“Always talking to your false gods,” he said. “Every time I see you,I swear you are talking aloud to them. It is a pity, then, they cannot hear you.”
“Isn’t burning my books enough?” I inquired as if I asked after his health.
“I defended you, you know,” he said, coming to stand in front of me.
There was a tent on either side of me, and I would have to push past him to keep walking. “Father,” I began, but he cut me off.
“I defended you when guards at the keep said you were keeping company with men not your husband, practically dancing on his grave.”
The fear in me dissipated and I felt my old friend, rage, take hold.
“I said,” Starling went on, “she is surely guilty of spell craft, surely guilty of worshipping false gods and killing babes while they are still in the womb, but can one woman really commit that many sins? Can she also couple outside a marriage bed? See, this is why I am always learning. Even I, a studied and ordained scholar of the scriptures. Even I forget the magnitude of women and what they can do.”
I looked beyond him and pretended at nonchalance.
“Do you remember what I said to you the night that your teacher finally paid for her crimes? The night I tried, one last time, to save her soul?”
Over his shoulder, I could see the spread of the dust road disappearing into the distance. A bird arced in the sky over the horizon. I watched it float and wheel in a circle. I realized it was a vulture, that it looked for carrion.
“One day,” the priest was saying. “Do you remember? I told you ‘one day,’ and that I would make that one day the cause of my life.”
“Say what you want to say and be done with it,” I spat out.
“Oh I say what I have always said, my child. I’ll say what I said to your dearly departed parents nearly thirty winters ago. ‘We must keep an eye on Roberta,’ I said. Do you remember?”
I realized he was waiting for me to reply, and I gave a curt nod.
“I also told them how unrest is a common sin in girls. It seems you never dealt with your unrest, did you? A shame your soul should burn. And you may think me your enemy that I delight at that knowledge, but it truly pains me.”
I blinked away the memories his words conjured and swallowed the rise at the back of my throat when he continued in his reminiscing, saying the words that had haunted me then and still did now.
“A rebellious girl. Full of questions.”
II
FATES
16
THEN: TIBOLT
The town of Sheridan was like many in the settlements and territories of the known world, a lord’s keep and sharecropping lands abutting a bustling township. Thousands of winters prior, it was somehow decided that the family Sheridan was the most noble, and the then patriarch became the lord of this portion of what many folk called “the low country.” Our township was on the Tintarian border, more southern than northern, a short ride from the magic of the Nyossa forest.
My twin sister and I were born on a humid day in late spring, both small and screaming. Our father, the miller, was disappointed at us both being girls. Our mother, a pretty, pleasant woman, was half alive after the birth. The midwife advised she not try again for a babe.
In our early days, I do not think there was much suffering. Rowena was an hour younger, cheerful, and delighted by everything. Even as a little girl, I knew the house was dictated by my father’s moods, and I pretended to be as delighted as Rowena even if I was not. This proved helpful to me as my father was caught up in the clutches of a faith that justified all of his rages.
Many winters before our birth, Perpatane, the great, icy countryto the west and north of us, propped up on its gold mines and its stark religion, had paid in gold, a rare coinage outside of that country, to have a church of their faith built in the town. The lord at the time, having no faith of his own and not having a care what his people believed in, happily accepted the gold. Perpatane installed in the church a nasty old priest by the name of Father Kenneth, the third or fourth son of a Perpatanian peerage family. Perhaps he was bitter about his lot in life, for he was a mean man. He preached the teachings of Saint Rodwin, which could easily be summarized as women being the origin of all sin and men being the cure to their disease.
Father Kenneth died before Rowena or I could remember very much about him and was replaced by a fat, generous man named Tibolt, who insisted on being called Brother and not Father.
“Please,” he would say. “Father makes me feel old. And I have been a brother for winters! Brother Tibolt works just as well if not better, child!”
He was a drastic change from his predecessor. Perpatane had monasteries, where only the most devoted Rodwin men lived, celibate and dedicated to study. Tibolt had been sent to us as a kind of missionary late in his life, his first priesthood assignment.
“I am sixty winters! And I have not left the library since I was ten! The High Conclave said every monk must take up one mission in his life. Here I be.”
The austerity of Father Kenneth receded somewhat. The crueler practices of Rodwin were set aside.
