“Oh, and our uncles are back in Coravann.” Rosurie was continuing with her recitation. “My mother thought they might come by to see us here, but I don’t think that would be allowed, do you?”
“I’m certain it wouldn’t be!” Ellynor said with a laugh. “Do you want to ask Shavell for permission? Or, no, would you like to go straight to the Lestra?”
Rosurie giggled. “That’s what I told her last time she asked, but she doesn’t seem to understand that
sebahta
means nothing in the convent. I don’t know how to explain it to her.”
No, for anyone raised in the Lirrens would have a hard time comprehending that the Lestra—a woman—could be absolute law within her own defined circle. Ellynor and Rosurie, used to submitting to authority, had recognized it immediately in the persons of the Lestra and her dedicants, but the men of their families would never find it so easy.
Ellynor lay back on the narrow mattress and half listened to Rosurie’s continuing story. Strange as it still seemed to her, Ellynor had kin in Gillengaria—so did Rosurie. One of the Lahja women had eloped more than thirty years ago with a man named Heffel Coravann, marlord of one of the Twelve Houses. Naturally, the men of her family went after him, for that was the Lirren way: If an outsider tried to ravish or romance a Lirren woman, one of the men of her family would face that outsider in a duel to the death. Usually, the
sebahta
men won—or, more often, the threat itself was enough to keep Lirren women safe from the attention of interlopers. Not this time. Heffel Coravann had killed his bride’s father and carried the woman off to his estates at Coravann Keep.
Normally, that would be the end of it—the woman would have been lost forever to the
sebahta-ris
. But somehow Heffel had managed to earn the respect of his wife’s relatives and had forged a durable relationship with them. There was visiting and some commerce between them, across the Lireth Mountains. Ellynor was not sure exactly how it had all unfolded, but she knew that Heffel was the one who had suggested the Lumanen Convent as a place to send the wayward Rosurie. He was a devout man, a follower of the moon goddess, and he had described the convent as both safe and holy.
And so here they were.
“I would like to go to Coravann someday,” Ellynor murmured as Rosurie’s voice drifted to a stop. “Wouldn’t you?”
“No. Why?” her cousin demanded.
“To meet the man who stole a Lirren woman from the clans.”
Rosurie sniffed. “He did not steal her. They let him take her.”
“He killed her father!” Ellynor reflected a moment. “Although her father wasn’t very well liked and maybe wasn’t such a loss.”
“That’s what I mean. The
sebahta
allowed it.”
“I’d still like to meet him. I’d like to meet his daughter— you realize we have a cousin who is only half Lirren?”
“Two,” Rosurie corrected. “She’s got a brother.”
Ellynor nodded in the dark. “So I’d like to meet him, too. And I’d like to see Coravann. Oh, I’d like to see any part of Gillengaria! Ghosenhall or one of the Twelve Houses! I’d like to be free to roam anywhere I wanted to. Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” said Rosurie, turning over on her bed and twitching her blankets up to her chin. “I’m happy where I am. Except I miss the Lirrens. I miss the
sebahta
. If I could, I would spend half my life on this side of the Lireth Mountains, and half on the other side.”
Ellynor sighed. “I miss the
sebahta
, too,” she said. “If we were home right now, we’d be planning the baking for the high harvest—”
Rosurie chimed right in, describing the recipes they would be selecting, the spices they would be mixing into the pies and soups. It was a game they played often.
If we were home right now
. . . Ellynor could not decide if the exercise made her more homesick or less, but she did know that she could remember every detail, every scent, every color, every name. She did not think she would ever forget any of them, if she lived at the convent until she was a hundred.
Her whole life, she had wanted to run away from the clans. But she had always wanted to be able to go back home. Once she left the convent, she would be able to return to the Lirrens. But if she left on her own? Slipped away in the night, or chose a rash lover and eloped? She would never be able to return. She would forfeit the Lirrens forever.
IN the morning, after they had attended the first set of devotions, Rosurie asked Ellynor to dye her hair. “I’ m baking today,” Ellynor said. “I’ll be free in the afternoon, and I can do it then. And you can do mine.”
So shortly after lunch, they returned to their room and set about the time-consuming but pleasurable task of marking their hair with
sebahta
patterns. A few of the other girls who lived on their floor had always been fascinated by this particular ritual, so Rosurie had invited them in to watch. When Ellynor arrived in the room, buckets of water in hand, she found Rosurie sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, hair unbound and touching the floor. Five other novices had crammed onto the two beds and were giggling and gossiping. They were all boy crazy, always discussing the charms and characteristics of the young men in the Lestra’s guard. Never mind that they were forbidden to speak to the soldiers or interact with them in any way. Talk about the soldiers formed their primary topic of conversation.
“Did you
see
him? I think he’s from Tilt.
So
handsome. I never saw eyes so blue.”
“Shavell will murder you if she thinks you’re flirting with one of the new guards.”
“I wasn’t flirting! Well, I would have, but he wouldn’t flirt back. I think he’s shy.”
“I like that other boy. The one with the fair hair and the scar on his left cheek. He has the sweetest smile.”
