“No,” I say quietly. “I would put them in the hands of Mortain, where they belong.” But it is too late. I understand now why she so desperately wants me to fill this role. “You want me to be seeress because you think you can control me. You think you will only have to make a suggestion here or nudge me a bit there to have me ‘Seeing’ precisely what you want me to.” After all, not only have I had exceptional training in the assassin’s arts, but in blind obedience and biddability as well. The thought of how much of my own will I have handed over to her and the Dragonette throughout the years causes a hot, painful wave of mortification to course through me.
“How can you threaten me?” The abbess rises to her feet, fists clenched. “I, who have spent my entire life at the convent protecting you, shielding you, saving you from that wretched woman?”
“The Dragonette?” I snort. “You did not shield me, or even save me—you were simply there once in a while to offer me comfort.”
She stands as still as any statue as my words echo in the silence between us. Then she turns, as if she cannot bear to look upon me a second longer, but not before I see the pain that twists her mouth. “You do not wish to know the answers to your questions, not really.”
“Oh, but I do. That is why I have left the convent and ridden one hundred and twenty leagues across the country. I have come in search of answers as well as my destiny.”
“Your destiny? You think to find your destiny here? You will find nothing, nothing but heartache and things you do not want to know.” She turns around then, her hands clasped before her and anguish in her eyes. “Annith, I beg you, leave off these questions. Return to the convent and assume the duties of seeress, and you will have a destiny to be proud of, one that few can claim as their own.”
“What you do not seem able to grasp is that I will not return to the convent—not if I am forced to be seeress.”
She draws herself up, and, to my surprise, her lips curl in a half smile. “You will change your mind when you hear the truth, for any sin that falls upon my head will also fall upon yours.”
“Why? I was never a party to your scheming. I had no knowledge of your plans.”
“That will not matter, for our close ties will speak far louder than any words you can say.” She takes a step toward me, then another, until we are close enough that I can see the faint lines that have begun to appear at the corners of her eyes. Abruptly, she turns away. “Would you like to hear the story of your birth? I know it has plagued you for years, not knowing how you came into this world.”
I blink in surprise and everything inside me grows still. “What do you mean?” My voice does not sound like my own. “No one knows anything about my birth.” I am not at all certain I wish to hear, for I am suddenly terrified of this story I have hungered for my entire life.
Unaware of my inner turmoil, the abbess begins to speak, her voice soft, as if she is peering down the corridor of time. “It was raining that night. They had traveled far, and the lady had only an old castoff maid from her father’s household, for he declared her dead to him once he learned of her plight. She was exhausted, and well beyond the point where she should have been traveling, but it was as if her shame and her heartache were some location on a map and she had to get as far away from them as she could.
“And then the pains began, leagues from a city of any size, and the lady and her maid both panicked. They stopped at the next house they passed and asked for the nearest midwife. There was none. The closest thing was the herbwife who lived at the edge of the mill road. It would have to do.
“It took them forever to reach it, with the rain and the mud, and the lady having to stop every few minutes and wait for the pain to pass. It was like someone had wrapped iron bands around her stomach and was squeezing. She dropped to her knees in the mud twice due to the pain.
“But she refused to have her baby—even a bastard babe—in the mud, so she pressed on, using her poor, near hysterical maid as a crutch.
“The herbwife—” Here the abbess pauses, a faint smile playing on her lips. “She seemed to be expecting them and opened her door as they drew near. The fire had already been built up, and clean sheets put on the single narrow bed in the one-room cottage. Drying herbs hung from the ceiling, so low the lady had to duck in places.
“The pains were coming much more quickly then, so quick she could scarce catch her breath. Before she could even lie down, there was a great gushing and water ran down her leg. She thought she would die from embarrassment, but that feeling quickly dissolved in the next squeeze that gripped her belly.
“The herbwife and the maid helped the lady onto the bed, and the next hours narrowed into an endless blur of pain and sweat. She could not help but scream, as she feared the pains would rend her in two—punishment, no doubt, for the sins she had committed.
“You arrived in the world after one last anguished push.” She smiles again and glances up at me with such fondness, such tenderness, that I am struck dumb. “As the herbwife wrapped you tightly in swaddling, the lady’s maid cleaned up her mistress as best she could, and then you were placed in her arms. You were perfect even then.”
“How can you know all this?” I whisper.
She lifts her gaze to meet mine. “Have you not yet guessed, Annith? You are my own flesh and blood, born of my body. Every sin I have committed, every rule I have broken, every girl you feel I have betrayed in some way—it has all been done out of my love for you, for you are my own daughter.”
The sheer audacity of her claim presses down on my chest, making it hard to draw breath. My mind scrambles to fit this new revelation into all that I know of the world. If I am sired by Mortain, can the abbess also be sired by Him? Surely He would not lie with His own daughter? “So you lied to the convent? You are not sired by Mortain?” The enormity of this is such that I can scarce wrap my mind around it.
The abbess stares at me, her eyes more human than I have ever seen them, and there is genuine sympathy there. It is all I can do not to place my hands over my ears, and something cold and slippery slithers in my belly.
“No, Annith. I am not.” She takes a step closer, and although I long to back away from her, the wall is already behind me and I have nowhere to go. “And neither are you.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
MY WORLD SHATTERS into a thousand pieces, each one of them as sharp as glass. Each one of them slicing me from the mooring that has anchored me my entire life.