Essalieyan Chronicles 04 - The Weapon Read Free

her words.
“We have been ordered to protect her,” the Mother’s Daughter said carefully. “We serve the Mother,” was the perfectly reasonable reply.
The child stirred. Emily began to shift her weight from side to side, her arms around the child. The warm child. She, Mother’s Daughter, would bear none. Had never thought—until this moment—that she might find solace in the act.
“We have no experience in raising children,” Iain told them all. But his eyes were now upon
     
Melanna. “The Mother has not seen fit to grace us—”
     
“No,” Melanna said. “I will not do this.” She turned from them and strode out of the small common room, her hands in tight fists.
Iain watched her go. “Mother’s Daughter, is this wise?”
     
“Wise? No.” Her arms tightened briefly. “It is not wise. But less wise is refusing the Baron’s request. Inasmuch as he can be, he is fond of this child. I believe…he was fond of her mother.”
Amalyn snorted, and Emily frowned. “She is but three years old. If she is her father’s daughter, she is also her mother’s. We cannot judge her. And she is no son; she is merely a daughter, and without value.”
“He has shown himself to be without mercy when the children of others are involved.” She knew. She remembered. “And will we show ourselves to be, at last, a church made in
his image? The Mother will turn her face from us, and without her blessing, without her power, what then can we offer the people?”
“Justice.”
     
“We are not the followers of Justice,” the Mother’s Daughter said firmly. “Nor of
     
Judgment.”
     
“Melanna will not accept her.”
     

Mother for ten years. Perhaps this is her test.”
     
     
    * * *
     
     
But she had not been truthful with her priests, and this was its own crime. She took the girl to her room and laid her in the small bed, staring at her perfect child’s features, at a face which would change, again and again, with the passage of time. Would she be beautiful? It was impossible to tell.
She had prayed for a child. But not this one.
     
What will we do with you, Veralaan? What will you become to us? She understood
     
Melanna’s desire. She felt no like desire; death was not her dominion.
     
But she had in her hands a child born to power, a child born with the blood of Barons in her veins. It was true that the Mother’s Daughter had never become involved in the politics of court
—why would she? Between one contender and the other, there was only the difference of competence; there was no difference of desire or ambition, no intent to change, merely to own. What matter, then, whose hand raised sword, lowered whip, signed law?
But here: here was temptation.
     
It was not only Melanna who was to be tested, but also Emily Dontal, the child who had become woman in the streets of the city, on the day that Lord Halloran had become Lord Breton, Baron of the Eastern Sea.
A child was unformed, uneducated. A clean slate.
     
And upon such a slate as this, so much could be written. She had not told her most trusted servants the words of the Witherall Seer.
Mother , she thought. Guide me . And she lowered her face into shaking hands, because it wasn’t a prayer for advice; it was a prayer for absolution.
* * *
     
The child would not eat for three days. She would drink milk and water, and Iain informed the Mother’s Daughter, with increasing anxiety, that he was certain she shed them both with the volume of her tears. Those tears had ceased to accompany loud wails, desperate flights toward the door; they became, instead, the silent companions of despair. She did not like the robed men and women who ruled the temple; she did not acknowledge the men and women who labored in the Novitiate. She was not allowed to sit when the congregation gathered, but Iain was certain she would take no comfort from the hundreds of strangers who made a brief home of the pews
     

either.
     
In the end, it was Melanna who took the girl in