The servants living in the towers of Ilbith were free for the sorcerers to use and share, but they were also allowed to keep thralls taken from the little Darklandic villages scattered about the grasslands. Rayna had happened to be in the right place five years ago when Chandran went out on another mission. He never had been one to bother caring for others, but Rayna’s bronze skin and long legs changed his mind a bit. She had protested plenty, but learned to like him after a good training regimen.
“Go away, Rufus.” The man did so with a sniff.
Chandran opened a small chest nestled within the large one. Five holding spheres, glass balls preloaded with spells for quick use, rested upon the black velvet lining the box’s interior, stuffed full with goose feathers. He moved them to his belt holster and included a few empty ones.
Rayna returned thirty minutes later with several drawstring bags bundled in each hand. “Pack for a long trip,” he told her, taking the bags. She bowed without a word before kneeling beside the pile of hay she slept on and rolling up the threadbare blankets.
With their bedding packed, she slipped a brown leather corset on over her dowdy dress. He laced up the back for her, snapping the strings tight in his haste to set out. No matter who it was, Chandran’s thrall would always wear this. He had ordered it specially made with close to one hundred pockets and sheaths hidden in the seams, so she always carried a whole arsenal for every job. Sweeping Rayna’s hair aside, he placed the longest blade into her back sheath. Its handle was made small enough to hide under her hair. She loaded other lethal implements into her front pockets, anything from throwing darts to powdered poisons.
“Don’t disappoint me,” he said, lifting his own pack.
“I’ll die first, master.”
He exited the room with her on his heels. Downstairs, a handful of sorcerers would be casting expensive spells for the two of them. It took a lot of energy and resources to create a portal to the Lightlands—energy and resources spent for him. Chandran’s moment to shine approached.
Chapter 3
Her Place
Lee-ah-lee-ah-lee-ah-lee-ah!
The Mistress of Novices walked between the rows of sleeping girls, ringing the bell as she did each morning. At the wall, she stopped, knelt, and chanted the morning prayer.
Kalea and all her sisters rose from their floor mattresses, knelt, and did the same. Her back ached and stung all the while. After finishing the morning prayer, she commenced the one for her penance, seventy Sovereign Creators. She’d recite seventy more tonight before bed since last night she hadn’t been able to hold her eyes open.
She dressed in her old blue kirtle for the day. Soon it would be replaced by the full habit. Novices could usually go on to be full Sisters of Sorrow at age twenty-five. Since she would turn twenty this year, she wasn’t far off. She had done her best all these years to practice discipline, hone her skills, and be productive enough to prove herself worthy. No voices had spoken to her from the water for at least four years. Ages ago, she had proclaimed to her parents that the One Creator spoke to her through the water. They’d said they believed her, yet continued to shoot wary glances at each other. Back then, she had thought they’d sent her here as a punishment, but after a while it became clear that this was her place.
Over in the corner, Rose, a novice fifteen years old, struggled with her own kirtle’s laces. “Rose,” Kalea said, approaching her. “Where’s Joy?”
“Joy can’t help me right now, Kalea. She ran to the garderobe.”
“Oh dear, is she feeling sick again?”
“She was hugging her stomach.”
“Poor Joy. And poor Rose. Don’t you know you can ask any one of us for help?”
“Sorry, I forgot.”
Kalea took over her laces. As she worked, Rose studied her face with her asymmetrical eyes, one of which could not see as well as the other. A smile spread on her soft, round face. Her smile proved contagious. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing is funny. You look different.”
“Well, I did a penance last night, and I have a lot of pain this morning.”
Rose smiled deeper and shook her head. “I don’t think so. You’re happy. You’re really, really happy.”
Kalea giggled but winced at the twinge shooting across her sore skin. “How would you know?”
Rose put a chubby hand on Kalea’s chest. “Follow your heart, Kalea.”
