The Sisterhouse

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 13

This is Chapter 13 of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.

The chant was finished, but Devotion was still singing. Her head was tilted upward, the weave of the veil pulling back so that the pale porcelain of her cheek caught the evening candlelight and a hint of black hair showed just above her ear. Her voice spiraled beautifully, the vibrations caught in the arches of the chapel and played back as an accompaniment of echoes, while every stillness in the singing seemed like the silence before a holy visitation.

“She skipped the tonsure last tenday,” Temperance whispered to Fidelity. “She probably thinks the angels like to see her curly locks. The pious bitch.”

Temperance hated too easily, but she was right: Devotion was the very definition of a pious bitch.

That was one of the four types in the sisterhouse, Fidelity had decided early on — the type that seemed virtuous, obedient, outwardly the perfect sister, but underneath the opposite of holy, their piety just a dress-up, a sinful masquerade.

Temperance was one of the second type — one of the accidental sisters, the mostly lowborn girls who ended up in the order because of other people’s devices and desires, who believed in the archangels and the order’s mission but without any great fervor, who looked always for ways to bring a little fun into the sisterly hours, the long days, the longer years. This made them gossips and rule-breakers and occasionally irreverent; it made them hated by the pious bitches, whom they despised in return.

The third sort were too comfortable to despise anyone. The spoiled sisters, Fidelity called them, though the name was a little unfair: They were mostly noblewomen or wealthy commoners who wanted a life without the burdens of wifely duty and the impositions and cruelties of men, and for whom the point of the order was ease, comfort, letting oneself go to fat beneath the robes, delighting in small pets and small treats.

Some of the spoiled sisters had attachments, which was sometimes a sisterhouse euphemism for unnatural relations and sometimes a sisterhouse way of insinuating jealously that close friendships were wicked and corrupt. Some of them concealed selfishness beneath a mask of jollity. Some were lovely and kind. Some just kept to themselves. The prioress, Reverend Mother Concord, was one of the spoiled in a way, but without corrupt attachments, which made the Jophielan sisterhouse a happier place than some. It was only unfortunate that she listened so much to her secretary, Sister Diligence, who was a pious bitch and who drew up the penalties that her superior then reluctantly imposed.

Finally there were the holy sisters, each as different from the pious bitches as river water from a stagnant fog. Out of the twenty-seven sisters in the house, in Fidelity’s estimation four were holy, in their own distinctive ways. Old Charity was somehow transparent, as thought the light of the next life was shining through the aged paper of her skin; her face reminded Fidelity of an illumination in the copy of the Histories that she was trying painstakingly to read, of ancient Ingica realizing that she had entertained Jophiel unawares. Benevolence was generosity embodied, the only sister known to every beggar in the upper reaches of the city. Young Dignity, who had been an aspirant with Fidelity when she arrived, was a mystic — strange and distant and not particularly likeable, yet tied somehow to a thread that ran up and away into the empyrean. And finally there was Sister Recompense, the choirmistress —

— if she were really as holy as you say she wouldn’t dote on Devotion, Temperance would say.

— it’s because she’s holy that all she notices in Devotion is her beautiful singing voice, Fidelity would answer.

— and now Recompense was beaming as the last plangent notes of the hymn faded and Devotion composed herself to receive the choirmistress’s praise, which quickly became praise for all of them, the whole beautiful chorus, for which Recompense felt so much pride, and what was holy about her was that she meant it, she loved her fellow sisters the way Jophiel was supposed to love Their faithful servants, in a way that accepted and somehow covered over all their sins and weaknesses and flaws.

“Truly,” the plump choirmistress breathed. “Truly, when you sing this way, the archangels hear us! Jophiel hears you, sisters. Bless you. Bless you.”

A wave of a hand and they were dismissed, as though Recompense was too overcome by emotion to continue praising them. They went down from the stalls, silent until they left the chapel, then giving over to murmurs and giggles as they lifted their veils and floated in clusters through the halls to the refectory, where the sisters who weren’t singing waited, and the warmth of the evening meal.

