Free Mortal Heart by Robin Lafevers Page A

first assignment.”
    My heart slams against my rib cage like a bolting horse, driving all the air from my lungs so I cannot draw breath. When my breath finally returns, it brings with it a hot gush of anger. My ears fill with a great rushing sound and something inside me snaps. Or breaks. Or shatters. With no thought to the consequences of my actions, I throw open the door to the abbess’s chambers and step into the room.
    The voices stop abruptly, and three heads turn in my direction. Two mouths, Sister Thomine’s and Matelaine’s, are open in shock, but the abbess’s is pressed into a firm, flat line. Spots of angry red appear on her pale cheeks. “What is the meaning of this?”
    My entire body thrums with barely checked fury. “You cannot send Matelaine.” I step farther into the room and slam the door behind me. “You cannot.”
    “Have you been listening at my door?” the abbess demands.
    “This is not right. Matelaine is too young to be sent out. Too untrained. She is not ready yet.”
    The abbess rises from her chair, trying to use her height to intimidate me, but I am beyond caring. “You forget your place here, Annith. Remove yourself at once to your chambers and wait for me there.”
    But I have not forgotten anything. Indeed, it feels like I have finally remembered myself. Deep inside me, the alarm keeps clanging. “You cannot be serious about sending Matelaine out! She is only fifteen. She has not passed any of the tests required to be a full initiate, nor has she learned all the skills needed—”
    “So are you now the novice mistress, and no one told me?”
    The icy sarcasm in her voice is sharp enough to strip the flesh from my bones, but it doesn’t matter. Instead, I say what we all know is true. “I have trained longer and passed all the tests.”
    “We have already spoken of this. Serving Mortain is not a right, but a privilege. A privilege
I
grant to you, not one you can march in here and demand for yourself.”
    “I thought it was a privilege granted by Mortain.”
    Her head rears back slightly, but before she can respond, I continue. “I can best Matelaine in a fight, and shoot ten bull’s-eyes to her one. I can land a killing blow faster and more accurately than she can.” In spite of how it might appear to the abbess, it is no longer about what I
want.
I am well and truly afraid for Matelaine. “Would you send ten-year-old Lisabet next? Or Loisse? No one this young has ever been sent on assignment before, and you are surely risking her life.”
    “What of Margot or Genevieve? They were but twelve years old.”
    For a moment, I cannot fathom whom the abbess is talking about, and then I remember. “Are you merely placing Matelaine in the household of one of our enemies to act as spy, like you did them?” The panic in my chest lessens somewhat.
    “What I do is none of your concern.”
    “It is if I am to be seeress.”
    I hear Sister Thomine’s sharp intake of breath, and Matelaine whips her head around to stare at me. For one hugely satisfying moment, the abbess is speechless, for she knows I am right. If I am seeress, then I will be involved in all these decisions—I will be the one to See who is to stay and who is to go. She cannot deny it.
    “But not until you have completed your proper training.”
    “Then Sister Vereda has Seen this?”
    The silence in the room is thick and absolute. Sister Thomine turns to look at the abbess, and even Matelaine seems uncertain.
    “Of course she hasn’t. Since her illness, her visions have only been of small, pointless things.”
    “Then how can you send Matelaine out?”
    The abbess’s mouth snaps shut, and as we stare at each other, I feel the past seven years of my life unraveling like an old rope. “You think Mortain’s business comes to a stop when one of us is ill?” she says at last.
    “What if that is the very reason she has grown sick? Because Mortain wishes the convent business to cease for a while?”
    “Mortain