Chapter Five

Penitent

The penitents' cells were deep under the Temple of the Sun.

Roughly cylindrical, they were cut from the stone of Mount Targon itself, radiating out from the Temple like the spokes of a wheel, or the rays from the sun. The Temple had been built on a jutting clifftop that pointed eastward to the sunrise, and all the cells opened onto the outer face of the cliff, bathed in light until the sun passed its zenith.

But what served the sun also served the moon.

It was another blasphemous thought. Diana didn't much care.

She hadn't seen the moon in more than two years.

It broke the eastern horizon enormous and round and full-bellied, and she watched it with eyes that glowed silver, reflecting the light of the moon as surely as it reflected the sun. Maybe this was why she was so pale, she thought; perhaps as a child she walked too many nights in the moonlight, and soaked in its light as surely as Helion soaked in the sun. She could feel it the way she could feel the baking sun at midday, as an almost tangible pressure on her skin. But the moonlight wouldn't burn her. It just whispered against her skin like a cool breeze. In her thin acolyte's tunic, she stood by the window to draw as much in as she could, all of that coolness and light and serenity, against the day ahead.

It soothed her. It calmed her. And the skies above knew she needed soothing. Thoughts of Father and Helion were twin torments, like Tityos and the two vultures in the story. If she had been left in the dark to think about them she would break, and she couldn't afford that, not when everyone would see her tomorrow. She wouldn't go with eyes swollen and reddened by tears. She would not look weak.

It might have been one hour or eight that she basked, with no thought beyond the eastern sky and a peaceful sort of emptiness inside her. They said the moon was cold and lifeless and sterile, but she didn't think of it that way. It was beautiful. It was clean. In all the hours and days she had meditated upon the sun, it had never brought her such peace as this.

So when the bolt on the door of her cell turned with a rusty scraping, she didn't turn, only watched from the corner of her eye as the Master of Rhetoric entered, stooping to get in through the little door.

"Skala," Diana greeted her politely.

"Phila Diana." There was a rough table with a single chair beside the bed, and the Skala sat there with a sigh, as if it were a relief to sit down. "I'd forgotten how many stairs there are under the Temple."

"Perhaps they should have brought me to you then, if you had to speak to me."

"If they had no better sense than to put you in this cell, I agree," the Skala replied. "Come and talk to me, girl. I'm not going to scold you. Much."

Reluctantly, Diana came away from the window, and felt the darkness all the more acutely for it. The single candle on the table sputtered in the breeze and cast a wavering light over Skala Ligeia's face and made the shadows play in every wrinkle and seam around her eyes, her mouth. She knelt on the hard, cold stone at the Skala's feet, the ritual posture of instruction, and waited.

"You will be whipped tomorrow," the Skala said, without preamble. "I expect you already know that."

"Yes," Diana said, tight-lipped. The pain didn't frighten her. She had been hurt at the agoge and the Temple before; for some months, Abeon had developed a particular fondness for having her beaten with a birch rod when he successfully baited her in class. Most often those beatings had been administered by Skalos Kolaphos, who always treated her as a sort of mild imposition, like a fly that had to be swatted. He'd swatted her, and then gotten on with things. But sometimes Skalos Abeon had preferred to do the honors himself, and those had been the worst; not just because she had to submit to the indignity at the hands of a man she despised, but because he had so obviously enjoyed it, and enjoyed provoking her to prolong the punishment. She'd never thought of herself as short-tempered, and had never in her life had such difficulty in controlling herself as she did in Skalos Abeon's presence.

Which was why she was here, and would be whipped in the Temple proper tomorrow. Far worse than the pain was the thought that she would never hear the end of it from the other acolytes, and all her friends at the agoge would hear about it, and oh, Father must be so ashamed.

"Do you understand why?"

"I blasphemed."

"Yes. But do you know why you will be whipped for it, in the forecourt?" The Skala leaned forward, lifting a finger. "Instead of privately by Skalos Kolaphos again."

That made her hesitate. "To…humiliate me," she said finally, and looked away, toward the moon.

"It's a worse punishment, yes," Skala Ligeia agreed. "And, as I told your father, it is justice."

