Free Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) by Tanith Lee

novitiate.”
    “It’s unusual. You’re not a widow.”
    “I told them who my brotherwas.”
    “I see.”
    “You’re not happy. I thought you’d rejoice.”
    “Luchita, you yourself admit you’re not a woman for such a life—”
    “Now, I am. The rest—was burned out of me.”
    Cristiano went to the window. He looked down at the empty court. There was nothing in it, no well, no shrub. Only the high walls at its sides.
    “You lost a child, Luchita. This—may have been a fancy.”
    “No.”
    “She has yet to be questioned. Suppose you were mistaken.”
    “I never was. She created fire. I saw it.”
    “Then suppose, Luchita, Berbo was correct and her gift comes from the Devil?” He spoke almost mockingly. He had never, she thought, credited contemporary miracles, only the stupendous wonders of an earlier world.
    “If it was from God or the Devil, what do I care? It proved to me, Cristiano, it
proved
to me—what I have
never
believed.”
    “Which is?”
    “Life other than this one. Omnipotent power other than the power of men. God exists.” In her face he saw, and did not recognize it, his own adamantine certainty.
    “You won’t shift me. Recollect, you never could. God Himself has done so.”
    This, she knew, was
not
the house of Ghaio Wood-Seller. She had been brought here in a black boat, over a vast sheet of water she thought to be the sea. It had been night, when she entered some equally vast building.
    The room was small and dark, windowless and lit by candles even now,at noon. Yet there was a sweet smell. Volpa sat on the stool they had given her, which was uncomfortable, but she never noticed this, being used to discomfort.
    Three priests sat at the table, on chairs. Two looked at her, and one wrote down apparently their questions, what she answered. She recalled such priests from the byways and market-place. Everyone feared them, but Volpa did not. It was not courage on her part—she had never been brave. Was there a word for what she had been? It was that she knew that she, a slave, and perhaps insane—as others said of her, she had heard it—was of no importance.
    Secure in abasement, she felt no specific awe, and showed none.
    The priests for their part had noted as much. Yet neither was the girl rude in her manners. Her eyes were kept down, save now and then. She sat modestly. A humble and demure creature, who answered with a seeming honesty.
    Any wrong-doer, blasphemer, murderer, witch—would deny the practice, until the full questioning began. Then all was brought out. But they had not been permitted to speak of torture, not even to show her the instruments. Was she then only mad? She did not seem to be. She knew her name, her position. When asked if she knew of God, she had said that she did, and crossed herself. Only in the matter of her former master was she somewhat vague. Witnesses had been found to identify her as the slave of the wood-seller on the Canal of Seven Keys. She acknowledged this. But when the priests demanded to be told what had become of him, and his house, (and three other houses besides) she affected not to know.
    “The house burned, did it not?”
    “Did it burn?”
    “I said that it did. And you, girl,burnt it.”
    Her eyes were raised then, strange eyes the color of the wine of pale grapes. “When I lived there, it didn’t burn.”
    She had told them, in response to their interrogation—apparently not frightened by their voices and louring, used to such things, glad only not to be hit—that since about five years old, she had lived in Ghaio’s house as a slave. But one morning, she woke up in an alley and did not know where she had got to. Then, wandering about, she had, she acquiesced, seen some houses that were burned. She did not recognize them. Also, sometimes women gave her a crust or some clean water to drink and she came across an inn, where they gave her food, usually in the evening.
    Why had she woken in the street?
    She thought Ghaio had sold