The…love manual? Vivene.
“Wait,” Kalea whispered into his hair as steam drifted off their bodies. He didn’t respond; he was losing himself. “But I’m a…vestal candidate.”
They’d stripped to their smallclothes, he in his undershirt and she in her chemise. The forest setting around them danced into a blur. She pushed back on his shoulders before he could take them into the next phase—that daunting phase she’d always wondered about but never imagined she’d experience. She still hadn’t. A headache developed, and she groaned.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“This isn’t real.” She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know what this is…”
When she opened her eyes again, the trees morphed into lampstands like the ones in town, and the ground became a marble floor like in her convent’s sanctum. Some of the spaces between the trees became stained glass windows.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
Dorhen sat back on his knees, watching her with concern on his face. Steam rose off his skin to mingle with the cool air. His hair hung in damp clumps, the ragged tips brushing his collarbone. The morphing scenery caught his attention too.
She rubbed her face again and…
She woke up in another sweat, back in her bed in the dorm. Dorhen had vanished. That dream again. Every time those dreams took place, she couldn’t tell it was illusion. She felt every fingertip he traced across her skin. Even in the waking world, the hot, residual fingerprints stamped her body. The effect was stronger this time: her body ached and her heart pounded. The dream always ended before they could complete the sexual process.
Her eyes widened, staring at the ceiling rafters. Dust glittered in the sunbeams through the windows. Those dreams were too real. Proof of their realness pulsed physically through her. What was happening to her? Whatever it was, it wasn’t supposed to be happening.
Within hours, she stood down the hall from the confession booths. Her feet had stopped.
I have to do it! Her foot refused to make another step. Demons. Demons must be holding her feet, preventing them from moving forward. If she couldn’t confess, she might go to hell for her unclean thoughts. Even now, awake, when she thought of Dorhen, her heart pounded. To touch him again…his hair…his face.
She clenched her fists. I’ll never be a vestal if I can’t get past this illness! Maybe he really had cast magic on her. What if he carried a contagious disease? He was plagued with unclean thoughts, and now he had passed them to her. She’d never imagined how difficult this condition would be. All her life, she had followed the rules laid before her: keeping faithful, vigilant, and constitutional. Vestals were bid to think of the Creator as soon as they woke up and last before falling asleep.
Now, one particular incident had occurred, and her long-refined discipline failed. All of a sudden, keeping to pure thoughts proved difficult. Dorhen had moved into her mind, made himself her last thought, frolicked with her imagination all night long, and managed to push himself past the Creator in her thoughts upon waking.
A sob squeezed up her throat and the tears started. She leaned her forehead against the wall and cried.
She never made it to the confession booth; instead, she rushed to the sanctum before Father Liam’s weekly sermon. His words drifted through her head as weightless and temporary as a firefly’s glow. As soon as every syllable ended, she forgot what he’d said until the sermon’s end.
“I have an announcement to make,” Father Liam said after the proper length of pause following the sermon’s end. “What I am about to tell you… Don’t be alarmed by it. Some changes are underway.”
Separated into their grouped pews, the novices and vestals all murmured until Father Liam raised his hand.
“Changes are not a bad thing,” he said. “They can be a blessing. As you have seen in your own food portions and possibly around town, a famine is about to happen. As it has always done, the Kingdom of Sharr, its people, and we the Sanctified will carry on with strength and dignity.
“Sometimes the One Creator tests us. He uses us to help people in need. He is filled with pride and joy when He sees how well we come out on the other end of our trials. Some people don’t survive, and for those people…the Creator welcomes them with open arms, a feast, music, dancing, and a love we could never ever possibly imagine—until we experience it, of course. We must pray for the dying, that they may be prepared to go to Him.”
Kalea’s mouth hung open as she listened. Her consciousness did not miss any of these words. Would he talk about what she already heard through Father Superior’s door?
He continued, “I thank you, vestals, priests, and novices, for your patience and understanding. The Sanctity of Creation…does what it can, and you all will find that some extra duties will befall you. In the meantime, as I said, a few changes will happen. The bishop is rearranging staff again. And this convent, as it struggles financially, will experience some drastic changes.” Father Liam lowered his head and raised it again, his face straight. Not the hint of a blush or the twitch of an eyebrow could mar his serious expression whenever he meant to keep calm. “Some of the novices are being rotated to other places.”
The whole novice section roared with a loud flutter of whispering, hand gestures, and girls moving to their seats’ edges.
Father Liam raised his hands. “Be calm. You’ll all be fine. A visitor from the bishop came to Father Superior the other day. It will be a change, but it’s all right.”
The girls settled down. Kalea’s heart raced. Though she’d heard the news from the earliest rooster, it was all too sudden. In her years living in the convent, she’d always known she’d stay here. Never had word passed around of the vestals or novices being rotated. The personnel, yes, but the actual residents, no! But it was like Father Liam said, they were moving into hard times. His sermons were often riddled with references to people from long ago enduring trials and suffering. The thought of her going through a similar time felt too real.