"You spoke to Father?" The question burst out before she could stop it.

"Yes. He will be there tomorrow." The Skala let the words drop like stones down a deep, dark well. Though she tried not to show any emotion, Diana's shoulders slumped. Somehow underneath the fear and anger she'd been thinking Father would stop this somehow, the words when Father hears about this running through her mind as both a terrible torment and desperate hope. He would be angry, he would be embarrassed, but she'd been so sure he would help her.

"He can't come tonight?" she asked, so low the Skala barely heard her.

"No. Though if it's any consolation to you, I suspect that it hurts him worse than it does you."

Diana looked at the floor, feeling tears prickling traitorously in her eyes.

"Your young man also asked to see you," Skala Ligeia went on. "Helion, son of Kadmos. And when we told him no, he asked to send a message. Do you want to hear it?"

"Yes," she said wretchedly.

"He said he understands. He will be there tomorrow, and you will talk later."

"I don't want him there."

"It is a public punishment." The gentle emphasis made Diana's tears overflow, and the old woman laid a hand on her head as she wept silently, bitterly, her shoulders heaving in soundless sobs.

"We are not being cruel needlessly," Skala Ligeia murmured. "And I hope you will look at your father and your betrothed for strength tomorrow. The Rakkor are like a shield wall. We are terrible foes when we fight alone, but we are invincible when we stand together. I know your Skaloi at the agoge have told you this. And there are more reasons than justice for your punishment. Too many people have heard your blasphemies, Diana. We must show them that there is a price to be paid. We must show you that there is a price to be paid."

"I wasn't trying to blaspheme!" Diana scrubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Except for the last time, and then I was just mad. I wanted to learn like Father did. If I don't ask questions, how can I learn?"

"Maybe you should try listening, and trusting," the Skala said gently. "I can assure you Elder Domitian never asked a question that made everything fall into place at once. There is no such question."

It sounded good, but for the first time, Diana found a flaw in the Master of Rhetoric's argument. No, there was no single right question. But her teachers couldn't answer any of the wrong ones, either. And it wasn't right, she thought mutinously, that the only answer to her questions was shut up and stop asking them. That wasn't knowledge. It wasn't wisdom. It wasn't truth.

"If there is one true path," she said aloud, "then there should be reasons why the other paths are false. I'm asking about those reasons, in the end."

"There is one true path," the Skala corrected her. "You are not the first to question it, and certainly not the first to have difficulty following it. But will you insist on following the wrong one all the way to its bitter end to find that out, and all the way the rest of us are warning you that it's wrong, it's dangerous? That seems to me a very foolish thing to do."

"How do you know if everyone's forbidden from asking? Everyone says the moon makes men mad, or fools, but where did that come from? Father told me about the ice-maidens when I was little, and how we used to leave milk and flowers on the doorstep for them to ask for a mild winter. They would drink the milk and wear the flowers in their hair, and it would make them long for spring to come sooner. They're not real, but if everyone still believed they were we'd still be leaving milk on the doorstep, and saying the ice-maidens had been at it when it was frozen in the morning."

"We have no evidence for the existence of ice-maids," Skala Ligeia said. "But we do have evidence of what comes of chasing the moon." She sat silent for a moment, her soft, almost nonexistent eyebrows drawn down over her eyes. Diana found herself holding her breath without knowing quite why. "No," the Skala said at length. "No, I will not tell you. It seems to me it would do more harm than good."

"But—"

"No, Phila Diana. I said you must learn to listen, and trust. And so you will. Later, you will come to this knowledge. You have my word. But to give it to you now would be like giving iron to the littlest wolf cubs at the agoge."

"I'm not a child." Diana said, exasperated.

"You are a child in matters of our faith." Skala Ligeia stood carefully, brushing her white robes with her hands. "You will be a child still for a great many years. I want you to answer one question for me. Do you believe that I am trying to do what is best for you?"

Diana looked away. The moon was still rising, it would only be visible through the window for another hour or so.

"Yes," she admitted grudgingly.

