“You must understand, young lady, that we of the Holy Flame cannot condone the works of heathen Inventors. There is a grand order to the universe – a place for every creature and thing. We must seek to understand the holy plan and our lot therein. As Aure blazes, so the chapel follows. As the chapel guides, so the nation goes! If the heavens wish that a miracle arrive, then it shall arrive. My child, you must pray!” wheezed the Keeper of the Flame from his velvet chair, stuffed with down feather cushions and inlaid with golden gilt across the manchettes.

  He swam in fine robes of all the fire’s hues and ran his wrinkled fingers over an ancient, hardwood desk. Behind him shone a stained-glass mosaic, here in the highest office of the entire Cathedral.

  The peasant woman across the vast table squirmed on her plain, wooden chair. She was slight and mousy, one among thousands. She wore brown cotton, but she had not come to Lumia to join the textiles.

  “I…I see…” she sighed. Who was she to object to the Keeper of the Flame?

  Her husband was not so easily cowed. Louis, stocky farmer in a tweed suit, would never speak ill of another man in normal circumstances. Yet these were not normal circumstances, and he dared.

  “A certain Lady of a certain noble House has recently given birth to a healthy son,” objected the man, resting his hand on his wife’s arm like a knight.

  “Blessed be her fortune,” the Keeper rasped.

  “Her condition was in all the papers,” he continued, building his argument with the same patience used to tend the crops on the family farm. “The doctors and priests swore she would never bear child. Until she visited the Inventors.”

  Except it wasn’t the family farm anymore, was it?

  “The medicine of Inventors pales before the power of faith, my son.”

  Belle’s fingers drifted of their own accord to her belly and began to pluck at the frayed threads there.

  “All we ask is a recommendation,” Louis objected. “A consultation with one of the miracle doctors!”

  “Miracles are the providence of heaven,” the Keeper replied immediately, twisting his wrinkled fingers through the three-fold spiral of the Blessing of Fire.

  Her husband turned to scripture. “Faith is built of mortal men.”

  “But only by the guiding hand might faith be turned to the forge.”

  Louis furrowed his brow, digging for his retort. “The hammer unused falls to rust.”

  “Yet the flame must sometimes be banked lest it consume.”

  I should say something, Belle thought dimly. She hesitantly reached out a restraining hand. “Louis…”

  Color seeped into the farmer’s face, and he ignored her hand. “Keeper of the Flame, with all respect…”

  “Your grief burns, my child, but the order of the firmament was placed by grander hands than our own,” interrupted the Keeper of the Flame. “Is it not written? ‘Those who seek to usurp the foundation endanger the whole’.”

  The farmer surged to his feet, knocking back his chair. “Our silver is just as good as any of those fools on the hill! My wife and I came here for an answer, and we are not leaving without–”

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  Belle snatched ahold of his outstretched arm. “Louis, please!”

  Bad enough that they sold all they owned for this vampire to offer the same thin blessings as their village priest.   Should they risk excommunication as well?!

  The farmer slowly righted his chair, trembling. “My apologies, Father. The heat overwhelmed me.”

  Outside the office, the secretary stared at the thick-chested farmer in naked worry.

  The Keeper of the Flame raised a hand, staying both the secretary’s concerns and the argument. “Your passion is love, and love tempers the sharpest blade. Aure has witnessed your faith this day.”

  All two gold and thirty-seven silver of it.

  Ten generations of farmers had tended that land so that Belle could sell it for this faintest of hopes. It may not have been pretty land; it may not have been good land; but it had been their land.

  Louis exhaled, unclenched his fists, and bowed his head.

  The Keeper returned his cadaverous hands to his sumptuous robes. “Have you considered adoption?”

  The farmer opened his mouth.

***

  Despite the fuss, Belle and Louis were spared excommunication. They were mere peasants, after all, and hardly worth the effort of a holy trial usually reserved for nobles. Instead, they were dumped at the steps to the Cathedral by constables and informed of two facts.

  First, the couple were now banned from the holy sanctuary for life.

  Second, they would not be eligible to appeal for reimbursement on their donation.

  They retreated to a quiet alley, and Belle wept.

  Louis watched her sob, his face drawn like old leather.

  “I understand if you wish to sunder our flame,” he finally managed to whisper.

  “Louis, no!”

  “I ruined any chance of…”

  “I knew from the moment we arrived that he would deny us,” Belle admitted. “I was simply too scared to confront him.”

  Like always. A passenger in her own life.

  “Old Haster will let us till the land for half,” her husband said softly. “Not quite owning, but food and a roof just as well.”

  They had sold their lives for just under five gold. Now they faced the prospect of spending the two gold that remained of their savings for a sharecropper’s rights. They would rent their own house – a home where Belle would never hear a baby’s laugh. There, the cycle of Harvest would march onwards. There, Belle would remain a bystander to the flow of time, a failure at the only brave quest she ever mustered.

  I’m not smart. I’m not pretty. Hells, she thought, clutching her belly, I’m not even really a woman.

  “Or we can move to an estate. Always need nursemaids there.”

  To suckle some noble child who would be torn from her arms as soon as the dirty work was done.

  “No matter what, I’ll be with you, Belle.”

  And his family name dies with me.

  A fog horn blew in the harbor. Whether an ocean cruiser or a great warship, that vessel could slip its moorings and fly free of its fate with ease.

  “If I could just sail away…” Belle whispered.

  But how was she to outrun the betrayal of her own body?

  Her husband held his silence.

  The horn repeated.

  A strange feeling crept over Belle in that alleyway. Hunched on an empty pallet, cheeks blotchy with tears, she felt herself at the edge of a precipice.

  The horn repeated.

  The ocean called – a road of waves to a place beyond the hearth.

  Her fingers clutched to her traitorous stomach.

  If not now, then when? asked her own voice, but wiser and older.

  “I’ll be with you, Belle,” her husband repeated.

  Would you return to the cycle of the known? whispered that inner voice. Is that what we wish?

  At the end of waves, a foreign land waited. Though they spoke the same tongue and shared the same coin, the southern cities worshipped strange and false creatures.

  Heathen gods of power and strange works.

  Her heart trembled like the racing deer at the audacity of what flickered across her mind, but she could not deny the allure. What ties remained for her in Ruhum? Should she return to Osh and endure the knowing tuts of her mother over dinner? Should she become the dreary aunt in everyone else’s story?

  “Better to die at sea,” she whispered. Better a swift end than the slow accumulation of humiliations from the people who claimed to know best for her.

  How many of them had offered a silver for her journey here?

  Louis knelt, taking her hands in his own. His calluses rubbed against her own. Matched palms, worn double their age by the toil of the farm.

  She swallowed and mustered what little courage a mouse might find. “Aure has given us his answer.”

  He could have recoiled in horror, but he nodded.

  “But there are other gods.”