Holding the smile, Kalea cocked her head. Rose beamed her everlasting innocent smile, and Kalea forced out another giggle and mimicked her, putting a hand to her chest. “Well, you follow your heart too, because that’s good advice.”
She tied the final bow at the top of Rose’s kirtle and proceeded to help her put on her novice veil. “Let’s get some breakfast in you, girl,” she said with a wink.
She and Rose enjoyed a nice breakfast of oats in milk at the long table of novices. Today, she volunteered to help Rose stay tidy, wiping her chin and taking care of her dish when they finished eating. Their bowls had been filled half as full as yesterday. She said her goodbyes to Rose and wished her a lovely day before leaving her in the care of one of the elderly vestals, then went out to take yesterday’s linens off the line.
Before starting the new washing load, she folded each gown and sheet into crisp squares. Joy rushed in, threw open the sewing box, and selected one of the garments in need of repair.
“Oh, Kalea, thank you for helping Rose this morning. I just got so…”
Kalea waved a hand. “Don’t mention it. I know how you suffer.” Joy’s skin showed the pallor and clamminess of an illness she’d battled for years, some years more intensely than others. Kalea was a bit older than Joy, though she often felt like the younger one.
“Would you like another sewing lesson this afternoon?”
Kalea snapped a new sheet out on the rug and dragged one end over to the other. “I can’t. I have a lot of laundry to catch up on.”
“Well, I’ll miss your company.”
Kalea laughed. “For me, it’s all about company. When it comes to sewing, I’m hopeless.”
“No, you’re not.”
Kalea placed the last sheet on the neat stack and slid her hands under the lot of them. “See you later.”
She passed the kitchen on her way to the vestals’ wing, her stomach growling despite the breakfast within it.
“If I don’t get a sack of flour and dried lentils, it’ll be nothin’ but onion soup for a while. I’m out of everything,” the head cook murmured to her assistant novice. Similar complaints had arisen last week with lots of grumbling at the market. The pyramids of stacked produce on vendors’ tables had seemed smaller.
From the kitchen, Kalea passed into the central hall with the red door. Father Liam headed toward it, giving her a weak smile while wringing his hands. He tapped on the door as Kalea walked around the corner with her stack of laundry.
A blue door marked the wing where the personnel lived. The main body of vestals each lived in their own cell in the building across the courtyard. Kalea would join them on their side of the complex after she finally took her vows.
A sense of serenity passed over her when in the personnel wing, a glimpse of what life would be like in the future. The little stained glass window at the end of the hall beamed soft, colored light onto the floor. It displayed a painted image of the Creator beaming on a mountaintop like a star, looking down at a city beside a forest, with a river running through both.
Tearing her eyes away from the bright, colorful image, she entered the first room, also with a blue painted door, and delivered the new sheet to the foot of the bed. All the vestals were in the prayer room at this time, where they usually spent two hours praying and reading the Creator’s Word.
The next cell belonged to Sister Scupley, who would also be downstairs about now. Another novice, Vivene, stood in Sister Scupley’s room, engrossed in one of her books. Vivene’s broom stood abandoned against the bookshelf.
“Vivene!” Kale
a said, plopping the stack of sheets down. “What are you doing?”
Vivene turned, putting a finger to her lips.
Kalea marched to her side. “I’m thinking you don’t have permission to read her books right now.” She peered at the illustrated book which had Vivene mesmerized and let out a gasp. She covered her mouth. An illustration displayed a man and woman in a naked tangle. Vivene turned the page to reveal the couple in a different position.
“What is that book?”
Holding the place with her thumb, Vivene showed the cover with its faint flash of an aged, gilded title reading, An Exploration of Love in Three Forms: Poetic, Symbolic, and Carnal.
“It’s a manual about love,” Vivene said, and Kalea frowned, gawking at the picture over the other girl’s shoulder when she opened the book again. “Watch the door for me, will ya?”
Kalea whispered, “Put it away.”
