Sufferborn

by J C Hartcarver

  “Do they cast any love spells on the women?”

  “No. But let’s remember there’s not much reading material in the book.”

  “Does Sister Scupley have any other romantic storybooks?”

  “I haven’t found any.”

  “In the stories you read, were the elves…particularly protective?”

  “Oh yes, very. Their protective nature makes a great loveable attribute. Typical heroic story stuff.”

  “So they don’t have any tricks up their sleeves?”

  “Nothing like that from the elf stories. Tell me, what’s his name?”

  “I’m not saying anything else.”

  “This is so great. We have to talk in private tonight. I can tell you all about what to do with him, if you know what I mean.”

  Kalea shushed her again, and after a gentle shove, ran back to the choir steps and began warming up her voice. “La la—lo li!”

  Vivene joined her like before and leaned over to catch her eyes again, but before she could whisper any prying questions, the door opened and the sister strolled in.

  If Kalea’s turquoise-eyed elf could write, she would tell him to write Vivene a letter of thanks. Otherwise, anything might’ve made Kalea change her mind about entering the forest today. Dropping her basket, she knelt by the water. Was he here yet? She could call out to him, but her throat closed up.

  She drank some stream water from her cupped hands. Acting aloof might be best. She opened the lid on her shoulder basket and pulled the first shift out.

  “I came like you asked.”

  Kalea jumped and nearly shrieked. She twisted around to find Dorhen standing behind her. “Don’t sneak up on me!”

  He huffed as she turned back around and tended her laundry. He dropped into a squat beside her. She kept her face straight and focused on her work, swishing the linen around in the water. In her peripheral vision, he untied a handkerchief and held it out to her over both hands. A bunch of wild strawberries were gathered in its center.

  “What’ve you got?”

  He bowed his head, still extending the berries. “I’m sorry for everything I did wrong.” Saehgahn truly did offer gifts. When she didn’t take them, he raised his eyes to inspect the situation, and extended them a bit closer. “I found these for you.”

  Kalea sighed. “Thank you.” It was a nice gesture. She shouldn’t stay mad at him over such small reasons for long, especially if this meeting was to learn more about him. And her stomach continued its groans after today’s tiny breakfast. She took the handkerchief. “Will you eat some with me?”

  “They’re for you.”

  She ate one, wincing at its premature bitter flavor, and held the bunch back out to him. “Nonsense. Humans share food with each other. Share it with me.”

  He shifted closer to her over the grass. Maybe she had been acting a little crazy as of late. When he took one off the pile, she said, “I’m also sorry about being harsh. I hope you can understand my worries.”

  He swallowed the strawberry, also making a face at the sour thing. “I can.”

  “Sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”

  He did, crossing his legs and folding his hands together.

  Kalea leaned over the water to scrub the garment against the rock. “Have you seen Arius Medallus since we talked yesterday?”

  “No,” he said, watching her hands work. “Have you?”

  “No. And I don’t want to. I’ve worked hard for ten years to keep the visions away.”

  “You should ask him what he wants.”

  She paused to look at him with an eyebrow raised. She could’ve snapped a haughty reply, but she stopped herself, remembering her manners. Come to think of it, she’d never thought to ask “the face” anything before. “I don’t talk to demons.”

  Dorhen showed no reaction to the comment. “Can I join your community in there?” he asked, and Kalea burst out in laughter, though she felt no mirth.

  “Only women can be in the convent.”

  “I’ve seen men going in and out.”

  “Yes, but those are priests. They don’t directly join the convent, they get assigned personnel positions by a bishop in a large city with a cathedral.”

  Dorhen’s mouth cocked as if he were sucking his teeth. “So if I became a priest, I wouldn’t be able to go in there of my own will?”

  “No.”

  “Tch. I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind those walls anyway.”

  Kalea twisted the garment, and a rush of water escaped its fibers. “Well, they work fine for us mentally ill girls. It’s a safe place for us to live.”

