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  © 2019 C. Z. Edwards

  To Believe In Mathematics

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-7327108-6-3

  Produced in the USA

  To Believe In Mathematics

  C. Z. Edwards

  Rien’s Rebellion

  by C. Z. Edwards

  Book I: Kingdom

  Book II: Repudiation and Refuge

  Book III: The Committed Ones

  Book IV: Wisdom’s Fire

  Book 4.5: To Believe In Mathematics

  Book V: Revolution and Redemption

  Book VI: Foundation

  Available at Smashwords and other ebook retailers

  Contents

  Five Days After Last Summer’s Night, 1139...1

  Five Days After Last Summer’s Night, 1139

  Cedri

  She was always going to be the most beautiful woman in the world, for me. I know I can’t be objective about the Lady of the Dreams. For her heart and mind, I could appreciate any housing. Probably even a staff and jewels, though that’s usually not my inclination. She could have been three times my age, or stood a foot taller than me. I adore her, for all of eternity, because when we are together in our dreams, we are more than partners. We share a mind, a heart. What I want, she desires too, and what she needs I need. I can trust her with myself. It’s impossible to know someone from the inside that way and not love them.

  Even if I wasn’t entirely sure she existed.

  I’d taken our four newest — Sashi and Reya, Cotter and Karse — out to the big stand of berry brambles. Inside their protection, Bran planted mountain grape arbors the spring after he joined Quin and me. It took his vines four years to bloom, but now they produce heavy cascades of blushing yellow fruit that’s more like a soft, gold berry than a cluster of grapes. That day, both the berries and the grapes were sweet and lush. We picked everything, laying our haul on lengths of stout linen in a sunny patch, then covering everything with wide, light gauze. The birds could pick their own damned treats. We’d want our fruit soup and our fruit wine come middle of winter. It was hot, sticky work, but not without reward. A handful of either berries in your tin bottle made even warm water lively.

  Still, by the time we heard Quin’s whistle to come in, we were more than ready to go, even if we still had three quarters of the bramble and arbors to pick. We’d be back in the morning, and for most of the rest of the tenday, I expected. Quin called us in early, given the long summer afternoon, and I wouldn’t argue.

  The Foreti, then, was mostly old forest a couple decades past its last good burn, which meant not much direct sunlight reached the floor, except in places like the bramble patch, where a few old trees had died and fallen, and nothing had filled in. It made walking easy when we were all tired. Harvests are the only time I wish I was back on Dastorian, because a farm kid’s work on a well-managed langreve is lighter than being one of four or six or a dozen trying to keep ourselves fed and a forest from burning around us. The vintner’s brat I once was didn’t have to climb trees to sleep, and someone else saw to the cooking and the laundry.

  I wanted food and a bath before sleep, but that was before I saw her. My stomach stopped gnawing on my spine, my scratches quit stinging, and sweat-prickles no longer made me itch. I wasn’t even especially tired. I kept walking, because she drew me.

  Other men would call her beautiful, too. She was at least as dirty as me, and looked like she’d been walking for a season and sleeping rough for a tenday. After the last year of mostly seeing only Rien, who only wears mourning, it still felt a little exotic to see a woman dressed in colors. She wore a wide brimmed straw hat, dyed a pale blue, still on her head. She’d skipped her tunic and coat this morning, in favor of a plain collared, long sleeved shirt of faded pink linen. Her sensible breeches were light grey canvas, with the pockets down the side. She wouldn’t want dark clothes that would try to cook her, but when the sun beat down, she’d cover everything, because she would freckle and burn, would never tan. She had a few on her nose and cheekbones, but mostly, the skin I could see was the color of rich goat’s milk. I knew the texture of her hair, how it curled and disliked salt water, but I don’t dream in color, and often not even in images. I didn’t expect the woodpecker’s vivid red. She wore it long, but bound into plaits. And her eyes. They were the restless color we called hazel; sometimes green, or amber, or almost the dark brown of walnut stain, and fringed with brown lashes.

  She was crouched near the fire pit with Rien when I first saw her. In one breath, I knew that despite all the years of existing as ghosts within each other, we were now made flesh for one another.

  And that I wasn’t mad for loving the figment in my imagination.

  She saw me, too, and stood. We would fit together well. I was at most two inches taller, which made her average for a woman, since I’m just barely above average myself. I wondered what she saw of me, beneath the dirt and smears of sticky juice. I’ve always been too brown to burn or freckle. Between us, we had enough hair for six people, maybe eight. Mine was waist-length, near-black, and straight, because it was easier to tail it once each morning than cut it every other tenday. That day, I was wearing old, faded, patched, brown sail canvas breeches and a collarless linen shirt that started the cool green of good pasture, but faded to the bluish-green-grey of winter juniper needles. Both were now streaked with dried blood and black berry juice stains, especially on my left sleeve and my right leg, where I wiped my fingers.

  I’d known she would be graceful, because in dreams, we share the experiences of our bodies. I’ve climbed something like rigging with her. We swam in the warm salt sea far south of here. That she was built for strength and endurance, I knew; I just didn’t know if she’d be slim or ample. She happened to be precisely the middle. She was here, the Lady of the Dreams.

