Merlin's Booke Read Free Page B

Blaise’s brow with water and smoothed down the brychan around his legs until Geoffrey was ready again.
    â€œâ€˜I do not understand, Ellsie,’ I said to her, in my anger returning to her childhood name.
    â€œâ€˜I do not understand either, Father Blaise,’ she answered, her voice not quite breaking. ‘When I awoke I was in the room still surrounded by my sisters, all of whom slept as soundly as before. And that was how I knew it had been but a dream. On my faith in God, more than this there was never between a man and myself.’ She stopped and then added as if the admission proved her innocence, ‘I have dreamed of him every night since but he has not again touched me. He just stands at my bed foot and watches.’
    â€œI put my hands behind me and clasped them to keep them from shaking. ‘This sort of thing I have heard of, mother. The girl is blameless. She has been set upon by an incubus, the devil who comes in dreams to seduce the innocent.’
    â€œâ€˜Well, she carries the other marks she spoke of,’ said Mother Agnes. ‘The burns on her cheeks you can see for yourself. I will vouch for the rest.’ She draped the cloak again over the girl’s shoulders almost tenderly, then turned to glare at me. ‘An incubus—not a human—you are sure?’
    â€œâ€˜I am sure,’ I said, though I was not sure at all. Ellyne had been headstrong about certain things, though how a young man might have trysted with her with Mother Agnes as her abbess, I could not imagine. ‘But in her condition she cannot remain in the convent. Leave her here in your parlor, and I will go at once and speak to the king.’”
    Blaise’s last word faded and he closed his eyes. The abbot leaned over and, dipping his finger into the oil, made the sign of the cross on Blaise’s forehead. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti, exstinguatur in te omnis virtus diaboli per…”
    Opening his eyes, Blaise cried out, “I am not done. I swear to you I will not the before I have told it all.”
    â€œThen be done with it,” said the abbot. He said it quickly but gently.
    â€œSpeaking to the king was easy. Speaking to his shrewish wife was not. She screamed and blamed me for letting the girl go into the convent, and her husband for permitting Ellyne to stay. She ranted against men and devils indiscriminately. But when I suggested it would be best for Ellyne to return to the palace, the queen refused, declaring her dead.
    â€œAnd so it was that I fostered her to a couple in Carmarthen who were known to me as a closemouthed, devoted, and childless pair. They were of yeoman stock, but as Ellyne had spent the last ten years of her life on the bread, cheese, and prayers of a convent, she would not find their simple farm life a burden. And the farm ran on its own canonical hours: cock’s crow, feed time, milking.
    â€œSo for the last months of her strange pregnancy, she was—if not exactly happy—at least content. Whether she still dreamed of the devil clothed in sunlight, she did not say. She worked alongside the couple and they loved her as their own.”
    Blaise struggled to sit upright in bed.
    â€œDo not fuss,” the abbot said. “Geoffrey and I will help you.” He signaled to the infirmarer who stood, quickly blotting the smudges on his hands along the edges of his robe. Together they helped settle Blaise into a more comfortable position.
    â€œI am fine now,” he said. Then, when Geoffrey was once more standing at the desk, Blaise began again. “In the ninth month, for the first time, Ellyne became afraid.
    â€œâ€˜Father,’ she questioned me day after day, ‘will the child be human? Will it have a heart? Will it bear a soul?’
    â€œAnd to keep her from sorrow before time, I answered as deviously as I could without actually telling a lie. ‘What else should it be but