  “You’re not mentally ill.” His brow narrowed. “And there are no safe places to live.”

  “You see?” Kalea said, wagging her finger from him to herself and back. “This is what I want to talk about. You have some interest in me, and I think it’s the kind of interest I can’t entertain.”

  He crossed his arms. “What kind of interest do you mean?”

  “Why don’t you tell me? Take a good guess.” She would construct the conversation any way she could to avoid using difficult carnal words.

  He averted his turquoise eyes.

  “This is what I’m talking about. You want something from me, but you won’t even say what it is.”

  “I would like to be near you.”

  She took her attention wholly off the laundry now and gestured animatedly with her hands while she spoke. “But you can’t. All right? I’m going to be a vestal. I can’t be friends with you. My life is about work, prayer, contemplation, and praising the One Creator. I’m not allowed to talk to laymen—or lay-saehgahn—too intimately, if at all. As I said, I can’t entertain your interests.”

  “And I’ve already told you, you don’t have to talk to me—but I will be here. I’ll live out here, right by your home. And I’ll protect you.”

  That hotness crept into her face again, and she snapped back to the laundry in the cold water.

  “Kalea.” He reached out for her shoulder, and she shrugged away. He scooted closer. “Would you like to know what my life has been like for the last sixteen years?”

  “Yes,” she said in total honesty, fixated on the laundry.

  “It was like being dead, though I could still walk. A strange existence. I walked and walked, practically sleeping through it. My head stayed cloudy. There were times when my survival depended on being quick and alert, but most days my body walked on its own, drifting through forests and cities and farms. I was unseen and felt every bit of it. Being unseen and unheard was the aim, the model life Arius Medallus designed for me. I fell easily into the routine. And lost my soul.” His eyes flared. “I watched my house burn and collapse with my mother inside.”

  Kalea’s hands hovered over the water, dripping. His last statement made her stomach rattle and echo up to her bottom lip.

  “I miss her.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Half of the word “sorry” choked off. She pressed her wrist against her mouth to try to stop the quivering. She couldn’t imagine such a thing happening to her own mother. Right now, her mother lived safe in Taulmoil, in a warm house with her father, writing Kalea letters at least once a month. “Dorhen, you and I can pray for—”

  “When I saw you, something happened to me.”

  “Huh?”

  He leaned toward her, hardly blinking. “Something changed. When I saw you, I woke up. I left the area but quickly returned. I wanted to hear your voice again. Though I promised not to remember your name, it kept ringing in my head as if you were calling—”

  “Did your mother honor the One Creator?”

  Dorhen’s voice caught for a moment as she forced him to change the subject. “I don’t know.”

  Kalea bit the inside of her cheek for a moment. “What was she like?”

  His eyes spaced out. “Beautiful. If your One Creator created anything, He created her. She had brown hair. Like yours. Her voice sounded soft and sweet. She used to get her hands all di
rty and make things with clay. She’d step into the water and splash around with me when I was little.”

  A genuine smile spread across Kalea’s face. “She sounds lovely.” Dorhen offered no response. He studied her in that serious and curious way of his. “But she never told you about the One Creator?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Kalea dropped the next garment into the pool. “And so you walked around the Lightlands for sixteen years. What’s Arius Medallus like?”

  “Strict.” Dorhen’s eyes perused the forest on the other side of the stream. “My childhood ended right there at age six. I learned a lot from him, but my cloud started around the same time.”

  “Oh. You poor thing.”

  “The nightmares came too.”

  “Nightmares? About your house burning?”

  “Not quite. Well, at first, sure. But they shifted into stranger territory.”

  “Like what?” She put her attention on him again; the linen gown swirled in the water on its own.

  “There’s old women around me. They make me sleepy, but I never quite fall asleep. My arms and legs go numb, and they hold me down with large, twig-like hands. When I can’t fight back, they cut open my chest and reach their hands inside. It’s cold. I can’t figure out what they’re searching for.”

  Kalea listened long after he stopped talking. The stream babbled on and the pine needles rustled in the breeze.