"Then let me," the Skala said. "I will have you moved elsewhere tonight; this is not a good place for you. Sing your Devotions and your Benedictions, sing your sleep-songs. It will do you good, and the rest of us will like to hear it. There are many ways to serve."

"Yes, Skala," Diana said, shoulders slumping at the thought of another night in the dark.

"May the light increase," the old woman said softly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "How bright you could be in it, child."

"May the light increase," Diana repeated back, with some irony. After all, an acolyte was coming soon to take her to a place where the light couldn't touch her.

Domitian dressed as solemnly as he would have for a funeral.

His sandals were cleaned, the dark leather shining. His gold cloak was freshly laundered, his white tunic impeccable. He wore his best belt, studded with leather and bronze, a gift from Diana. His beard had been combed and oiled and curled from his chin to his chest. He examined his reflection for some time, marking the lines in his face, the lines radiating outward from the corners of his eyes. The Solari called those rays, and said they were the places the sun had traced its touch over the years.

He marked also the shadows under his eyes. He had talked for a long time with the boy Helion, late into the night, simultaneously comforting and being comforted. The boy was hurt and angry that Diana had kept so much from him, and more, he was trying to reconcile this Diana with the girl he had imagined her to be. It was hard when idols fell, and no mortal woman could have reached the pedestal on which Helion had placed Diana.

But Domitian wasn't worried about the boy. He would be proud, one day, to call him his son. No, the trouble would be with Diana. Moon-madness aside, she was a proud girl. Perhaps too proud. She had been excellent for too long, she had been the standard against which all the other girls in the agoge measured themselves. It would be hard for her to be humbled this way.

The walk to the Temple was short, but it felt an eternity. He was sure he felt eyes on him, heard whispers, or worse, heard conversations stop short as he walked through the Temple Heights, but he was a man of the Rakkor and remembered his iron face well. He stood straight, his eyes focused on the steps ahead of him, then the great Temple doors, then the long colonnade to the forecourt, open to the sky. The many-rayed sun on his mantle rode well on his wide shoulders and he walked with dignity for all that he leaned heavily on his walking staff.

Domitian had timed it well; the crowd was already assembled there, standing on the wide steps with the wide stone tiles of the courtyard emptied. At one end stood all the Elders and Skaloi. Skalos Joras was chief among them, Skala Ligeia a step down and to his right. Elder Pyrphoros, ruinously ancient but still as cunning as ever, was seated in a chair in deference to his age, but leaned forward, squinting as he looked for people he knew.

"Stand beside me, Elder," he barked at Domitian as he came near. "Hard day, I know, but you'll bear up. So will she! Mark my words, there's iron in your girl! A credit to you."

"Thank you, Elder," Domitian said dutifully. He appreciated the sentiment, but wished it hadn't been spoken quite so loudly. It was an effort not to look around the crowd, to find faces he knew; to see Diana's teachers, his teachers, some of them, looking stern or censorious. To avoid the eyes of his brother and sister Elders, most of which would be sympathetic, but a few—Hadrian, Calpurnia, and Ioanthe, in particular—who would be quietly rejoicing at his fall. Even among religious men, even among scholars, or perhaps especially among religious men and scholars, there was a great deal of politicking, and skirmishes for position and favor were constant. This weakened him, and he would be a fool to deny it.

It was a galling thing, and he tried not to think about it now. Now, he must be there for his daughter. Skala Ligeia was right. This would be hard, but if Diana were to find her way to faith, she must suffer this. And this time he would do right by her, Domitian swore to himself.

At the top of the steps on all sides, behind the higher-ranking Skaloi and Elders, the acolytes murmured and whispered among themselves, and he saw some satisfaction there, some of the same ugly pleasure in Diana's misfortune that was so distasteful on Hadrian's face. But he also saw Helion, dusty in his armor and broad enough to command some respect. And, if he wasn't mistaken, that was Diana's friend Kallista beside the boy, near as tall as he was and lean as a string bean.

The boy had brought Diana's friends with him, Domitian thought, seeing other young men and women in their armor in the shadows behind him, and closed his eyes briefly in gratitude. Today, Diana would hate it, but in the days to come she would be glad. This was a show of support for her from the agoge. It would make troublesome Temple acolytes think twice.