Four kinds of sisters, and then there was Fidelity herself. Lowborn, accidental, a natural friend for a girl like Temperance, yet also robed in a certain mystery, because she had joined the sisterhouse so suddenly, which implied that she was connected to someone important or significant in the world outside. Indeed at first, before her style of conversation disabused them, some of the comfortable highborn sisters had assumed that she must be one of them. And even now there was a sense, an understanding, that there had to be more to Sister Fidelity than the official story — which was that she was simply the daughter of a man who had served with Lord Arellwen in the legions, that her father, dying, had come to Rendale and importuned the chancellor for assistance, and Arellwen, in remembered gratitude, had intervened to place her with the sisters once her father went to his reward.

The two alternative theories in the sisterhouse, she knew, made her out to be the chancellor’s by-blow, fathered on some country girl, or alternatively a girl he had somehow ruined and been obliged to place in the sisterhouse because no respectable man would have her for a wife. The second was the more exciting theory, but also the more implausible, since she was obviously not a noble’s daughter, and country girls had their innocence violated every day without being snatched up and placed in an important sisterhouse; the idea that a man as powerful as the Lord Chancellor would quail before some outraged crofter seemed unlikely. So the first theory had more adherents, though it had to be acknowledged — or so Fidelity understood, through the friendly channels that carried this gossip to her ears — that she didn’t look much like the Lord Chancellor’s daughter, if it came to that.

Not that I looked that much like my true da either. It was Hilwen who had favored him, Hilwen who unlike her father and mother had no place in the simple story she was now obliged to tell. So her elder sister simply dropped away, and if she forgot herself and mentioned a sibling she always had to quickly collapse Hilwen and Willa together into a single sister who had died a long time ago, leaving her alone, the sole child of her household, and now an orphan with nobody in all the world.

Nobody, that is, save for the man who had finished throwing up in the basin in the House of Birds, and then gathered himself and gone out and left her alone and somewhat stunned in the firelight, for what felt like a long time but probably wasn’t because the flames were still strong enough when he returned, all by himself, no Ladyhawk or Reffio or anyone, handed her a cloak and boots, and told her that they would leave the house immediately.

Part of her assumed that was she going to her death. Another part of her felt sure that the man who had just crumpled before her was not likely to leave her body in an alleyway or toss her off the wharf.

Both parts kept silent and went with him.

So it was Rendale at night, again, but this time earlier and with people still out in the torchlit squares and circles. Then a new inn, somewhere up the hill, not so far from the temple, whose dome she glimpsed now and then as their route bent from wide streets to narrower ones, and finally reached a sign with a rose and a sword. Then through a quiet common room to an upstairs bedchamber little bigger than a closet, and the click of a lock as she was left there, with a single candle and a pitcher and a pisspot and a narrow bed, and instead of a true window a pane of glass somehow set way up into the ceiling, through which a dusting of starlight fell once the candle was blown out.

It was impossible that she should sleep and yet she did, perhaps because of whatever had gone into her wine and blood and mind. There was a period of half-wakefulness, when she heard voices around her, in the room or just outside, and part of her mind tried to stay in the waking world to hear what they were saying …

The deep voice, as familiar as any to her now – “ … not gone south on a riverboat, not dead, but right there in the House of Birds, dressed as one of their strumpets …

Another voice, plaintive, making excuses – “M’lord the witnesses were sure in what they said, that a girl left that morning on the same riverboat they all came in on, and besides I spent much of my time dockside, I swear to you, if she’d been wandering down there I’d have caught wind of her … ”

“Well she wasn’t wandering, they made her quite at home, and did you wander back ever after those first few days? No, you did just enough to assure me she was gone, to make looking for her a problem for Alderholt or Bluehaven or Cranholt or angels-know-where-else, and then back you went to your own devices …”

Was it the fox-faced man? Not flirtation anymore, just cringing —

“No, no, m’lord knows that I have no devices except his own, no business except his service …

Enough. She let go, and fell and fell and fell — down into a heavy, drowning sleep, like going way down underwater in the Balenty pond, everything blotted out by depth and dark and pressure.

