Felix clenched his jaw and entered.
The courtyard was silent. But not the silence he and Loren shared two nights before, the comfortable quiet of sitting together. When Loren’s hand curled in his. When he first kissed Felix, sloppy drunk and teeth-achingly sweet.
No. This was the quiet before the storm.
Felix took a deep breath and stepped from the portico. Blue smoke curled from the altar into open sky, where it diffused and vanished. Behind the stone block hunched a figure, his gnarled fingers gripping a smouldering bronze bowl. The rest of the courtyard was empty.
‘I wondered when I might see you again,’ said the Priest of Isis at Felix’s approach. His eyes, unlike last time, were clear and keen. ‘Though I am surprised you came willingly. I was under the impression you dislike temples.’
‘Not temples. But I have a history of bad experiences with priests.’ When the old man said nothing in his own defence, Felix continued, ‘Loren left the city.’
The Priest passed a hand through the smoke, and it twisted into peculiar shapes: the soft outline of a galloping horse, the spread of a bird’s wings, a fox disappearing in the underbrush. A week ago, Felix would have blamed the shapes on whatever alcohol he last drank. Now all his beliefs – the rules that kept him alive – lay dashed in the gutter.
‘Left? Or was sent away?’
The Priest didn’t say it as an accusation, but it hit as one all the same. It threw Felix back to the alley, the fear that spiked through him when he saw Loren bidding Aurelia and Livia goodbye. Felix had counted on Aurelia to convince Loren to leave with them. His plan hinged on it. But Felix was nothing if not adaptable. He switched tactics. He baited Loren to follow, then used everything he’d learned about him, admired in him: that Loren acted with his heart.
To get Loren to leave, Felix had to break that heart.
The Priest offered a smile kinder than Felix deserved. ‘Sit with me.’
Reluctantly, Felix perched on a second stool. The still-healing gash on his arm twinged. ‘I hope you aren’t about to take a knife to me again.’
‘The time for appeasing the gods is long past. The course is set, the dice have been thrown, if you will.’
‘Comforting to hear the gods gamble, too.’ Felix sniffed.
The Priest laughed. ‘They have vices, same as humans.’
‘Then why worship them?’ Felix blurted, face flushing hot when the Priest raised a brow. ‘I only mean, it seems unfair to devote so much to them when . . .’
‘When they give little in return? Ah, you’ve stumbled upon the crux of religion,’ he mused. ‘Tell me, how old were you when you lost your mother?’
‘An infant. I never knew her.’
‘And your father?’
Felix tensed. ‘How did you know? That he’s dead?’
‘I can read it in the lines of your shoulders, son, that you have been alone a long time.’
The familiar urge to bolt surged, spreading thin through his blood. Felix made to slip off the stool and – do what, he hadn’t worked out – but the Priest held up a hand.
‘I meant no offence. It can be a terribly good thing to share a burden, you know.’
Felix’s heart pounded, the need to flee driving his bones to move at any cost, but he remembered again . . .
He had nowhere left to run.
Instead, he hugged his midsection tight. ‘I was eleven. My father was a smuggler. A thief, a good one. But that time he wasn’t quick enough. They sliced him to ribbons, right there in the alley. I watched.Everyone watched. Nobody did a damn thing, not the people, not the gods. Not me.’
‘That’s enough to make anyone lose their faith.’
‘I have had only myself since, and even that’s – fragmented. Until I met Loren, and believed in him, and lost him. I wasted the morning running around the city, trying to be on my own again. Now I’m here, but no closer to understanding.’
‘Then perhaps what you need mostisfaith,’ the Priest said. ‘Not in the gods, but in your ability to let others see you. You might understand yourself along the way.’
Felix wanted that. He wanted like an ache, a muscle atrophied after years of disuse. Boys like him were not allowed to want. Wanting led him to take the helmet. Led him to Loren. Picked at memories long stripped away. Wanting begged for power. Demanded choice.