The wide golden doors with their many-rayed insignia of the sun opened, and they brought her out. Diana wasn't bound or manacled or anything so melodramatic and unnecessary as that, but she was flanked by two older acolytes of imposing size, all of them clad in white. Her tunic was dusty and her belt a simple rope wrapped many times around her narrow wait: the marker for where the whipping must end. The base of the spine was nearly as fragile as the nape of the neck. He knew that well, to his own cost.

That she was barefoot made her seem strangely vulnerable to Domitian's eyes, even more vulnerable than she was without her armor and spear.

"Diana, daughter of Domitian, Elder of the Fifth Degree of the Solari," boomed Skalos Joras, his impressive voice bouncing off the stones of the courtyard. "You are guilty of blaspheming the doctrine of the Solari. You are brought before the Elders and Skaloi of the Temple and your peers to bear the punishment. Do you have anything to say on your own behalf?"

It was hard sometimes to remember that she was a fourteen now, and soon full grown; pale and exhausted, but her face was iron and her arms and legs were striped with pale white scars, a legacy of her time in the agoge. She was very nearly a woman, and a Rakkor warrior, and though in his worst imaginings he had thought of her weeping, crying out under the whip, he knew she would endure it.

"I am sorry," she said simply in answer, and followed the acolytes to the two posts, lifting her hands without prompting to be bound. But she did look at the crowd, and Domitian saw the shock of recognition when she found Helion and Kallista and her friends behind them. It will force her to be strong, he thought, as she looked stoically away from them. She did not look for Domitian. She already knew he was there.

"For your blasphemy, you will have thirty lashes," Skalos Joras said. "We encourage you to contemplate your crime and see where you have erred, that this need never happen again."

"I will."

"Heard and witnessed," said the Skalos. "May the light increase."

"May the light increase," the crowd echoed, and that was that.

The whipping was administered by Skalos Kolaphos, a barrel-chested man of middle age who had come late to the Temple after many years in the Rakkor army. His hair was thinning and well-salted with gray, but there was nothing wrong with the strength of his arm. He did the duties of his office with all proper solemnity and a great deal of skill. Domitian didn't know the man well, but had heard that he was strangely gentle; entrusted with the care of the Temple's livestock when he wasn't whipping acolytes, he had an almost magical touch with beasts and wouldn't hear of any brutality to even the balkiest mule.

The courtyard was silent as he stepped forward, uncoiled the whip, and shook it out. He nodded.

One of the acolytes standing beside Diana tore her tunic down the back to the waist. Unlike her arms and legs, her back was pure white and unblemished, her skin like cream. There were no scars on her back, and never would be. Diana faced her enemies.

Against his will, Domitian jerked when the first lash cracked, and the first red welt appeared on that creamy skin. Across the courtyard he could see Helion watch with his lips pressed so tight together they almost disappeared, his face pale under his tan, but by the heavens, Domitian could watch as stoically as the boy could. He didn't move with the second lash, or the third, and Diana was silent, her hands clenched into fists and her eyes set like two stars burning silver.

On the tenth lash, she began to bleed, the red terribly vivid against her white skin, her white tunic. Skalos Kalophos laid the stripes with the precision of a chirurgeon, spaced neatly a finger's width apart from just below the nape of her neck to just above her waist, but thirty lashes was thirty lashes. Her skin welted and then split under the slashing leather.

She never budged. Except for the blood, the Skalos might have been whipping a statue for all the reaction she showed. And Domitian was so proud of her for that, but in his mind she was still a little girl, the child of his heart, bearing pain that made grown men cry out in other, lesser lands. Every lash was for Domitian a reminder of his failure; he must have failed dreadfully for her to come to this. Diana was bleeding because he hadn't taught her well, he had loved her too much to correct her as he should have, and now she was paying the price. It was the worst part of being a parent: that he would not be the one to suffer for the mistakes he'd made.

