I do not know what I expected: perhaps a priest in a belted robe or a green-cloaked scholar with the smug air of Olondrian medical men. Certainly not this tall woman in a dark dress, her delicate features lit from below by a lamp in a globe of frosted glass.
“Are you the petitioner?” she asked.
“Teldarin,” I answered, “I am a stranger.”
She gazed at me closely. “But you have come to see my father.”
“Is he the Priest of the Stone?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am—I think—he is to examine me.” I paused, unable to trust my voice.
“Welcome,” she said. She balanced the light on one hand and held out the other; I clasped her fingers warmed by the lamp like heated wax. “My name is Tialon,” she said. “My father is the Priest of the Stone. He’s waiting for you; we received the letter yesterday.”
“The letter.”
“Yes. From someone called Yedov. You were staying with him, I think.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, compassion softening her gaze.
I laughed: a short, hard sound.
“Your name?”
“Jevick of Tyom.”
“Jevick. Come with me. He’s waiting for you in his study.”
I followed her. She was taller than I, and her curls were cropped short, as if she had been ill. There was nothing elegant in her cloth slippers, her plain wool dress; had she not introduced herself as the daughter of a priest, I would have taken her for some sort of superior servant. Yet she had a certain distinction, an air not of loneliness but of self-sufficiency. In the next room, where gray light filled the windows that dripped with returning rain, I saw that she was older than I had thought, perhaps thirty years old. Her left temple was tattooed with the third letter, against insomnia.
“Father,” she said.
I did not see him at first; the room was crowded with desks, each covered by a landslide of books and papers. I only noticed him when he cleared his throat: a bent old man in a black robe, seated by the fire on a high-backed chair.
The knob of his head gleamed in the grainy light as he gazed at me. At the sight of his carven features my heart gave a throb of hope: he had the same arrogant, solitary look as the doctors of my own country, men who cured illnesses of the spirit, men who banished ghosts. Ivrom, Second Priest of the Stone—a holy man. “Greetings, veimaro,” I said. “My name—”
I stopped, taken aback, as he moved toward me. He did not rise: the chair itself was moving. As it drew closer, I noticed the delicate wheels at its sides, spider-webbed with spokes.
The old man advanced with a slight ticking sound. When he reached me, his gaunt hand, resting on the arm of the chair, gave a barely perceptible twitch, and the vehicle stopped. He tilted his head back to read my face. His eyes were startling, large and light, rich signal lamps still burning in a shipwreck.
“So,” he said. A single word, yet my heart sank at the sound. His voice was thick with phlegm, disdainful, the voice of a tyrant.
“Jevick, please sit down,” his daughter murmured, pushing a stool toward me. I glanced at her and she nodded, her eyes giving back the light from the windows. Something in her gaze, so steady and frank, encouraged me, and I sat down.
“So,” said the priest again. “You claim to have seen an angel.”
“I claim nothing. It is the truth.”
“So you say.” He cocked his head as if observing a process of nature. “But it’s original,” he said. “A ludyaval.”
Ludyaval—an “unlettered one.” Illiterate: a savage.
“I can read and write,” I said, stung, “and speak Olondrian fluently.”
“Ah! And you are proud of yourself, no doubt.” He shook his head, smiling so that his lips whitened, drawn against his teeth. “Well, well. Come, there is no need for this. The matter is a simple one. Tell me who has sent you, and you may go.”
“No one sent me. I was brought here by soldiers.”
“Do not toy with me,” he said more softly. “Give me your master’s name.”
I swallowed. Rain rapped sharply against the windows, the fire stirred in its bed. The old priest watched me, clutching the arms of his enchanted chair. “I,” I said. My blood sang in my ears; a strange sea, white and full of stars, seemed to be rising about me, filling up the room.
“A name!” barked the priest.
I blinked fiercely to clear my vision. His arm in its black sleeve flashed through the mists around me like a wing. Parchment crackled. He spread a map on his knees and jabbed it with a yellow fingernail. “Where did you go in Bain? Where were you corrupted?”
“Corrupted—”
“Yes! Was it Avalei’s priests? I doubt it; they are too cunning for that these days. Was it a merchant? Was it the proprietor of your hotel? What was his name?”
“Yedov,” I whispered.
“Was it he?”
“No—that is—I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t know what you mean.”
The priest turned to his daughter, who had drawn up a stool and sat near us, her chin in her hand, her expression thoughtful and tinged with pity.
“You see?” he said. “That’s why they chose this ludyaval. He can claim he doesn’t know anything, and we cannot prove he does.”
“But perhaps he’s telling the truth,” she said.
“I am,” I interrupted, seizing on this spark of hope. “Veidarin—”
“I am not a priestess.”
“Teldarin—”
Again she shook her head, frowning. “No. Call me by name.”
“Tialon, then—by the gods you pray to, help me!”
My cry hung in the air. The priest’s daughter seemed moved by it: her cheeks grew pale, and she sat up straighter, setting her hands on her knees. “I will,” she said. Her father groaned, wrinkling his map in a gesture of impatience. “I will,” she repeated firmly, “but you must help me too.”
“Anything. Anything you ask.” I rubbed my eyes with a trembling hand. The mist of my faintness had receded, the room growing clear again. Beneath the windows, blue in the rain, Tialon leaned forward, her hands clasped, a streak of firelight on her cheek.
“Jevick,” she said in a slow, earnest voice, “this is a serious matter. You have been brought here under suspicion of a crime. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Pretense of sainthood,” she said and paused to watch me.
“Sainthood.”
“Yes. The crime of claiming contact with the spirits of the dead.”
“But I claim nothing,” I said. “I have claimed nothing. I told no one but the keeper of the hotel, and he sent me to you.” I turned from her clear green eyes to the glittering orbs in her father’s face. “I am no saint. I would not call anyone with my affliction saintly.”
“You see, Father,” Tialon said.
“I see nothing,” he snapped. “Nothing but a new ruse of the pig-worshippers of Avalei.”
Tialon sighed and turned to me. “Tell us about your island. Tell us—”
“Tell us,” the priest broke in with a sneer, “do your people worship angels?”
“No,” I said. “That is—we have good spirits which we call angels. But they are not dead. They are not the same as the dead—that is something different…”
My voice sounded very small in the room, but the priest leaned forward, intent, transfixing me with his pitiless gaze. “Not the same?”