“If you are scared or concerned, as always, you should pray. Pray often. Sometimes prayer is all we have. You are dismissed.”
As the mass of people rose from their seats, mingled a bit, and eventually drifted out of the sanctum, Father Liam took a seat next to Kalea on the pew.
“Your face was so vacant today, Kalea. Is everything all right?”
“Oh, hello, Father,” she said, perking up. She’d barely even registered his presence. “Yes, it’s fine.”
“Are you worried?”
“A little, I must admit. Father, what about our parents? Were they informed?”
He leaned forward and laced his fingers together. “The novices will write letters to their parents, I’m sure. As of yet, the vestals aren’t going anywhere.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
A smile crooked his mouth. “I have some pretty wonderful news, if you’d like to hear it.”
She gave him the best smile she could. “Yes, I would. What’s—what’s the news?”
“Well, you’ve impressed me and the superioress these last few years. You’re a model novice, hardworking and faithful. We did a lot of talking, and with your upcoming twentieth birthday, we’ve written all the documents to expedite you to the promotion of full Sister of Sorrow.”
Kalea huffed and waved her hands. “I don’t believe it.” She almost threw her arms around him, but instead did the more proper gesture of grabbing his hand and squeezing it. “Thank you, Father!”
He chuckled. “I thought you might be pleased. We’re making preparations, and your vow ceremony will take place on your birthday. Congratulation on your marriage to the One Creator.” He took her hand again.
“Thank you.” She slipped her handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped the moisture gathering at her eyes. Its fabric still displayed a faint stain on its corner: Dorhen’s blood.
“Are those tears of joy, or are you bothered today?”
“Father… Um, what do you know about elves? Are th
ey wicked?”
“You’re worried about the elf you saved last week?” He chuckled again when her face pinched with emotion. “First of all, stop worrying about him. You’ve been forgiven regardless of the elf’s morals and intentions. And to answer your question…” He closed his mouth and studied her. “You know something?”
“Hmm?”
“Long before you were born, when I was young but old enough to have been placed in my own parish, the town guard caught some elves, comparable to the incident you witnessed and disrupted. Except these elves weren’t stealing, they were travelers passing through. Two males, a female, and two children.”
“They were innocent, and yet they got arrested?”
Father Liam bowed his head. “Attitudes were and are bad, aren’t they? Anyway, the female was married to one of the males, I believe, but I didn’t know if she had any relation of any sort to the other. A struggle broke out, much like you saw, and the husband took a fatal injury. He lay dead by the end of the havoc.”
Kalea’s eyes burned and she sniffled.
“The other…saehgahn, they call themselves, was bound in ropes while the female and her children complied with being led into the courthouse, where they were locked behind the wooden defendant’s grate. They took the remaining male into the stronger, more unpleasant jail under the guardhouse. Curiosity overtook me, but I also considered it my duty as the Creator’s servant to investigate these foreigners for myself.”
“And what were they…?”
“Well, the male in his damp dungeon cell might as well have been a wild animal. None of us could interpret his language, which hardly mattered because he’d gone mad. He raved and slammed himself against the bars until long bruise lines appeared on his arms and shoulders. The guards gave up on communication and got to teasing and laughing at him instead. By the time I arrived, I couldn’t calm him enough to try to make sense of his language.”
“How did they treat the female and children?”
“They were in a warmer atmosphere, and they were fed well. She did her best to answer our questions, though we didn’t have any resources to decode her language beyond an old Lehomis book the local sheriff owned. I convinced the manor lord to send a message to Norr about the elves.
“While we waited, I visited the female and her children daily. The two children were boys, all smiley and curious, both under the age of nine. The younger one couldn’t have been older than four. We grasped hands through the wooden bars. I brought carved wooden horses for them to play with. Their mother smiled at our interactions. She always sat several feet to the back, on her knees—an astounding display of discipline I’d never seen from a prisoner before.
“My visitations grew longer. I pointed to the little horses and said the word ‘horse.’ The children repeated it and memorized it. They promptly pointed to other objects and demanded more words, and I gave them.
“I brought the Creator’s Word and read passages to them the next day. They listened and loved it, and surprised me by reciting some passages back to me from memory.
“And then one day, a miraculous thing happened.”
“What?” Kalea asked. She hung on his every word, temporarily forgetting about her worries.
“The mother spoke to me in Lightlandic.”
“How long had she…?”
“About a month, they’d spent locked up. But she could speak well enough. Brokenly, but I understood her. And her children spoke Lightlandic too.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked about the surviving saehgahn. I chose the simplest words I could, explaining his condition and his non-compliance. She asked for him to be placed in the same cage as she. I asked why, and then she reached her hand through the bars.
“Feeling a little too enamored for my profession, I took her hand eagerly. She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen… She said ‘please.’ What could I do? I knew they’d never put that wild animal in such a low security cage as hers. I convinced the guard to put her and the children into the damp, dark cell with the saehgahn.”