Blood pattered onto the stones, soaked the back of her tunic, rolled down the back of her thighs in beads. Her face went white, but still she said nothing. Not a sound escaped her. And Domitian wished vindictively that Skalos Abeon were here, because if he had witnessed this, he would be shamed. This was the girl he had thought to test and bully, and the Skalos wasn't fit to polish her sandal leather.

"Thirty," said Skalos Kolaphos, his voice loud in the silent courtyard, and he stepped back, pulling a cloth from his belt to begin wiping the blood from the whip.

The applause was genuine, even if it was grudging from a few quarters. They did not cheer and their faces were as still and cold as hers, which was, in its way, a compliment to her. They did not rejoice at this punishment. No one's heart was gladdened by it. They were here to observe justice as coldly and dispassionately as any blind judge, and that justice having been done, they applauded her courage and stoic endurance of pain. She was, as far as the Solari and Rakkor were concerned, forgiven.

"Thank you, Skalos Kolaphos," Skalos Joras said, and stepped forward again. "Phila Diana, you have made amends for your crime. You are forgiven in the eyes of the Temple and the Solari. Let no man speak against you."

"Heard and witnessed," said the crowd, and Domitian hoped it would be true.

He could see her hands shaking when they untied her, her wrists red from the leather thongs, and her knees wobbled once as she turned with the acolytes to walk back to the courtyard doors, where she would be taken immediately to a chirurgeon. They had tied up all her silvery hair on top of her head, but a few strands had come loose—Diana had bemoaned the fineness of her hair since she was a child; it never would stay where she put it—and were damply red, making fine whorling patterns on her bloody shoulders.

Domitian didn't see the rest leaving, and only vaguely acknowledged Skala Ligeia and Skalos Joras. His eyes were on the bloody flagstones where Diana had stood, and in his mind he said it again with the force of an oath: it should have been him there. He had failed her.

And by the Four Faces of the sun, by the eastern sun victorious, he would not fail her again.

Diana tolerated a single day of convalescence before she rebelled.

It was as much against Father as it was the chirurgeons. Her father had been…different, somehow, since the flogging. Distant. Facing him when he came to take her home was worse than the whipping; she had been utterly unable to meet his eyes, but for once Domitian hadn't forced the issue.

She had expected him to. She expected him to be disappointed, maybe even angry, but—and it was embarrassing to admit it, but still true—she'd also expected him to take care of her, afterward. Somewhere in the back of her mind, where the child Diana still lived, that child remembered the days she'd been home sick when she was little, and Domitian had hovered and fussed as much as any stoic Rakkor man was capable of fussing.

That Domitian would have interrogated the chirurgeons. He would have informed Diana in no uncertain terms that she was to stay in her bed, the maids would do the fetching and carrying. He would have been silently, constantly present, rustling in the hallway below the stairs, listening to everything she said to the maids, listening for every grunt of pain, every restless tug of the bedclothes.

Instead, when they got home, he told her to go to bed, went to his study, and shut the door.

The maids brought her food and drink and she lay as still as she could because anything else hurt. Where the whip weals had crossed each other, some of the cuts were deep, and she felt like a poorly constructed patchwork quilt, with stitches in twos and threes at odd places on her back. It was especially bad around her ribs, where the flesh was thin and the whip had tended to curl, striking the same sore spots over and over again.

It was amazing how much you used your back. You never realized it until you had to try, on pain of…well, more pain, not to use it.

For one day she lay in her bed and healed. Truthfully, she was waiting for her father to call her to an accounting. But he never did.

So the next day, she went out.

It was pouring rain, she forgot her cloak, but she wasn't going back for it. She really had no idea where she was going; she wasn't fit for the agoge and wasn't ready to face her friends en masse in any case. The shame was still too fresh to face any large group of Rakkor, and certainly not any Solari of the Temple. The thought of the Temple—the other acolytes, the Skaloi, especially Skalos Abeon—made fury flare like a bonfire, and she stalked determinedly in the opposite direction, down the clifftop trails to the south side of the village near the pass. Her hair was plastered to her head and she was just starting to shiver in the chilly rain when she realized where she was, where her legs had carried her without any conscious thought of her own.