  I was three steps from her when I saw the medal on the fine chain around her neck. Archilia1’s flame, blue and gold enamel on a silver base. All of my delight cracked and fell in that moment. I could accept her faith, if she insisted, but she’d never accept my absolute apostasy.

  “You,” she said, her smile blazing like joy as she looked into my face for the first time. I hoped what she saw pleased her. I was ordinary enough, neither big nor small. Face shaped face, with my mam’s long nose. But I too, was dressed for a hot, late summer’s day.

  I can’t remember what gods my mother favored. She was Pantheist2, in her way; she’d ask them all for help when the blood flowed or the fever burned, and she’d thank them all when everyone was recovered and well. I think she might have favored Iolantha3 and Lunaga4 a bit more, since she grew up shepherding and spinning, and got her Healing training from the Lunagans, but Mam always knew the difference between the grace of the gods and our work here. For most of my early life, that seemed to be my father’s way, too.

  I was the middle kid of five, and the only
boy, when Mam had my baby brother. I was eight when Jeron was born, and still eight when he died. Goosebite pox goes around, and almost all of us survive it, except the little babies. My parents took it hard, and that’s when my father started getting strange. By the time I was ten, my father had been consecrated as a Lethian5 lay priest, and he dedicated me. I wanted my father back, so I did what he wanted.

  Thinking back now, I don’t think Mam approved of my father’s devotion to the god of death and decay, but Mam was both strong-willed and tolerant. She could agree to disagree with anyone, as long as they talked about it. I did get another sister after Jeron, so they weren’t entirely estranged, at least not then.

  When a child is dedicated to Lethis, the first rite is to nick their finger and their tongue, because blood is our mortality, and shedding it unites us with the end of days. It’s horseshit, because when we’re all ash and dust, there won’t be enough left of us to give a damn about the mysteries of the universe, but I was ten. I craved my father’s love.

  The first rite isn’t the only rite. Lethians believe that our souls are only lightly bound to our bodies. At every dark moon, the faithful donate more of our mortality, and the priests mark us, to contain our volatile souls. The first tattoo on my breastbone wasn’t large enough for the pain it carried. Every three tendays, from the time I was ten until I ran away at eighteen, a priest added to the filigree of ink creeping outward along my collarbones and down my chest.

  My father wanted me to be a priest, a celibate, to spare me the anguish of losing a child. I needed his approval. I didn’t know I could object when they applied the needle.

  I’d been in school since I was four, because Mam was what Dastorian paele used for a Healer and my father was Dastorian’s vintner, and my best friends were Dastorian’s granddaughters, the Pronemiae6. The Teregenitor permitted all the children to share their school as long as we kept the tutors happy, and I loved it. I preferred the reading and the history, but give me any book and I was content. I wasn’t going to make a master vintner. I just don’t have the nose for it, especially not as a kid. Sending me to the Chapterhouse maybe wasn’t the worst decision my father made. But it certainly wasn’t his best, either.

  As educations go, a Lethian one could be worse. My masters at least grew up in the Old Order, even if they joined the heretical New Order. The Old Order insisted that becoming a Lethian priest was an affirmative choice. You didn’t fall into because that’s what your father did, or because you didn’t know what else to do. You had to choose it, and reason your way into that choice. Which meant they taught me logic and their form of philosophy, and how to refute the other philosophies, to write and scribe and to minister to the laity. Between lots of practical bits, like keeping records and protecting just about anything from winter, and to hold still and quiet for the needle, and how to break a brick cubilata7 to remove the faithful dead for the pyre.

  I ran when I was eighteen, after five years in the Chapterhouse. Mostly I ran because I’d realized I didn’t believe at all, and I still had my soul. The priests with ingeniae8 would figure out my apostasy eventually, and then they’d kill me. Lethians said they didn’t require belief, just behavior, but that was not true. Especially for people like me, given to the Order and tasked with building the faith.

  I was told Mam divorced my father for putting me in the Chapterhouse without consulting her, and because he was planning to donate my sisters to the Lethian cloister. The oldest of us, Fiene, married one of Teladel’s Patronae9 not long before I got sent to the Chapterhouse. All I know is what my father told me afterward: that my mother and all five of my sisters were soulless because they refused to obey him. He said Mam took all the girls to Fiene, then came home. I think she intended to try to talk sense into him, one last time.

  But I’ve been studying with Rien now for most of a year, and Rien’s the type of lawyer who writes everything, both in her Advocate’s memory10, and on paper. Her Lex had an index of cases that reached the High Judicatura. She noted that while she was at Women and Children11, Teregenitor12 Dastorian sued my father for support of his three minor daughters. That would be Gilane, who was three years younger than me, and Lieve, six years younger, and Sanna, who came two years after Jeron. My mother wasn’t mentioned at all in Rien’s notes.

  I’m two years older than Rien, so she started at Women and Children the same spring I ran away from the Lethians. My sisters’ case reached the High Judicatura13 when Rien was eighteen, so the first year Quin and I were in the Foreti, when we were still trying to learn how to stay warm and dry and not starve. But it takes years for a case to reach the High Judicatura. Especially a minor one like that, merely a suit for support. It probably first started around the time my father told me my mother had lost her soul, when I was fourteen.

