one over the other as he rested his elbows on the arms of the overstuffed chair in which he sat. He had asked Mia the question, but his eyes held no surprise or concern at her words. If anything, he looked slightly amused.

“Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?” she asked in response, evading him.

Another soft chuckle erupted from the depths of his throat. “If you’re going to try my patience and my nerves, I suppose you’d best offer me that tea again,” he said plainly, a white eyebrow rising up toward his close-cropped head. His light, jovial manner wasn’t improving Mia’s foul one. She moved to the hearth and busied herself taking two cups from the shelf above and filling them with water from a pitcher. She plucked two red, hot stones from the hearth with a tong and dropped them into the cups of water.

“Ginger or black?” she asked.

“Oh, ginger,” the Dominus replied with a smile, anticipation gleaming in his eyes. “I do so love the spice.”

The water in the cups was steaming from the hot stone resting at the bottom of each, and Mia dropped in a small cage of dried leaves and gingerroot to steep in each of the cups. She brought them over on a small tray with tiny carafes of honey sap, milk sap, and cream. Dominus Nikola took his cup and stirred the seeping leaves and gingerroot around. They sat in silence as he tended to his tea, eventually adding a dollop of cream and some of the honey sap before taking a sip.

“Ah, yes, that is quite fortifying,” he said with a satisfied sigh. “We’d best begin this conversation anew.” He paused in thought, and Mia sat silently, allowing him the moment to ruminate. He took another sip of tea and cleared his throat. “Do you remember how you came to us, my child?”

“I was destined to serve with the Order, like my parents before me.”

The Dominus looked at her, his teacup perched below his mouth. “Ah, but that isn’t the whole of it, correct?”

“Well, when I first arrived, I thought Father had bargained my freedom for his life,” Mia said, “but that wasn’t really the way of it.”

“Was it not?” he said after a moment’s deliberation and took another sip of his tea, breathing deeply of the ginger-spiced aroma that floated around them.

Mia considered his words carefully before she spoke. It had all been a ruse to fulfill her mother’s wishes. There had been no bargain struck. And yet she truly had felt betrayed, used, and abandoned. And she supposed she had been all of those things. Father had made no effort to try to explain the situation to her. He hadn’t treated her as the independent adult she was but had tricked her as one does a child into eating a bitter root. And then she thought about Dominus Nikola’s words that cold morning upon her arrival. She recalled his piercing gaze and her own rage. It had seemed at the time to be a false decision presented her, one in name only.

“If I had turned and walked out the way I had arrived that first morning, would the Order have let me leave?” she asked.

“One always has a choice,” the Dominus said, smiling at her and taking another enthusiastic sip of his tea.

She sighed and sipped her own tea in response. “And what is my choice now?” she asked finally, sensing this conversation might finally get to the point the Dominus was dancing around.

“You can either take up your entitled position as a full cleric of the Order and the obligations and rights that are assumed and bestowed with that position, or you can watch from a withering tree branch as Lumin and the elders and fauna so precious to it are endangered by the Druids.”

Whatever Mia had been expecting Dominus Nikola to say, this wasn’t it. She sucked in a breath, her brow wrinkling.

“That’s rather dramatic and not much of a choice, if I do say.”

“Extinction is naturally a dramatic topic, I am afraid,” the Dominus said.

“Extinction?” she parroted the word, her brain not fully comprehending the Dominus’s meaning. For the first time since meeting Dominus Nikola, she considered whether he was going mad.

“There is much you still don’t understand about the Order and its inception. We were formed not only to protect the artifacts but also to restore society. Something, however, has gone terribly wrong. Gamma Protocol was supposed to terminate more than one hundred fifty cycles ago, but we can’t get into the Core.”

“Gamma Protocol?” Mia asked, raising her eyebrows.

“A great deal about the Great Fall remains unknown,” he continued, “but you’ll have to trust me on this. The Shillelagh has much more than just historical significance. It is the means to get to the Core.”

“Yes, I knew that,” she said. “Brother Cornelius mentioned it while I was…”
In the dungeon.
She finished the sentence in her head. “But what is Gamma Protocol specifically?”

“Gamma Protocol saved Lumin from extinction once,” Nikola said. His tea finished, he leaned back in the armchair and scratched his chin thoughtfully. “But now we know for certain that the Druids are trying to get into the Core, and Rosewater will stop at nothing to put us back on the path.”

“To extinction?” she asked, her limbs growing numb and cold.

The Dominus nodded slowly and clasped his hands again. For a moment, he and Mia sat together in silence, each lost in thought. Mia’s mind roiled with many unanswered questions, but the gravity of the revelation left her thoughts watery and insubstantial.

“Why don’t we just go to the Core first?” Mia asked.

“Because we can’t find the key,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “So you see, the Order needs your skills and resourcefulness. Your abilities are integral to our survival.”

“But I let Compendium be destroyed,” she said. “I let Mallus die and the others be injured so we could get the Shillelagh back. I let Cedar be maimed.”

“It couldn’t be avoided,” the Dominus said contemplatively.

“I never should have trusted Taryn. I let myself be led astray. These are not the qualities of a cleric.”

“We can make decisions only with the information laid before us,” he replied. His eyes grew distant, a haunted look crossing their gray depths before they snapped back to their piercing gaze. “The capacity to trust in others is not a failing.” His tone brooked no argument.

“Even if that trust is abused?” Mia asked, disregarding his tone.

“Especially when it’s abused. You may not feel that you have earned your place among us, my child, but the practical lessons that you’ve learned in the past thirteen months more than make up for, ah, let us call it, your independent nature.” With that, he stood and stretched his back and grasped his cane from its resting place. Mia always wondered whether it served as more of an ornament than a support. “Now, my child”—he gestured his free hand toward the acolyte pin stuck to her sash—“will you be joining us then?”

“I suppose I don’t have a choice,” she said, sighing and rising to give him a bow and escort him to the doorway.

“Ah,” he said, “but one always has a choice.”

Mia peered through
the large carved doors toward the assembly in the Great Hall. The last time she had entered here, it was to make amends. This time it was to be inducted as a cleric of the Order. Those gathered—which appeared to be almost everyone—chatted in hushed tones as they awaited the commencement of the ceremony. Mia’s fellow acolytes occupied the space closest to the door. Iris’s eyes were fixed upward as she pointed to the stonework and intricately carved skylights set into the ceiling. Another acolyte stared openmouthed at the delicately woven tapestries that hung along the walls of the chamber.