“He already suffered by the measure of our sins.” Tallia lifted her hands and turned them palms up to display to her audience. “This is mere skin, molded from clay, nothing more than that. Like all else outside the Chamber of Light, it is tainted with darkness. We do not return to God in the flesh but rather in the spirit. It is our soul that ascends through the spheres to the Chamber of Light.”
“But then how could the blessed Daisan have come back to the earth and walked among his disciplas again, as you say, if he didn’t have a body?”
“Is there any power God does not have? She gave us birth. She gave birth to the universe—Ah!” Tallia gasped, swaying, and Hathumod, as stout a young woman as her cousin was a young man, held her up so she did not fall. “Lady bless!” said Tallia in an altered voice, high and breathless and yet somehow piercing. “I see a light like the blinding glance of angels. It penetrates the haze of mist that envelops the dull earth.” Head lolling back, Tallia appeared to faint.
Ivar jerked back from the fence to find Baldwin, Ermanrich, and Sigfrid clustered at his shoulder, pressing him back into the rough wood.
“What happened?” demanded Ermanrich.
The bells rang for Vespers and the four young men scrambled up guiltily to take their place in line.
Ivar braved Master Pursed-Lip’s willow switch to get a good look at the line of female novices as they proceeded into the church, but he did not see Lady Tallia among their number … and she never, ever, missed a chance to pray.
Nor did she appear before Vespers at her usual place the next day.
It took two days for Ermanrich to arrange a private rendezvous with his cousin, and then the news he had to report hit all four boys with horror.
“Hathumod says Tallia has been stricken with a paralysis.”
“Devils have inhabited her because of her heretical words!” said Sigfrid, biting at his nails. “She’s been possessed by the Enemy!”
“Don’t say such a thing!” Ermanrich’s ability to defer to the wishes of another—in this case his lady mother—without resentment had allowed him to enter Quedlinhame with a resigned heart and a peaceful spirit. He looked anything but peaceful now. “She lies as if dead, Hathumod says, with only the faintest blush of red in her cheeks to show she still lives. It is God who afflicts her, to test her faith with infirmity!”
“If it’s true she eats so little, she probably fainted from hunger,” observed Baldwin, whose appetite was as certain as the promise of the sun’s rising each morning. “My aunt said that’s a sure sign of starvation, when farmers are too weak to sow. The biscop enjoins us to sow charity and distribute grain in lean times for the good of our souls, but my aunt says we’d best do it for the good of our holdings.”
“Baldwin!” Poor Sigfrid looked deeply affronted. “How can you say such a thing, and in God’s house, may They forgive you for your disrespect.”
“It’s no disrespect to speak the truth!”
“Quiet!” said Ivar. “It won’t help us if we quarrel like princes.” But a sudden fear gnawed at him, and he did not know why.
He did not know why, but he and the others knelt every day at the usual time beside the fence, hoping for news.
And news came in the most startling fashion four days later when Tallia herself, leaning on Hathumod, made her slow way out to her accustomed place. There she knelt on fresh snow as though it were spring flowers, brought her hands together at her chest, and prayed.
She had no color in her lips. Her hands were curled up like claws, nails tucked into her palms. Although she was frail in body, her voice was strong.
“God be praised! By the blessing given by the Holy Mother and Her blessed Son we have all been granted eternal life if only we shall testify to the Holy Word of the sacrifice and redemption. I was overcome by light, and while my body was laid low by God’s hand, a vision enveloped me.”
Her face had so fine and delicate a pallor that she appeared almost aethereal, as if her body had leached away and all that held her together in this world was the strength of her immortal soul. The very fragility revealed in her flesh, woven with the fierce glamour of her gaze, gave her a beauty she had not possessed before—or so Ivar thought, staring raptly until Ermanrich poked him hard between the shoulder blades and demanded his chance to look.
Though they shouldn’t have been looking.
“My soul was led by a spirit of fire to the resting place of the angels. There I was granted a vision of the rewards God prepares for those who love Her, in which infidels and those who heed the False Word of the Unities put no faith.” She lifted her fists. With great effort, face straining against obvious pain, she uncurled her swollen fingers.