“The Holy Mother also gave me permission to pray with you every Hefensday. So do you find me here, Sister, with such provisions as I was allowed to carry as well as a blanket. As long as I am allowed, will come every Hefensday to pray.”
“Then it is almost the first day of Decial. The dark of the sun.” Facts were a rope to cling to in a storm at sea. Knowing that she lay confined in this dungeon while, above, the good folk of Darre celebrated the feast day of St. Peter the Discipla, on the longest night of the year, amused her with its irony. “Does the Holy Mother wish me kept in this cell indefinitely?”
“If it is the Enemy’s doing that causes you to walk in your sleep, Sister, then you must be kept apart to avoid contaminating others. There will be a special guard to walk with you at your exercise, one who is both mute and deaf.”
She bowed her head. “So be it.”
They would never be left alone, and even if they thought they were alone, Anne could still spy on them by means of magic. She could no longer speak frankly to him, nor he to her. Hugh knew that she had seen the king ensorcelled by a daimone and Helmut Villam killed by subtle magic at Hugh’s hands, and yet Hugh still had not had her killed.
She was ill, she was hungry, and she was imprisoned in darkness in the dungeon beneath the holy palace, but by God she was not dead yet.
“Let us pray, then, Brother, as we will pray every Hefensday, if God so will it.”
She knelt. The straw cushioned her knees, and she had grown accustomed to the aggravation of fleas and the scrabbling of rats. If her limbs were unsteady and her voice ragged, and if she shifted the wrong way because the glare of the lamp hurt her eyes, at least she had not lost her wits.
God willing, she would never lose her wits.
As Fortunatus began the service of Vespers, she knew at last what time of day it was: evening song. To this scrap she clung with joy. In an appropriate place she chose a psalm, as one added prayers of thanksgiving or pleading in honor of the saint whose feast day it was.
“It is good to give thanks to God
for Their love endures forever.
Those who lost their way in the wilderness
found no city to shelter in.
Hungry and thirsty, they lost heart,
and they cried out to God,
and God rescued them from their trouble.
God turn rivers into desert
and the desert into an oasis,
fruitful land becomes wasteland
and the wilderness a place of shelter.
The wise one takes note of these things
as she considers God’s love.”
When they had finished, Fortunatus answered her with a second psalm.
“Blessed be the Lord and Lady,
who snatched us out of the haunts of the scorpions.
Like a bird, we have escaped from the fowler’s snare.
The snare is broken, and we have flown.
Blessed be God,
who together have made heaven and Earth.”