  “That’s the nightmare I have the most.”

  “I know what you need to do.” His head jerked her way, and his eyebrows rose. “You came to me for a reason, so I might be able to help.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You say you don’t remember your mother teaching you about the One Creator?” He nodded. “And how about Arius Medallus?” He shook his head. “First, we’ll pray for your mother’s soul.” She wiped her hands on her apron and sat facing him on her knees. “Have you ever prayed before?”

  “No.”

  “Copy this pose.” She put her hands together. “Now bow your head. If you were to join the priesthood, you’d do this a lot. Listen closely: Our One Creator, please look after Dorhen, Your new follower. And please keep the soul of his mother…” She raised her head. “What was her name?”

  “Orinleah.”

  “Please keep Orinleah’s soul safe in Your care for all eternity. Bless us all. Amen… Now say ‘amen.’”

  Dorhen parroted the word.

  “There. Now how do you feel?”

  With his head still bowed, he looked at her and smiled. “Good.”

  “It’s a start, but we have a lot of work to do. When I met you, you had committed a sin. The sin follows you, but you’ll release it by confessing. You should establish a regimen of regular confession and keep it for the rest of your life.”

  “What if I don’t do anything else wrong?”

  “Oh, you will. We all do, so get used to it.” She cleared her throat. “You said you ‘walked in a cloud’ and you’ve experienced dark dreams.”

  “Yes.”

  “These are symptoms of a heavy heart. Or perhaps an empty heart. People who don’t have the One Creator to fill their hearts have empty holes in their hearts.”

  Dorhen glanced down at his chest.

  “It even appeared as a literal symbol in your nightmare, so this must be the case. But your condition is easy to fix. We’ll do your first confession. Normally, we have private booths and a priest to hear our confession, but right now we don’t have such luxury. I’ll have to fill in as your confessor.”

  She stood and went over to sit on the nearest large rock at the edge of the water. “Kneel before me.” He did so. “Turn your face that way and I’ll look this way. We don’t make eye contact.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now say, ‘May the One Creator forgive me because I have sinned.’”

  “May the One Creator forgive me because I’ve sinned.”

  “Good. Now you can tell me what you did wrong recently. The day you stole at the market is an easy one.”

  “Okay. Well. Several days ago, I got so hungry I went to the market and I stole a fistful of peas against Arius Medallus’s order, but I didn’t get to eat them—”

  Kalea cleared her throat loudly. “Now stop. And now I say, ‘One Creator bless you. Your confession has been heard and you are forgiven.’ Now you must say…um, ten Sovereign Creators.”

  “What’re those?”

  She regarded him as he stared across the stream. “You can look at me now. It’s a recited prayer. Since I assigned ten of them to you, you go away and say the prayer ten times in private. It’s a penance, which is a punishment. After you say them, you’ll be absolved. You should feel better too.”

  “I don’t know the words.”

  Kalea stood and stretched her back. “Not a problem, I’ll write them for you.” She picked up the straightest pine twig she could find, cleared a spot in the red pine blanket, and wrote the first word.

  “I can’t read that.”

  “Oh, sorry. I’ll be clearer.”

  “No, I mean I can’t read.” He was standing now, his face bland.

  What’ll I do with him? Bringing Dorhen to the One Creator will be harder than I thought. We have a lot of work to do.

  “Understandable. You have been living in the forest with a fairy, after all. I can teach you.”

  “You mean it?” All of his front teeth showed in the wide smile spreading across his face. All of them were perfect except for one long, pointy one on the side, grown beyond its twin on the other side. His face was adorable when he smiled.

  “Yes, I meant it. Come closer.”

  He practically leapt to her side to see the bald patch of earth she’d made for writing. She drew the first alphabetical symbol. “This is an A. It makes the ‘ah’ sound…”

  She rushed through the alphabet with Dorhen, and then rushed through the rest of her laundry. “Try to remember any symbol you can. We’ll go over them again tomorrow,” she told him before she sprinted away with her basket of wet linens.