“Hold on.” The ink drawings were a little crude; some took a moment to puzzle out what was going on. As Vivene turned each page, the positions got more elaborate, perhaps unlikely for real life, each one showing the man’s…part entering the woman’s body. A romantic poem or story came around every other page.
“Did Sister Scupley confiscate it from someone?”
“Nope,” Vivene said. “I would’ve known about it if one of us owned it. She’s kept this for years.”
“Why?”
Vivene turned her eyes toward Kalea, cocking a smirk. Her eyes returned to the page. “Listen to this: ‘My lady love, my lady love, my butterfly seeks the nectar in your quivering flower.’”
“That’s disgusting!”
Vivene laughed, bending over the book as her finger kept the page marked.
“Why does the superioress have this?”
“Can you blame her? It’s not as if we all chose to be in here. We were thrown in here because we were all deemed ‘crazy.’”
“But I’m glad I’m in here.”
“Good on you, K’lea, but for some of us, it can get unbearable. Don’t you miss flirting?”
“I was too young to flirt when my parents enrolled me here. Are you saying you’d like to be married instead?”
“I don’t know. Would you?”
Kalea averted her eyes and scanned the bookshelf. The rest of the collection consisted of religious musings, plant guides, and biographies of saints or their scribbled ecstasies. She hadn’t thought much about marriage or if she should be on that path instead. She tried not to since she was already in here.
“I’m meant to be a Sister of Sorrow, Vivene.”
“I’ve skimmed this book a lot,” Vivene continued. “I’ve nearly memorized all the poses.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes I think of them at night.”
Kalea raised an eyebrow. Should she continue with the questioning?
“I guess Sister Scupley does the same. Ooh, no wait! Maybe she has a lover in Tintilly.”
“Vivene. Stop, please. You have to confess about this.”
“Well, I told you, didn’t I?”
Kalea bit her lip. “I can’t do this.” She threw her hands up and turned to leave.
“There’s something else in here I like.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Vivene raised the book anyway, pointing to a page near the back. “There’s love tales about elves.”
Halfway to the door, Kalea stopped. Turned. And stepped slowly back over.
“Really great stuff,” Vivene continued. “Listen to this. ‘The female elf cries no louder than a whispering leaf under the careful tending of her husband, bottling up her passion lest the lonely neighbor saehgahn hear her and throw himself off a cliff to end his own loneliness.’ Isn’t that sad? It says most male elves have to be celibate. Like us, I guess.”
“Yes… I guess it is a sad story.”
“There’s more. ‘A vibrant young saehgahn leaves his homeland to seek adulthood in the human lands. There, he discovers the secret of love in the embrace of a townswoman or farmer’s daughter, an act forbidden, but he is so appreciative that he leaves his mistress with a magical gift or blessing to brighten her life.’” Vivene’s eyes slid shut as she paused to sigh. “Imagine getting a ‘magical gift’ from a romantic elf lover. Couldn’t you just die thinking of such a wonderful…? Kalea, are you all right?”
Kalea shook out of her trance and caught herself staring out the window, bracing her palms across each arm. “Yes. Sorry. I’m listening. It is a pretty story. But you should put the book back and confess and never look at it again.”
Vivene gave her a playful push. “Tch, indeed. And I won’t find you in here tomorrow, thumbing through this?”
“No, of course…”
A door closing echoed in the hall.
“Put the book away!”
Vivene fumbled it back into place behind the row of ordinary books as Kalea lunged for her stack of linens, leaving one on the bed for the superioress. Swiping up the broom, Vivene feigned being busy.
With her stack in hand, Kalea turned toward the door, acting as if she were heading out, while an unsuspecting vestal strode past. Kalea exhaled, turned back to Vivene, and pointed a stiff finger at her before moving on with her chores.
At the river running through the forest near the convent, Kalea immersed each piece of today’s laundry, laid a piece of sopping wet fabric against a rock, and absentmindedly beat it with her washing bat. The same bat she had used to free the elf.