Ellynor pulled up a second stool right behind Rosurie’s and ran her palm down the thick, straight hair. It was a reddish chestnut, many shades lighter than Ellynor’s own night-black hair. It was marked all down the back with the sickle-rose-and-star design of the Plesa family, done in a blond dye. Every few weeks, as new hair grew in, Ellynor added another row to the pattern near the top of Rosurie’s head; every few months, she trimmed off the ragged ends at the bottom, and some of the old designs with them. Every Lirren woman wore her hair this way—long and marked with her family heraldry. Of course, in most situations, certainly in public, a Lirren woman kept her hair rolled up in some manner on her head—in braids or in a knot—so the patterns were not visible. But everyone knew they were there.
“I talked to Daken the other day,” one of the other girls said in a dreamy voice.
“You didn’t! And Shavell didn’t see you?”
“Just a few words. He was so serious.”
Rosurie sat very still while Ellynor dampened her hair with a sponge, then separated the thick locks into five sections. She opened the small container of dry dye and rubbed the top with a damp sponge, then transferred the color in deliberate strokes to Rosurie’s hair. The sickle was easy, the star a little more complicated, the rose the hardest symbol of all to translate. Ellynor worked carefully with the skill of much practice, knowing how important it was that the final result be perfect. If anyone were to come across Rosurie, lost or ill or dead— unable to speak—he could unpin her hair and know exactly to which family she belonged. Even if she was found by one of the warring
sebahta
, one who hated the Plesa family, she would be returned to them, safe from further harm.
If a Lirren girl were ever to chop off all her hair, she would be lost forever. No one would recognize her, no one would know how to send her home.
“You know who I haven’t seen for a few days?” said one of the novices. “That young man from Fortunalt. Kelti. I liked him.”
There was a gasp and then an ominous silence that lasted long enough to make Ellynor look away from her task. Even Rosurie turned her head, carefully, to keep the dye from running.
“You haven’t heard?” That was Astira speaking. The tall blonde from Merrenstow was the one Ellynor liked best of all the novices. At twenty-two, Astira was Ellynor’s own age, and both of them were older than most of the other girls. “Kelti’s disappeared. They found Rostiff and three others, but Kelti— just vanished.”
“Found them? What does that mean?” Ellynor demanded.
Astira gave her a wide-eyed look. She had patrician features and a well-bred air, and Ellynor had always assumed she was part of the Gillengaria nobility. “Found them dead,” Astira said solemnly. “Murdered.”
All the girls were exclaiming now with dismay and fascination. Their words tumbled over each other.
Murdered? How? Who killed them? And why?
“What happened?” Ellynor asked.
Astira shook her head. “I don’t know all the details,” she said, which meant that she only had this much information because she’d been eavesdropping on conversations she was not meant to hear. “They were about a day’s ride away from here, maybe two. Someone said they were looking for mystics— someone else said, no, they were merely carrying messages for the Lestra. At any rate, their bodies were found outside some little hut miles off the main road, buried in a common grave. Blood all over the floor inside the house. No one else around. None of the people who lived anywhere nearby knew what had happened to the soldiers—or the woman who used to live there.”
The novices all listened, rapt with horror. Ellynor and Rosurie, who had grown up with violent men and knew a bit more about combat than the rest of the girls, were even more shocked and impressed than the others. They knew what kind of skill and manpower it took to overcome five soldiers fighting for their lives.
“But then—what happened to Kelti?” one of the girls asked. “If his body wasn’t found—”
“Maybe he was abducted,” another novice replied. “Who- ever killed the others took him. To torture him. To make him— tell them things.”
The first girl, the one who was sweet on Kelti, started crying. “They took him,” she said with a sob. “They took him, and they’ll hurt him, and then they’ll kill him after all.”
She didn’t specify who she meant by
they
, but all of them knew. Everyone else in the room was nodding.
“May the Pale Mother strike them all down,” Astira said. “Mystics.”
“Are they really so terrible?” one of the younger girls asked. She hadn’t been at the convent very long, so she could get away with asking the question that Ellynor knew better than to raise. Though she had wondered it silently many times.
“Yes,” Astira replied with emphasis, while Ellynor returned her attention to Rosurie’s hair. “They’re evil. They contravene the laws of nature and the laws of the goddess. They—well. Here’s a story I just heard. There’s an island off of Danalustrous, on the western coast. That’s where they send people who are dying with a fever that has no cure. But now mystics who have the power to change themselves and
other people
into animal shapes—these mystics are going to the island and turning sick people into dogs and horses and who knows what? Changing them! From humans into beasts!”
“Why?” breathed the youngest novice.
“I heard about that,” Rosurie said. “Animals get that same fever, don’t they, except there’s a cure for it in dogs and horses. Isn’t that right?”
Ellynor looked up from the pattern forming between her fingers. “You mean mystics change people into animals so they can be cured? Do they change the animals back into humans when the fever’s gone?”
“I don’t know! But it’s still an abomination!” Astira exclaimed. “The goddess made each of us into the shape she most desired. We can’t just decide to be something else—something she did not sanctify! You should have heard the Lestra when somebody brought her this news. I’m surprised the whole convent didn’t come tumbling down, she was so angry.”