  In the courtyard, she released yesterday’s hanging laundry to clear space for the new wet load. Sister Scupley stomped through the door.

  “There you are! We were going to send someone out for you again. We insisted you not go to the stream today.”

  Kalea stepped away from the soggy hanging linen and curtsied. “I’m sorry, Sister. There were some stubborn stains on the linens. I’m fine now, though. Please don’t worry about me anymore. I didn’t get woozy at all today.”

  “Well, good. Hurry and finish here. Father Superior needs a new set of linens for his room.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  After hanging the second-to-the-last garment, she lifted the remaining one out. A white object dropped out of its folds and clacked at the basket’s bottom. “Hmm?”

  A jagged white ring glowed in the shaded wicker space. She lifted it out and inspected it on her open palm. A string of pearly seashells—a bracelet. The novices couldn’t have jewelry in the convent; she would know if it belonged to any of the others. They certainly wouldn’t have let it fall into the laundry basket.

  Dorhen. Jitters returned to her core. A brief, skeptical laugh burst from her throat. Surely not… He did. He dropped this in the basket for me to find!

  Unable to contain her smile, she shoved it over her hand and turned her wrist around to see it twinkle in the sun. She would have to hide it. Jewelry was prohibited here. Vestals were supposed to practice modesty and poverty. Once upon a time—as in five minutes ago—she had agreed with that virtue. Now, something about it, a gift from an elf…or a boy at least, made her heart fly.

  Dorhen.

  Leaving it on her wrist, she untied her chemise sleeves, which were gathered up around her upper arms, and pulled them down into their long and straight positions.

  She dropped off her hastily folded sheets and visited Father Superior’s chamber last. The office with the red door sunken into the floor also serv
ed as his bedchamber.

  Her knuckles stopped an inch before hitting the painted wood. A guest was with him. It wasn’t Father Liam’s voice.

  Father Superior said in soft, muffled tones, “We’ll have to rotate personnel, so please, could you give us a few days?”

  “However you want to do it.”

  “They’ll be well taken care of, you say?”

  “Of course. The famine won’t reach our region. We get more than enough rain for our crops, and our resources are numerous.”

  Though they murmured to each other, their voices echoed loud enough through the key hole. She tried to peek through it. A hand rested on Father Superior’s little tea table in the faint glow through the window.

  “They’ll have a bit of a shock at such an abrupt change, I hope you know, due to being placed into a non-religious institution.”

  The hand’s fingers drummed on the table. “Father, you misunderstood me. Our institution is very religious.”

  “Excellent. We’re settled then. I’ll get back to you on the day. But when you come, be quick. It’s the green door in the west building. It’ll be locked, but please be as quick as you can.”

  Green door? The novice’s dorm?

  “Have some more tea, Mr.…”

  “Tal. Mr. Tal.”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Tal.” The sound of tea trickled. “H-h-how much can you—”

  Father Superior’s guest hissed through his teeth. “Oh, dear. This is awkward.”

  “What is, Mr. Tal?”

  “You’re asking for an expensive movement here, which will require two castings. It’s such a long distance. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for some gold, however much you can spare.”

  Father Superior cleared his throat. “As long as this alleviates some of the mouths to be fed in this establishment, it’ll be worth it.” Coins jingled. “I have thirty on me now.”

  “I’ll take them.” The coins chimed again with a snap as a hand snatched the whole purse. “Though I’m afraid I’ve no time for another cup of tea. Thank you for your time, Father.”

  “And you, Mr. Tal.”

  Chairs scooted on the tile floor, and Kalea scrambled away from the door and hid around the corner. She waited. And waited. The red door never opened.

  At the supper table, Kalea couldn’t eat. Vivene shot sly glances at her and smiled, always on the edge of bursting into a laugh. Nothing was funny, especially not the secret Vivene now knew. She could easily be the one to get Kalea into deep trouble if she carried on with her nosiness.