Dorhen Sufferborn.
She reached into her belt pouch and retrieved her handkerchief, still stained with his blood. The stain had turned brown, but the gold sheen remained. She immersed that too.
The elf must be long gone by now. She closed her eyes and summoned his face to her imagination, already hazy since yesterday. The forest’s pine scent wafted coolly around her on the breeze and the tall, stick-like swaying trees shielded the bright spring sunlight. In her imagination, she pieced his face back together and, once in focus, she thought about the feel of his hand on hers and the moment she slipped and he caught her. The forbidden touch he’d managed.
What am I doing? She snapped her eyes open again and plunged her arms into the cold water, where a small group of garments soaked in the little man-made pool sectioned off with stacked rocks. She resumed her toil, shifting them around. Winter had ended early, and new pointy shoots of grass pushed up through the red blanket of pine needles already. Her handkerchief floated in the water, its cold temperature perfect for removing stains, and she saw that the bloody smudge had lightened. Even her bandages from last night were renewed.
Watching the water, her eyes glazed and the light glinting atop the dancing liquid surface drew her stare as it always used to do. In the blurred shapes of reflected light, the elf’s face assembled, smiling at her.
She growled and scrambled the water with her hand. “I’m not talking to you anymore, I’m a woman of the Creator now!”
She whipped a garment out of the water, slapped it on the rock, and thrashed it with her bat. Her arms were well-strengthened from doing this for so long, as willowy as they appeared. Beating her frustrations out with the bat had always been a soothing component to her day, leaving her free of tension and ready to fall right to sleep at the end of it. It also drew her focus away from the rhythmic dancing water. Though the water had always been the culprit to trigger her hallucinations, her superioress had specifically slotted her as washerwoman, as if facing the activity would cure it. Combined with intense prayer, busy days, and deep contemplation, it had worked…until now.
“I won’t tell them,” she said. “No one needs to know I saw it, just like no one needs to know I saw that hideous book.” The inky image of a woman with her legs wrapped around a handsome man flashed in her head. She beat the clothing harder.
She’d lived here since age ten, and soon she’d finish her nineteenth year of life. A comfortable routine in the convent was all she needed to be happy. She loved her sisters, Father Liam
, and Mother Superior; she enjoyed her chores, reading about the fabulous workings of the Creator and talking to Him, and visiting the hospital to care for the sick and feed the poor, and singing on Sundays—so many activities filled her time. She didn’t need to…care for a husband. She could care for homeless children, she didn’t need her own. A full life striving for perfection and holiness had been provided to her by her loving parents, who cared enough about her to pay to put her into the convent.
She stopped swinging the bat and bent over, panting. Dropping to the ground, she reclined atop the thick pine needles, which crunched under her head.
A spirit in the water. That’s what it was. A spirit in the water had talked to her for as long as she could talk and kept showing up since, appearing in little rain puddles along the beaten path running by her house. She’d never been afraid of it. Her habit of talking to water used to cause a lot of problems in her family, though, and eventually led to her admission into the convent.
The spirit was nice, perhaps deceptively so. In her ninth year, it spoke to her so sweetly one day that she went into the calm river to get a closer look at it. She didn’t remember actually seeing anything down there, but the time she spent submerged sent her parents into a roaring panic. Splashing. And screaming. Her father dragged her out so fast, her body created a tubular wave. His big hands pressed into her cheeks when he checked her face for life. He patted her back so firmly it hurt, but she was fine. She didn’t even cough. A few months later, her tenth birthday had passed, and she watched her parents ride along the trail through the towering pine trees back home to Taulmoil, leaving her in the big squat house with the steeple and colored windows.
A tear trailed into her hair as she stared at the swaying canopy. She smiled regardless. Nothing in the world happened by coincidence; everything happened for a reason. She lived here because the Creator wanted her here. His will spoke louder than the water spirit’s voice.
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