With every step, the Order of the Maiden loomed closer. Its bell towers and turrets scraped the clouds, and the tracery of its massive rose window shimmered like a spider’s web in the gray sunlight. It depicted the face of the Maiden—the first face of the three-headed Goddess alongside the Mother and Crone—with her golden hair woven with wildflowers. Once Wren passed through these doors, nobody but the queen could free her.

I hope you’re as persuasive as you think you are, Una.

She couldn’t bring herself to take another step. These walls could not be her world; she had seen too much beyond them to be content here. Standing in the courtyard, the wind tugging at the hem of her traveling cloak, Wren swore this place remembered her. She could feel it like the chill of a lingering gaze.

Because someone was looking at her.

She snapped her attention to the west gallery, where a dark silhouette waited in a window. Wren staggered back a step—but then, as she let herself focus, she saw who it was.

Mother Heloise.

Dressed in her dark robes and wimple, she held a cracked leather belt loose in her hands. Wren had never felt its sting, although she likely deserved it. She’d never had the constitution for hours of adoration, for reading the borderline erotic devotional poetry of saints. She’d even tried to escape a few times in her first weeks there. But Heloise believed in implied threats. The promise of punishment controlled her students far more effectively than its execution. Lectures, however … Those, she did not hold back.

You have a gift, she would tell Wren in her stern, rattling voice. No family. No faith. No prospects. Only your magic. Will you waste your life here, making mischief and wallowing in self-pity? Or will you make something of yourself?

Heloise had given her an opportunity, a gift more precious than any gem. An education in medicine and magic. And with it, a chance to be valuable. Not a royal bastard hidden away behind the abbey’s walls, but a healer of the Queen’s Guard. Someone who could be useful if she couldn’t be loved.

Now, Heloise stared down the slope of her nose with a look of palpable disappointment. Then she turned away from the window and slunk into the shadowed hallway. Wren flinched as if Mother Heloise had cracked the belt over her knuckles.

Drawing in a steadying breath, she approached the front gate. The stone tympanum perched above it, and all she could see in the weather-beaten carvings were anguished faces and blank eyes upturned to the Goddess. And higher still, the predawn sky was scattered with stars that glittered cold as shards of ice.