Lelia's father was a woolens merchant, and their house was one of the larger homes, two stories tall with a gleaming Four-Facing Sun on the pinnacle of the roof, and a fine courtyard. For a long minute, Diana stood and contemplated the front door, the rain trickling down the back of her neck and dripping off the end of her nose. Then she stiffened her spine and knocked on the door.

She didn't know what she expected from Lelia's mother; she half-expected to be hit, or to have the door slammed in her face. But Osteria Kirikaios had been a warrior herself, and only looked Diana up and down for a second, her eyes—Lelia's eyes—flat and unreadable.

"You're going to get mud all over my tile," she said. "Go on, you know where Lelia's room is."

Diana did know. She had spent many hours there as a child, dismissed from the women's quarters because Osteria couldn't weave with two screeching little girls in the room. She climbed the stairs, gritting her teeth as her stitches pulled, and knocked on Lelia's door.

"Come."

She pushed the door open and stood, dripping, in the doorway. Lelia was in bed, working on some small bit of sewing with a frown puckering her visible eyebrow. The left eye, from the bridge of her nose to her cheek, was hidden behind a thick swath of white bandages, her hair waving past her shoulders loose in a torrent of ruddy gold.

"I'm sorry," Diana said finally. The words were entirely inadequate, but they had to be said.

Lelia looked up, regarded Diana with her beautiful right eye.

"You thought a good penance would be to get soaking wet and catching your death of cold?" she asked dryly, and patted the furs on her bed. "Come on, sit down. It's going to give me a crick in my neck to look up at you."

"Helion said the doctors thought they could save your eye," Diana said. She could hardly stand to look at her friend, but it was her fault; she could at least have the courage to face what she'd done.

"They thought they could," Lelia agreed. "They had to take it last night."

"Oh," Diana whispered, and sat down on the bed, her back prickling with the movement, a wash of stinging, burning pain that was like thousands of biting ants. Rakkor ants in thornmail, stabbing with tiny spears.

"Turn around, let me see. Kallista told me you were going to be whipped."

If it would make her feel better. Diana obeyed, pulled her wet plait of hair over her shoulder. Bandages covered the worst of the marks, but there were still long stripes laid over and between her shoulder blades, red and angry. Behind her, she heard Lelia sit up, and then felt her finger prodding painfully at a lash mark. Diana didn't flinch. If it would have given Lelia her eye back, she would have suffered a dozen floggings.

"Looks like it hurts," Lelia observed, and settled back on her pillow. "Was it worth it?"

"Worth what?" Diana turned toward her, crossing one sandaled foot over her knee to keep from dripping on the bed, and winced as her stitches tugged.

"Beating Skalos Abeon. Blaspheming."

She was about defend herself when she saw Lelia's lips twitching, and she laughed, short and sharp. "Beating Abeon was. I'd take another whipping for that."

"You know what he said was a lie. It's not your fault. My eye."

Diana looked away. "I was tired. You could've kept maneuvering forever. I knew I would lose if I let you, and I wasn't going to lose. So I went too far."

"But that's what we do." Lelia pushed her sewing aside. "I went to see Clytemne, after you told us what she was doing. I just wanted to ask her what the problem was. Let her know that you weren't alone up there, that the agoge stood with you. She asked how I could be friends with some outland orphan brat. You couldn't be Rakkor, she said, and if you were, you were still a disgrace to the Solari."

"Maybe she's right." Diana shifted. "Whipped for blasphemy."

"Well, you're sorry for it, aren't you? Kallista said you didn't make a sound." Lelia punched her shoulder, grinning. "But who's Clytemne to say you're not Rakkor? Some soft Temple bitch, that's all. You didn't quit when we were fighting, and you shouldn't have. You found a way to win, no matter what. That's what we do. That's what we are. This," Lelia said, flicking her fingers toward her bandaged eye. "What's this? I've got another eye. I am Rakkor. I can still carry my shield and my spear. I can still shoot my bow."

"You are iron," Diana said finally, her throat tight.

"We are iron," Lelia corrected her, holding out a hand, and they clasped wrists as if it were an agreement between them. "And these are the things that we do."