Arc 2: Chapter 19: Confession
I took in this new revelation for several minutes of silence, chewing it over along with all its implications. How had I not already guessed?
I might have said many things in that moment — something comforting, some tasteful insight. Instead, because I couldn’t quite get the thought out of my head I said, “so before she killed him, they, uh…”
Emma fixed me with a withering look. “Do I really need to spell it out for you?”
I held up a placating hand. “It doesn’t matter. You aren’t your great-grandmother.” Even still, I knew it did matter, at least some. Just as there are sacrosanct traditions concerning hospitality and the treatment of the dead, which can have dire repercussions if broken thanks to the magics placed over the land, what Emma revealed about her family’s deeds couldn’t simply be dismissed as a long-ago crime.
She’d been left a legacy of murder and betrayal, both done in the most intimate of circumstances. She’d literally been born of that betrayal. It wasn’t fair, or right, but it left a very real mark, like a wound in the world left to fester.
Astraea Carreon couldn’t have been much older than Emma at the time. Perhaps the stories of their house’s vileness weren’t so exaggerated.
“But I was raised by her get,” Emma said through clenched teeth. She closed her eyes then, breathing deep, and settled back into a hollow calm. “My grandmother, the daughter of Lady Astraea, told me that story for the first time when I was seven. She’d meant it as a lesson — our world might be built on pretty ideals of romance and chivalry, but it is all paint over a cracked canvas. Our history is a bloody march of one war after another. She once told me this: God did not want saints, She wanted an army. She called the Orleys fools for living in a dream, and applauded her mother’s ruthlessness.”
Emma inhaled sharply through her nose, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the bench with a quiet little thump.
I closed my eyes as a vivid memory struck me, a fragment of my frequent visions. We could have lived in a dream. What’s wrong with that?
I pushed her voice back down into my memories, where it belonged.
Emma’s eyes opened after a time and went to the stain-glass window dominating the far wall of the chapel. The storm had broken, and moonlight turned the Heir silver, causing Her outstretched arms to softly shine, making the horned crown on Her brow a wreath of starlight.