Only one dream reached her there, and briefly: She found herself on a path in the woods near their farm, just at the spot where she and her mother had built the little shrine to Jophiel, and the archangel was there watching her, except that instead of the crude carving the statue was entirely lifelike, painted wood that could easily be blue cloth and dark hair and immortal flesh. Jophiel was gesturing, pointing, or somehow revealing something, and when she turned to look in the direction of Their stretching hand, she saw the familiar path widening, the trees suddenly bright with autumn color, and where in life there had been a small clearing with a few strong oaks, in the dream there was the same bright path and the same corridor of trees she had walked in her dreaming in the House of Birds.

She took a step toward the trees, and then the dream faded and the depths took her back, and she slept in oblivion until sometime in the morning when a sunbeam falling through the upper window finally cast its gold upon her face.

When she sat up he was sitting there, his bulk balanced atop a gray-painted stool, a small red book in his hands. She realized quickly that she was still in her revealing garb from the previous night and slid back down a little so that the blankets hid her, and at that noise he lifted his face — still somehow pained, but without the turmoil of the prior evening — and let his eyes, dark in their hollows, meet her own.

“Good morning, Rowenna,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

She could not say any of the things she knew about him, so she told the truth and said she did not know his name.

“Would it mean anything to you if I said my name was Arellwen, lord of House Maal? I need you to tell me the truth; everything here will be easier if you do.”

Again that was no difficulty. There was something faintly familiar about the name, but only faintly, nothing she could summon to her mind.

“No, m’lord. I am sorry but I do not know you.”

He looked at her for a moment in silence, and then nodded. “Nor is there a good reason why you should. I have some little power in this realm, and some folk would recognize my name if not my face. But you have come here from far-off, am I right? Can you tell me the story that brought you to the House of Birds?”

Carefully, so carefully, she told him the same story that she had told the Ladyhawk and Reffio: Nothing added, nothing left out, no mention at all of seeing this man in the bedroom in the Snow Goose, or seeing the fox-faced man at all, or any speculation about Hilwen and her fate.

“I am so very sorry,” he said heavily when she finished. “That is a great deal for a young girl … I’m so very sorry. But I must press you a little: You are certain, absolutely certain, that your father told you nothing about his business in the city? Beyond just what you’ve told me, that he had friends who would set him up as a trader, that there was money waiting for you here?”

Again, she could answer honestly: “My father did not confide in me, m’lord.”

“Nor in your sister?”

She had suspicions and Hilwen was dead, surely dead, but there was no point in speculating when she could continue to speak truthfully: “Nothing that I ever knew of, m’lord. Nothing that she told me.”

“And was there — ” He paused, his fingers tapping absently at the little book. “Was there anyone in your town, this Balenty, whom your father trusted? Anyone he might have shared a secret with? Or anyone elsewhere in your family to whom he might have written?”

“My da … my father wasn’t much for lettering. He knew his letters, I mean, better than I did before they taught me at the … at the place we met. But he didn’t write with them much at all. We had family in Felcester, his sister-by-marriage, but we haven’t seen them in a long span. He wouldn’t have shared much with them.”

“And local friends? Village friends? Farmers?”

She shook her head. “Da didn’t have great friends, m’lord. He kept to himself — we kept to ourselves mostly. I mean, that is, Hilwen had friends, we went to the village, I had friends — but my father wasn’t much in the way of a host, if you follow me, m’lord.”

“I do,” he said. “I do. So what it all adds up to is that you’ve no sense of anything that might be a clue to how he died, whom he was meeting with that night, anything like that?”

