I
PENITENTS
1
NOW: CONTRABAND
It was the reappearance of my favorite book that saved me. It was taken from me, and then it was returned. But before it was returned, I lost hope. I had finally caved to a lifetime of pursuit, of being the skittish deer darting between trees, the hunter’s horse on my heels. I had felt the arrow strike me in the neck and take me down. When they came for the books, they came for all that I believed in. It was a death.
But I would have that book again.
They came to my house on the day before my fortieth day of birth, and they came for the books. Every book I had bought for myself, inherited from my teacher, or—and these were the ones I believe offended them most—held safe for someone else. Every citizen of this settlement knew if you had a book to hide, Robbie Finch would keep it for you. For the longest time, my having been the accused witch on the edge of the woods kept the priest and the lord’s guard from invading my farmhouse. Our property was on the border of Tintar’s sacred Nyossa, a pagan forest condemned by our church. It frightened most folk of Sheridan to venture there and sothey may have loathed us, but they left us alone as long as we attended tenth-day church services and kept our heads down.
Father Starling, the priest, had long observed the strange girl that had been apprenticed to a Tintarian hag, that old midwife who did other unlawful things for women. I was now the strange widow with a household of strange women, two alive but listed as dead and a teenage girl who did not speak. Starling had his eye on me since I was a child. I had been a willful girl, publicly punished with frequency, clutching my book about a foreign, heathen princess to my chest in secret. When I was nineteen, he had been cheated out of the chance to kill me. Over and over I had evaded him. He had never caught me once during winters of me creeping down alleyways with medicinals meant to keep a woman from falling pregnant. When my own stealth had not protected me, my loose family ties to Lord Sheridan had always gotten in the way of the priest’s campaign.
Starling had bided his time.
It was a bright day. I was in town visiting my sister’s widow, Tessa, the woman my sister had given her heart to even though by law she was still wed to Thane, Lord Sheridan’s younger son. After her death, Thane—ever traveling for work—had left his house and its apothecary quarters in the front to Tessa for her and his daughter Adelaide to live in, offering them the support and protection of a prominent member of our settlement. And even after Adelaide had married and left for Perpatane, our benefactor country to the west, Tessa still lived in his house.
I was Thane’s wayward sister-in-law, unpresentable and unfit to be so closely related, hair loose and often with a twig in it. But by extension, Thane also protected me and my household when he could. Perhaps I had grown too comfortable in this. Maybe that was why I sang an old song my sister and I had made up about church, swinging my basket allegedly full of bread recently traded in exchange for jars of fragrant oils I had pressed especially for Tessa’s candle-making. I grinned at the book sitting on the windowsill at the end of the street. Reaching under the bread, I fished out another book,then set it on that windowsill and retrieved the one the owner of the home had set out.
Under my breath, I was singing, “Ten days in a week, three weeks in a moon, only church once a week, it’ll be over soon.”
I caught a glimpse of her in the house, Kate, the wheelwright’s wife. Her man was an employee of Thane’s wagon transport business. Was she too comfortable that day also? She too was smiling, eyes not on me but on the new offering sitting on her windowsill. Women had been forbidden to read anything but scripture in Sheridan since I was little. But forbidden things would always flourish in some way.Iwas the way that books were still read by women in the low country. For that reason, I was proud. Maybe it was pride that took me down. Whether it was pride or comfort, either fit; the two things were both found sinful by our church.
I was still singing when I was caught. “Three moons in a season, four seasons in a winter, only six and thirty sermons sitting on the pew’s splinter.”
“Oh, madam,” came the priest’s voice, echoing down the stone alleyway. “I have longed for this day. For ages.”
I whirled, jostling the bread and the books in my basket.
The snick of the wheelwright’s window shutting was incredibly loud.
Father Starling stood two house lengths away, a look of rapture on his elegant features. He wore his regular gray tunic belted over trousers, his only adornment a brooch with the Perpatanian crest. In his late fifties, he was still handsome, imposing, and fit.
I had always thought someone of his physicality should have been a soldier, not a cleric. But I was reminded every time of his true prowess when he spoke. His voice was always warm, nearly enchanting. It was so inviting that by the time his sermons ended with the damnation of all immortal souls, those souls felt inclined to thank him for the warning.
“Roberta Finch, I have many questions for you,” he said during his approach down the alleyway towards me. “What is it that bringsyou into town today? The murder of a child? The scattering of talismans? The dispersing of something named on the list of offenses? Shall I get you a fresh booklet of them?”
“Father,” I said and gulped, angling my arm away from him to hold the basket behind me.
He paused just before me. “There is no need to hide your contraband. You have been found out. I would suggest you make things easy and come to the church with me. Turn yourself in. I will take your confession there.”
“Turn myself in for what?” I asked.
Starling nodded. “You cannot even admit to your sins. I forget you are afflicted with your language of lies. Your tongue is not the tongue of soundness.”
I bit back my retort that in scriptures, “the tongue of soundness” always seemed to mean a man was speaking.
He went on. “Last winter someone claimed to see you—” He cut himself off and seemed to wince, as if what he was about to say gave him qualms. But as practiced as he was, he could not disguise his delight. “Someone claimed to see you letting one of Lord Thane’s drivers swive you in the stables of The Pale Horse. Really, Madam Finch. Have you no respect for your dead husband?”
To avoid spitting in his face at the mention of my Avery, I asked, “And, Father, why weren’t you able to make that accusation stick?”
The priest grimaced. “I think you know why.”
“No. Tell me, Father.” I made my tone light, smothering a swell of panic, my mind awhirl with all I would need to do, all I would need to hide.
“Too long has the lord’s son, Thane, your brother-in-law, protected you,” Father Starling sneered. “And now that his dear wife, your sister, is departed, and now that their daughter, your niece, has secured a good marriage, he turns his eyes back to you. Or perhaps he always has. For too long, there has been an affection between the Sheridan family and your own. Even before my time as priest. But itcomes to its end now. You are the only one of your family who still lives.”