His eyes perused the sanctum as he shook his head. “When she descended those steps and into his sight, he went into another rage. She broke away from the guard and ran to the cell, spouting fast Elvish words to the male. They couldn’t get the door open fast enough.
“She soothed the male, cooing soft foreign words and stroking his matted hair. He checked her face for any sign of abuse. She showed him only serenity.
“He checked the children next and ordered them all to sit at certain spots within the cell. They obeyed him. The children took their ordered places and sat quietly while fiddling with their little toy horses, and the male planted himself at the front of the cell, now sitting stern and disciplined like the female.
“Let me remind you, he wasn’t their husband and father. He had been their neighbor back in their village, the female told us. But because he was male and she female, he took responsibility for their safety.”
“Did they get to go home together?”
“They did. All thanks to the clever female, who managed to keep the peace and translate the male’s speech, things went more smoothly. In an orderly fashion, they boarded the caged wagon and were ransomed back to their country when the time came.”
Kalea waited a moment to let the story sink in. “Your story was…kind of romantic.”
“I thought so too.”
“So basically, you’re telling me…”
“What I’ve learned from the story is that elves are extremely smart and deeply passionate in their relationships with each other and in their approach to duty. To answer your question, I don’t think elves are wicked. I think they’re quite honorable. But I also think they are and will be misunderstood. Their customs are a world different from ours; in fact, they’re a whole different species.”
Father Liam’s story replayed in her head all the long day as Kalea went about her routine. Even though Father Liam didn’t know her real problem, his story at least soothed her mind a bit so she could function, focusing on something besides Dorhen and her sisters’ impending departure.
During one of the prayer hours, she begged the Creator to alleviate her illness and to detach whatever demons had grabbed onto her body to manipulate it. She also asked Him to wipe thoughts of Dorhen from her mind and help her return to thinking about Him instead. Eventually, she’d try to make her way back to the confession booth and rid herself of her unclean thoughts for good. A lot of prayer and contemplation awaited her with her destiny now laid out. She’d take her vows and become a full vestal in merely a week.
For the rest of the day, she avoided going outside.
The next day, Sunday, the young choir group gathered to sing praises to the Creator by evening candlelight. All day, she avoided going outside, instead finding lots of chores to busy herself with inside. She hadn’t seen Dorhen since the day he’d stripped naked in front of her, and she’d been practicing a new discipline: whenever the image of his warm body and pleading eyes emerged from the shadows of her consciousness, she recited a short practiced prayer and forced thoughts of Dorhen away in favor of the image of her favorite stained glass window, the one showing the Creator standing on the mountain as light itself. The trick worked, so she could finally relax and focus on her chores. Keeping Dorhen out of her dreams had turned into another problem.
Hundreds of candles illuminated the sanctum in the evening hour, and the pews were filled with the rest of the convent’s residents, the full vestals, as well as the townspeople who’d come to worship and hear the expert harmony of the young girls’ voices.
Kalea swept her eyes across the crowd. She couldn’t spot Kemp, thank the Creator. His absence made it easy to relax and enjoy the music.
Though far from being the best singer, Kalea enjoyed this activity more than most others. When she sang, she often felt the ecstatic presence of the Creator join her side. Tonight, they wore their fine silken choir robes with swirling stylized vin
es to form the Creator’s flower. Their voices rose and fell like waves. Deeper-voiced girls hummed like the Creator’s earth, and higher-voiced girls soared and frolicked like plants and animals over the earth’s crust. Kalea hit her high notes perfectly tonight. Her head went light with pleasure, never mind her empty stomach after giving away her breakfast and supper again today.
“Glor-rious! Glor-rious!” She croaked on the end of the second word when she saw a person moving about the room behind the audience. Dorhen! He’d gotten in somehow; perhaps he’d merged with the flow of the incoming crowd. And now he’d taken his hood off and traversed the shadowy gallery to the side of the audience. He stopped and leaned against one of the columns supporting the gallery arches, watching her, his mouth partly open.
“Ahhh—ah, ah, ah, ohhhh,” she sang her next part.
Dorhen’s eyes lingered, unblinking. When he did blink, he did so slowly. He must’ve been listening for her voice, picking it out from the rest of the singers. He listened for a long time, leaning his head against the column, often closing his eyes.
When the song ended, he slipped through the doorway leading to the kitchen wing. The choir finished their last song, dispersed, and took seats in their pew section to listen to Father Liam’s evening sermon.
Before everyone was seated, Kalea snatched a candle off one of the side tables and slipped through that door herself. No telling where Dorhen had gone. Her feet tapped loudly on the slate floor of the dark kitchen. The door to the cellar stood open a crack. She might’ve missed it if her pace were any more brisk.
She stepped down the small set of steps to the sunken door and went through, closing it behind her. The cellar opened its black atmosphere around her candle.
“Dorhen,” she said in a hard voice.
“Yes.”
She went around the corner and found a blue glow, like the one he had flashed the first night he chased her through the woods. His necklace, which he’d taken off and hung on a hook on the wall, supplied the glow. She moved forward until her warm candlelight mingled with his cool blue light.
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