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The cardinal stood in the corner of the room trying not to look at the image of the Goddess on the wall, and yet his eyes were drawn to her. He should have covered her up long ago. She was still trying to influence his life, and he couldn’t have that. He knew what was to be done and that it was the right thing. It was the reason others still supported him. The reports to him on his return were that the king was trying to remove him from his position. The cardinals who had come before him might very well have listened and obeyed their king, but he had a higher purpose and the God supported that. It was the God’s work he did, after all.
“Your Grace,” Brother Fortitude murmured, coming to stand beside him.
“Mmm,” he responded, finding it hard to look away from her. Too hard. He silently chastised himself for the weakness.
“We have found nothing in the belongings of the witches.”
“Nothing at all?”
The monk shook his head.
“No sign of who they are or where they were trying to get to? No tokens of witchcraft?”
“The young one had only just escaped from us, and she had nothing on her then. But the other one surprises me.”
“Could she have lost them in the convent?” the cardinal asked, turning to the monk beside him. He had known Brother Fortitude for most of his young life, which he had dedicated to the God in the right way.
“What convent?” he asked.
“The innkeeper claimed she had been dressed as a sister of the Goddess; I assumed she had lived in a convent. Perhaps we missed her in one of our sweeps.”
“You think we might have found her sooner? If she was in a convent we searched but slipped away in the smoke, it is only luck that we found her now.”
The cardinal glared at him. “It is the will of the God that we found her,” he corrected.
Brother Fortitude dropped to his knees, bowing low to the ground.
“Do not fret. With so many around, the world is unstable. It has been so long since we have seen such numbers.”
“Where is the child?” the young monk asked from his prone position. “We could learn so much.”
“We could,” the cardinal agreed. “The king has other ideas. Ideas that worry me,” he admitted.
The young man sat back on his heels and sighed. “He does not understand what danger he supports.”
“No,” the cardinal agreed, motioning for the monk to stand. “Tell me we learnt something from this.”
“Not enough,” Brother Fortitude said, hanging his head.
“We will have the opportunity; the king doesn’t have the control he thinks he does. We cannot reach the witches at this stage, but the child is somewhere in this castle—and with a man who understands the danger. He might not be willing to work with us, but I doubt he would stop us.”
“The general,” Brother Fortitude said.
The cardinal nodded once and reached out to rest his hand on Brother Fortitude’s shoulder. He was the closest to a son he could have, someone to follow in his footsteps, to follow his way of life. There was more to worshiping the God than sitting around in chapels. They had to end this flow of evil, and he would be the one to find the way to end it once and for all. Besides, there were some benefits—some moments of joy when he discovered them and took them from this world to the next.
The God forgave him the innocents, as the general called them. They weren’t innocent. They were complicit. They hid the witches away, protected the women and children who should have been killed the moment they were discovered. That was the only way to stop them. Witches in the community exposed mothers and gentle folk to their magic, corrupting unborn children and creating more. More and more witches that just perpetuated the problem.
“Send out our seekers,” he murmured. “Someone knows where they are. The king isn’t able to keep the secrets he thinks he can. That is why everyone knows there is not a chance of issue. Although the Circle still pushed the old line. The woman is too old to carry life. And she knows she should not.”
The monk looked at him as though he should elaborate. The cardinal knew enough of the queen to understand she too thought she had secrets. The little witch hovering over her growing belly had caused more harm than they had considered possible. Her true identity hadn’t been discovered until the child was lost and the fire had taken hold, but he had known then what had happened. And the promised son had in fact been a daughter.
He did not know who had discovered the truth of the child or why the witch had started the fire. Although she had denied that. Would a witch kill another? Perhaps she was speaking the truth and someone else had killed the child and started the fire.
“The king will try to remove us from the chapel,” Brother Fortitude said, breaking through his thoughts of what might have occurred that night.
“In doing so, it would reveal that we were here undetected for so long. And he won’t risk that.”
“You are confident?”
“I have no reason not to be,” the cardinal said. “We do what is right. We do the God’s work.”
“Praise him,” hummed through the chapel as the monks paused in their studies.
“But the Goddess,” the young monk murmured, looking to the painting that the cardinal had tried so hard to ignore.
“We are in the right,” he reassured his apprentice. “Continue your work. I will find a way to remove the child from the general. And once we discover where the witches are hidden, we can do as we planned.”
Brother Fortitude bowed his head to the cardinal and walked back to one of the long tables covered in bottles and books. He picked up a small glass vile, which glowed blue, and lifted the stopper without bringing it closer to his face. They had lost many trying to determine what was in a witch bottle. The contents slowly turned a dull red. He replaced the stopper and the liquid returned to blue, although it no longer glowed. He sat it down and wrote something on the parchment beside him. Then he called over another monk and whispered something. The man bowed and headed out of the room.
Brother Fortitude raised his eyes to the cardinal, nodded once, and then returned to his work. They all knew that the instructions came from him, no matter who gave them. Someone was always watching within the castle, and it was usually one of his.