Only one. His voice, the same voice, in their dark room, standing over her sleeping sister: Only one, the other girl is gone.

Could she answer this one without a lie?

“M’lord, I … he never said anything to me that would have been a clue, except that it was another inn, and meeting old friends who were men of business. For the rest we were just to mind our own affairs and let him handle his.”

Again he let the silence hang, and after a moment she wondered if he were trying to test her, to see if she would start babbling if he didn’t speak at all. But then he nodded brusquely.

“A pity,” he said. “There are many ways for a man to get himself killed, but if we knew anything about the men your father met with, well … it would be a place to start, at least. And now it’s my turn to offer you an explanation, I think. You see, I was one of your father’s friends, a long time ago, in our soldiering days. The legions make equals of men, put a farmer’s son and a thane’s son on the same footing, and so we were for a time. Did he talk about those days, ever?”

“Not much, m’lord. Not often. Especially after our mother died.”

“And do you know much about their courtship, how they wed?”

The temple veil again, with all its secrets hid behind. “They were in Sheppholm, m’lord. I know Hilwen was born there, at least. He was at the fortress, her folk came from the city, I think. But that’s all I know, all I remember — like I said he didn’t talk much about it, my ma was gone, it was all just a past I didn’t know.”

“So he kept his secrets,” Arellwen said, almost to himself. “I did not know much of your mother. But I am sure he loved her. And so from there … well, he went his way and I went mine. Again, often the way of it for soldiers. But I remembered him, and he knew, I suppose, that I had risen … my family is no great house but I have been fortunate … and when he came to Rendale he contrived to get a message to me. Perhaps I was one of the friends he hoped to meet. But it was a little while before I tried to answer him, and by then he had — well, you know what happened, he was dead, and his daughters vanished, and there seemed to be nothing for me to do. And then … “ His voice tightened. “And then we encountered one another, and I could see your father’s face in yours.”

She knew he was lying to her; the question was just how much truth was mixed in. He had killed her father, she was still sure of it; if he had come to the inn for some other reason he wouldn’t be lying to her about it now. He had killed her father, and probably thrown Hilwen into Lake Orison, and only the archangels knew why. But if he had killed them, then perhaps he was telling the truth about having known her da, about their having been soldiers together once …

He was squeezing the book now, and no longer looking at her. “I am not … I would not have hurt you. I do not go to that House often. I have weaknesses, you’re too young to understand, what it’s like to sometimes have a demon in you. The angels have given women other temptations, but not like this, not what we men carry. I have never hurt a girl, I want you to know that. And now I’ve been punished, the angels have given me a warning, I will never ….” He trailed off, biting at his lips.

Then his voice turned firm, even commanding, and he looked at her again. “But I recognized you, you are still unspoiled, nothing worse than lust passed between us. And now you must listen to me. For your father’s sake I will help you. You will never go back to that house. You will be safe. But that safety will fail, I cannot protect you, if you ever let slip where you came from, where I found you. I will know immediately, and the place where I am sending you will no longer accept you. In the hour you tell our secret all your protections will be lost, you will be on the street, death and disease will hunt you, your fate will be worse than if you had remained under the Ladyhawk’s dominion. Do you understand? All you must say, all you must ever say, is the part of the truth that matters: That I knew your father, that he is dead, that I am helping you for his sake. You must swear a fearful oath. And though we will be close, at least for a time — you will see me now and then, our paths will cross — once I have set you safely where I’m taking you we must never speak again. Do you understand?”

While she was nodding, trying to nod fiercely, saying “yes, yes,” he cocked his head to one side and rubbed his beard and said, against almost to himself:

“It would be helpful if you knew how to sing.”

The sisters who didn’t sing were already there in the refectory, sharing one of the four long wooden tables, and they looked up with a mix of welcome and annoyance as her group came through the doors — Temperance chattering away to Gravity and Grace, all four of them outpacing the older sisters and the slower ones and the ones who felt that a smooth glide looked more pious than a brisk trot.

