“There have been losses, true,” Serymn conceded. “I believe those are outweighed by the gains.”
I was suddenly angry, furious, with her. I had heard Serymn’s arguments from my mother, my priest, friends of the family—people I loved and respected. I had learned to endure my anger without protest, because my feelings were upsetting to them. But in my heart? Truly? I had never understood how they could be so… so…
Blind.
“How many nations and races have the Arameri wiped out of existence?” I demanded. “How many heretics have been executed, how many families slaughtered? How many poor people have been beaten to death by Order-Keepers for the crime of not knowing our place?” Hot droplets of tea sloshed onto my fingers. “The Bright is your peace. Your prosperity. Not anyone else’s.”
“Ah.” Serymn’s soft voice cut through my anger. “Not just lost faith, but broken faith. The Bright has failed you, and you reject it in turn.”
I hated her patronizing, sanctimonious, knowing tone. “You don’t know anything about it!”
“I know how your father died.”
I froze.
She continued, oblivious to my shock. “Ten years ago—on the very day, it seems, that the Gray Lady’s power swept the world—your father was in the village market. Everyone felt something that day. You didn’t need magical abilities to sense that something momentous had just occurred.”
She paused as if waiting for me to speak. I held myself rigid, so she went on.
“But it was only your father, out of all the people in that market, who burst into tears and fell to the ground, singing for joy.”
I sat there, trembling. Listening to this woman, this Arameri, dispassionately recite the details of my father’s murder.
It wasn’t the singing that did him in. No one but me could detect the magic in his voice. A scrivener might have sensed it, but my village was far too poor and provincial to merit a scrivener at its small White Hall. No, what killed my father was fear, plain and simple.
Fear, and faith.
“The people of your village were already anxious.” Serymn spoke more softly now. I did not believe it was out of respect for my pain. I think she just realized greater volume was unnecessary. “After the morning’s strange storms and tremors, it must have seemed as though the world was about to end. There were similar incidents that day, in towns and cities elsewhere in the world, but your father’s case is perhaps the most tragic. There had been rumors about him before that day, I understand, but… that does not excuse what happened.”
She sighed, and some of my fury faded as I heard genuine regret in her tone. It might have been an act, but if so, it was enough to break my paralysis.
I got up from my chair. I couldn’t have sat any longer, not without screaming. I put the teacup down and moved away from Serymn, seeking somewhere in the room with fresher, less constricting air. A few feet away, I found a wall and felt my way to a window; the sunlight coming through it helped to ease my agitation. Serymn remained silent behind me, for which I was grateful.
Who threw the first stone? It is something I have always wondered. The priest would not say, when I asked him over and over again. No one in town could say; they did not remember. Things had happened so quickly.
My father was a strange man. The beauty and magic that I loved in him was an easily perceptible thing, though no one else ever seemed to see it. Yet they noticed something about him, whether they understood it or not. His power permeated the space around him, like warmth. Like Shiny’s light and Madding’s chimes. Perhaps we mortals actually have more than five senses. Perhaps along with taste and smell and the rest there is detecting the special. I see the specialness with my eyes, but others do it in some different way.
So on that long-ago day, when power changed the world and everyone from senile elders to infants felt it, they all discovered that special sense, and then they noticed my father and understood at last what he was.
But what I had always perceived as glory, they had seen as a threat.
After a time, Serymn came to stand behind me.
“You blame our faith for what happened to your father,” she said.
“No,” I whispered. “I blame the people who killed him.”
“All right.” She paused a moment, testing my mood. “But has it occurred to you that there may be a cause for the madness that swept your village? A higher power at work?”
I laughed once, without humor. “You want me to blame the gods.”
“Not all of them.”