Selfish Is the Heart Read online

  “I haven’t yet decided.” Cassian resisted the urge to ruffle the boy’s hair. It was already a tangled mess, with bits of grass caught up in it.

  “The pond’s got an eel in it,” Kellen said. “I’ve seen it. Just a wee one, about this long.”

  Cassian studied the boy’s measurement. “That long? ’Ware, else you’ll find yourself the eel’s supper.”

  “They don’t eat people!” Kellen’s small mouth rounded and he turned to his companion. “Do they, Leonder?”

  Leonder shrugged. “If Master Toquin says . . .”

  Kellen took a leap back. Leonder laughed. Cassian smiled. The boys began an argument over which was better, steamed or roasted eel, and the best way to catch one, and what to use for bait.

  Cassian left them to their rough and tumbling, the sound of their boyish shouts following him. He’d wrestled with his brother much the same way. He’d sometimes even won, if his brother felt magnanimous enough to refrain from dirty fighting.

  Now, he walked. And thought. He often sought the forest, but today he went through the grass and fields toward the pond. It had been hand-dug when the Order’s first manse was built. The original founders had thought to breed fish in it and eels, for which the depth and brackishness of the water was better suited. He didn’t think they’d ever thought of boating or ice-skating, though sometimes the sisters came out here to take part in such pastimes. But not today.

  He couldn’t imagine the hours of labor that had carved the pond. Boulders lay piled around its edge, proof of how hard the ground had been, how difficult the effort. Cassian had never swam in it—nobody did except the sorts of foolish boys who might tempt an eel to nibble. But he had gone out to the center in a small skiff on a day so bright the sun had cut through the dark water like a flame. He’d seen the pond’s depth as well over a tall man’s head. It wasn’t over-large, but it was deep enough to drown.

  Of course, it didn’t need to be deep for that. He knew of an upstairs maid in the home of a childhood friend who’d drowned herself in a bucket. Nobody had said why. As a man, Cassian could guess at any number of reasons she’d done so, especially since she’d taken her life in the bedchamber of the house’s master with a bucket dragged all the way from the stable. But as a boy, he’d only heard the tale of how she’d been found, facedown, her skirts not even wet. How she hadn’t struggled or fought but simply put her face into the few inches of water at the bucket’s bottom . . . and breathed.

  Calvis had seen her himself, he claimed, and been the one to tell the tale. How he’d managed to get inside the bedroom and view the maid he never quite explained, but he’d told the story often and with few embellishments. The lack of frills convinced Cassian his brother had indeed seen the dead girl. He’d been envious at the time, thinking it some treat to witness the subject of the story that had the county buzzing.

  “You don’t want to see it.” Calvis had said this with clouded eyes and a shake of his head. “Not really. It’s not a sight for the likes of you.”

  Later, when they outgrew short pants and slateboard lessons and had moved on to the pursuits that would shape them as men, Calvis had told him a different version of the worn-thin story. Not frilled or furbelowed.

  “She put a bar of soap between her teeth,” he said.

  “Why that? Why a bar of soap?”

  Calvis had shuddered, his mouth working. “To keep from screaming? I don’t know, little brother.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Standing at the pond, the dirt soft beneath his boots and water squelching around his toes, Cassian could still hear Calvis’s voice. He could smell the acrid scent of the soap his brother’d been using to clean his fingernails before eating the dinner their mother had called them to. And in the rippling water at his feet, he saw the reflection of his brother’s face.

  An image from the looking glass. Reversed. They’d only ever been identical to any who didn’t look overclose or didn’t know them overwell. Now he looked, and then again, trying to put his own features in their place. The lines at the corners of his eyes helped. So did his hair, blown a bit by the wind around his face. Threads of silver had woven in the darkness. Calvis had ever been, would ever be . . . young.

  “I miss you, brother.” The mouth in the rippling reflection moved, echoing the sentiment. “Ever and always.”

  It wasn’t enough. A memory and a few words would never bring him back.

  Life will bring what the Invisible Mother provides. Cassian had long ago ceased believing that. It hadn’t escaped him that in a faith based on the story of a man and woman split apart by betrayal, real or imagined, it might have been the male who created the world, but it was the woman who oversaw it. People might invoke Sinder’s name, but it was to Kedalya the prayers were sent.

  There was no use in praying for his brother’s return. Death was a chasm not even the Invisible Mother could bridge. His brother was gone, whether to the Void or to the Land Above, both places in which Cassian had also ceased believing. He’d never see his brother again.

  Whatever life brought, it wasn’t at the bequest of the Invisible Mother. And what did life bring him now, as he made his way around the pond to the gazebo on the pond’s far side. Annalise, her hair covered with a headscarf and her face scrubbed clean of cosmetic, her gown hitched at the sides and tucked into a belt tightened at her waist. She had a basket covered with a towel settled in front of her, and a loaf of bread peeked from it. A jug sat next to it.

  She didn’t see him. She was Waiting, her eyes closed, her mouth moving but no sound issuing forth. Was she praying? That didn’t seem right. Handmaidens knelt in Waiting, not in prayer.

  It felt illicit, this watching her when she couldn’t see him, but Cassian made no move to step away. The crunch of his boots on the gravel hadn’t yet alerted her, but if he moved now, would she hear and open her eyes? Would she think he’d been spying on her apurpose?

  Did he care?

  “. . . no greater pleasure . . .”

  Ah, she was reciting the five principles. It wasn’t enough to learn them by heart, a novitiate must believe in them. Live them. Be consumed by them. Annalise did not impress him as a woman to be consumed by anything, but what did he know?

  And still he stood, boots grounded to the earth as though he’d grown roots. His breathing soft, held tight in his chest, so as not to alert her. His hands curled into fists he noticed only when his fingers ached.

  Move. He didn’t obey his own silent command. He drew breath after breath, ears straining for the sound of her voice.

  Cassian had been with the Order for ten years, with another three before that in service to the priesthood and assigned to the Motherhouse. He’d been surrounded for years by women, inundated, immersed. He knew beauty.

  Annalise wasn’t beautiful. Her features were too bold, her smile crooked, her eyes too shrewd. If she’d been perfect, would he have been able to ignore her the way he did the others, the many others? Cassian thought so, and cursed himself for being so swayed by what he’d long ago decided to forgo.

  “Oh,” she said when she opened her eyes and saw him there. Nothing more, no accusation, no smirking smile to show him she’d known all along he was there. No alarm, either. Only curiosity. She gave him that tilt-headed glance that Cassian was equally as disturbed to discover he found as familiar as her voice.

  “I plead your mercy,” he said.

  “For what?”

  For what, indeed. For staring? For not alerting her that he’d come upon her? Cassian cleared his throat.

  Her mouth tightened. “Is this your special place? Have I encroached?”

  “No, no. I often walk here, but no, it’s not . . . mine.”

  She chewed the inside of her cheek and looked at the basket and jug in front of her. “I’m required to learn the five principles, front to back. I’m having difficulty.”

  “Surely not in the learning. A child could memorize them.” He meant no insult and so of course that w