Not many in Jophiel’s order didn’t sing. The blues prized their choirs, their charism of music, and they culled the girls offered to the order by testing them for talent. Where there wasn’t talent there was at least enthusiasm, usually from noble girls who joined the order in part because they wanted the chance to sing, and who brought money with them even if they didn’t bring the ideal level of ability. So even some of the less-talented, the chronically off-key, were usually given a place in the choirs, leaving only the sisters who did the cooking and washing — along with the aged and infirm and what the choirmistress called the difficult — exempt from formal, public duties in the Temple and the Castle chapel. And even those exempted sisters had to sing the daily orison every morning in the sisterhouse’s chapel, and the Great Orisons on the major feasts, and rise with the rest of the order to sing the Great Vigil after midnight on the nights that followed Winter’s Eve.

It was on the Winter’s Eve just past, or rather on one of the hidden days that followed, that Fidelity had been raised from aspirant to junior sister, kneeling with Temperance and Dignity and two others to swear oaths that bound her the sisterhouse for seven years — at which point there would be further oaths that bound her for a lifetime.

In theory there was a choice at each swearing, but for the common-born girls that was mostly an illusion: Temperance couldn’t really go back to the family in the Heart that she had loved and trusted right up until the moment she realized that her parents intended to give her to the order, that they thought of the singing voice she had always treasured as something to offer the blue sisters in return for taking a poor couple’s fifth daughter off their hands. And what was an illusion for the others was even more of one for Fidelity — Arellwen and Reverend Mother Concord had each made clear that there was no path for her except the one laid out inside the sisterhouse.

There were times when this felt like such a blessing that she could hardly object to its constraints. She had prayed for deliverance and she had been answered in the most direct way imaginable — lifted from whoredom, saved from death, planted securely in one the most honored communities of women. She had safety and friends, the gossip would fade, she could indeed sing — not like Devotion or even Temperance but well enough for the chorus — and she lived just a stone’s throw from the Castle and walked its courts and halls three or four times every tenday. The wide sunlit street that she had strolled with her sister when they climbed from the Snow Goose to the Castle was now a street she regularly crossed with her sisters, sisterhouse door to postern door, on their way to the imperial chapel. The imperial chapel! And more than that, her imperial highness, the princess she had imagined seeing atop a battlement in some romantic pose, was a flesh-and-blood human being who had served her food and spoken kindly to her and recognized her later, veil and all. She had been moments from becoming a common whore, a ruined woman, Balenty’s most famous cautionary tale, and now Princess Alsbet of Montair knew her name!

Or knew her Jophielan name, at least. Because for now — maybe it would pass, some days the feeling wasn’t there at all, but still for now there was also part of her that resisted the assimilation, the disappearance of Rowenna of Balenty, Rowenna of Rendale, beneath the cowl and veil. Her worst fears had been taken away but in their place she had a life she had never imagined for herself, not once for all her piety and prayerfulness — a life of eternal routine, song and labor, song and labor, in a house of women that no man would ever enter, where no child would ever cry.

Sometimes looking around the refectory was like looking around a through-the-mirror of the common room at the House of Birds on a night when all the girls were in fancy dress and flirting — the same costumed femininity, except with the clients supernaturally erased. And sometimes there was even a part of her that missed the feeling of the other place, the thrum of it, the danger, the desire, the vividness of everything, so fearful and yet so stimulating, nothing muted or placid or soporific, every nerve standing at attention …

… but this was a terrible part of her self, a fool’s part, a tiny part that she mostly pushed down deep in the cellars of her mind. No, it wasn’t the House of Birds that she missed, but the possibilities for an ordinary life that the brothel had seemingly closed off, that had made her wish so much for an escape. Because when she had escaped, her prayers answered and her deliverance achieved, the price was that she must give up everything that she had wanted to escape for — the hope of marriage and family, a little place all her own, the little house in Balenty with the vegetables, her father a prosperous merchant in Rendale with suitors knocking at their doors

the citadel and the king with the golden eyes beyond the golden wood

and what’s more, she must give it up without ever knowing why all this happened to her, what Arellwen and his fox-faced man had really wanted, why her father was gone and Hilwen vanished and why she had been placed here, in comfort but also, there was no point in denying it, in a kind of prison.