  I’d have to go to Dastorian or Teladel to find Fiene or Trinia. Trin was moony over another Teladel Patrona, so there’s a chance my older sisters were both still there. But I didn’t know. I was afraid to send a letter, and Patronae like us didn’t make the broadsheets very often. A part of me didn’t want to know if my father killed my mother, or just hurt her so badly she gave up on me, too. When we first got to the Foreti, I didn’t have time or money to make that trip, and I still needed to hide, because I wasn’t quite twenty, not an adult. Now that I had the money, I still lacked the time, and wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I learned to live around the uncertainty.

  The one thing I could do in the years since was erase what the Lethians engraved on my skin. By the time I ran, a lace of lilies and glyphs covered my upper chest, from shoulder to shoulder, from the notch in my collarbone to just above my nipples. Had I stayed and joined the priesthood, I would now be covered down to my knees and elbows, front and back.

  I started almost as soon as I was safe in Gorthania. To burn a tattoo out of your skin meant charring down to bone and muscle. It took a hand almost as delicate as the one that wielded the needle, and as much patience, if you wanted to survive. If you didn’t, you could do like the Lethians when they expelled a priest for cause. What they would have done to me, an acolyte who lost his faith. The cubilata was a privilege for the faithful. Apostates, they strapped down. They covered his tattoos with linen soaked in fuel oil, and set the linen on fire. Very few died of smoke or pain. Most lingered for a couple days, until thirst and infection killed them.

  There’s a reason I never had much mercy for Lethians. They had none for anyone else.

  I wanted to live, and preferred to still have some skin at the end, so I didn’t burn, often. Mostly, I cut. I removed an inch every tenday, working from the outside in, left, then top, then right, then bottom. It took six years. Now all I have is a lace of scars. Mam taught me well. I never got infected, and my stitches always healed clean.

  But my scars were visible. To another of Galantier’s priests, it was obvious what they once were. When I went to Reva or Celestan or Earliast, I kept my shirts laced tight, wore a tunic and neckcloth. Better to be thought too formal than to expose what was done to me in the name of the god of death.

  The day the Lady of the Dreams finally became flesh? I wasn’t in town. I was home, with my family. Bran and Quin and Fanik and Daval know why I scarred myself. They witnessed it, and all of them tried to stop me. Self-mutilation, they called it. Self-deliverance, I argued back. I stopped when I was done. Rien knew and understood why I did it. I think she even agreed with me. I hadn’t exactly explained to Marli and Nekane, nor Cotter and Karse, nor Sashi and Reya, but Nekane and Reya both bore their own scars, and none of us would be in the Foreti at all if we weren’t running from something.

  I had to touch The Lady, at least once, so I knew I wasn’t mad, and I hadn’t wasted six years on a fantasy. But I saw her gaze leave my face and take in the pale pink ridges that stand out from my sandalwood skin. “Bloody bricks and mortar,” I heard myself breathe, though I’ve been trying to stop using Lethian curses. They’
re just a bad old habit for me, but they make Rien jump, every time. I try not to hurt my friends with my words. I touched The Lady’s medal, the circle of blue and gold enamel flames. “You’re Archilian,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking.

  She laid her hand on my chest, the pads of her fingers just touching my collarbone. “You’re Lethian?” she asked. I’d never heard her rich voice before, not once in my head, but I heard the question she didn’t quite say, and the horror and disbelief she tried to mask. I know your mind, how can you possibly be Lethian?

  I shook my head, because I’m not. I don’t think I believe in any of the Pantheon, but if they do exist, I’ll never acknowledge them. I’ve seen too much of the damage they permit their faithful to do. If deities exists at all, they’re monsters.

  But for an Archilian — a priest — to fall in love with a Lethian? It’s just not done. It’s not even as taboo as marrying a Spagnian. More like... wanting to fuck a steam engine or a flash tower. I may be an apostate, but according to the Lethians, my body is Lethian property, no matter how long my soul has been departed. To the Lethians, my children will be Lethians, and theirs. Hidden, covert, but still claimed for the god of death and decay. No Archilian should entangle herself in the Lethian disaster. Even if she wanted me, the Archilian Council would never let her.

  I was glad, right then, that Rien had chosen war instead of capitulation. I’ve read enough history, both Galantieran and the rest of the world’s, to know that in a war, I probably wouldn’t survive. I’d follow the woman who should have been my Razia until it killed me, because nothing else mattered now.

  The advantage of spending every single day of the last decade with Quin, the minor Impath14, was how well he knew me, and what my black despair felt like, often even before I knew I was spiraling down. Whatever he threw at me, it bounced off my skull just as I was about to break down into the black. It wasn’t heavy and it wasn’t traveling fast enough to do me harm, but it was hard and it hurt, and I wasn’t expecting it. “Holy fire, Quin,” I swore. An Archilian curse, because that’s what my legal tutor and my best friends used, and I spent far too much time with Rien and Quin.