Sometimes she entertained the idea that the speculating sisters were right, and she was a bastard — not Arellwen’s, that didn’t seem possible despite his horror and disgust, but the issue of someone powerful and mysterious and rich and noble-born. She tried to see the idea as an explanation for the distance she’d always felt from her father, the strange veil across their past. But still it made a piss-poor explanation for their voyage to Rendale, her da’s great expectations, the men in their room and his throat cut in the dark, and then later Arellwen’s strange solicitude.

Or again, sometimes she wondered about the potential truth in Arellwen’s tale of a friendship with her father. But there, too, whatever was explained by believing him was outstripped by the events left unexplained, the things she knew had happened but could never tell to anyone, the questions she felt sure she would carry to her grave.

Temperance gave her a dig. “Off in your head again, are you? Move along, girl, I want some of the stew.”

They were in the line with bowls that led to the cauldron, Sister Remedy stirring and ladling just ahead of, her veil tucked back like all of theirs when they were inside the sisterhouse, exposing a ruddy face, a warted nose.

“Lively, now, sisters,” she said in her cheery way, her mouth rolling the words like fat berries. “Young Fidelity, you’re holding up the line with your mooning, now. Step up lively before it all gets colder than Caldmark, step up …”

As she said up the peals began. Not their chapel bell but close by, across the way in the Castle. Not a single bell’s tolling of the hour, but a tumbling sort of sound, as though the bells were falling over one another to share whatever news they had.

There was a long window in the refectory that some of the sisters crowded round, but dark had settled over the city and there was no great noise of movement or disturbance. Yet still the bells rang out, and then others joined them, from a shrine nearby and then farther off the heavy ding-de-long, ding-de-long that could only be the Temple.

The secretary, Sister Diligence, came through the room in her usual manner, brisk and exasperated. “Don’t crowd the windows, sisters, there’s obviously nothing to see out there,” she snapped. Then, looking around: “Piety,” she said to a whey-cheeked aspirant, “draw down your veil and hustle yourself across the postern to find out what in heaven’s name they’ve decided to go on about.”

Piety wasn’t gone long and when she came back it was with fat Sister Merciful, the sister-doorkeeper, panting and blowing at her heels.

“The bells,” Merciful said. “The bells.”

“Yes, yes,” Diligence said impatiently. “Tell us what they mean, sister.”

“The bells,” the doorkeeper said, her face apple-red, her eyes aglow. “The bells ring for, for an engagement. For the princess’s engagement. Just announced. They ring to celebrate, the princess is to wed.”

There was a great stir and chatter, and Fidelity suddenly saw Alsbet in her mind’s eye, poised and regal, as far above them here as they were above the House of Birds. She wondered how an engagement felt, for one so grand and highborn — a moment of perfect joy, a coming-into-womanhood no different from the one she had once imagined for herself? Or — she looked around her, at the chattering sisters, and then up, to where the dark beams of the ceiling interlocked as in a cage — a moment when you realized that you could escape from one destiny and still find yourself prisoned in the next?

“Who’s she wedding, who’s she to wed?” a few of the sisters kept asking, but Merciful was still bent over to recover from her climb and had no more answers to offer.

“Jophiel alive, they sound so beautiful,” Temperance said to her. “Never heard the whole city ring like this. Listen, they’re almost harmonizing.”

Fidelity closed her eyes and listened to the bells.

Author’s note: This is the end of Part I of the novel. Next week’s chapter is an interlude. Part II begins the following week.