Free Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) by Linda Lael Miller

balance. I staggered out of the hut with its thatched roof and hard dirt floor into the cold glare of sunlight. For a moment or two I was blinded by the dazzle and raised one arm to shield my eyes.
    Mortals are damnably resilient, even when they don’t choose to be. Within a moment or so I could see clearly, and my weakened frame supported itself with a shaky determination that came from some unexplored part of my mind. I looked about and saw other huts—pigs and dogs and chickens wandering in their midst—and a few gaunt humans in poor clothes. Not far from the edge of the village was a great firepit, encircled with stones, black and acrid at its center. I was drawn to the place by a horrible fascination that shamed even as it compelled me to take the next step toward it, and the next.
    Blackened bones and skulls lay scattered, haphazard, through the ashes, and I recognized a single charred arm, muscles clearly defined, sooty fingers curled. I wretched convulsively and reeled away from that grim sight and the other helter-skelter leavings of death. I could be grateful, at least, that Brenna’s mortal remains had not been cast into the pit. That none of those hideous pieces and parts were hers.
    I nearly collided with the small, rotund monk who stood behind me.
    “What is your name, lad?” he asked, and I was struck, even in my welter of confusion and agony, by the serenity in his expression. I knew this was Brother Timothy, the holy man who had visited me in the witch’s hut.
    He wore robes of undyed wool, a narrow, frayed rope girding his middle, and his tonsured head was fringed with brown hair. The flesh of his face was tight, but the eyes were old, and I could not begin to guess his age; he might have been seventeen or seventy.
    “Valerian,” I answered hoarsely. I did not speak of my dead father, nor did I offer the name of my village. I had no home now, after all, and no kinsmen. For me, there was only one question, one concern, in all creation. “Where did they bury milady?”
    Brother Timothy gestured toward a copse of naked birches on top of a small knoll nearby. The branches of those trees looked like white cracks in the smooth, chilly blue surface of the sky. “There,” he said. “On the hill.” I moved past him, awkward in my weakness, near collapse, but desperate to look upon Brenna’s grave.
    “We did not know her name,” the monk hastened to inform me. “But there is a cross to mark her resting place. Was she your sister. Your wife, perhaps?”
    At his words, the loss of Brenna cut through me anew, fresh and sharp, seeming to sever not just muscle and marrow, but other, less tangible parts of me as well. I locked my knees to keep them from buckling and forced myself to keep moving. “I have no sister,” I said. “And the word wife is too feeble to contain all that Brenna was to me. If I could have died in her place, I would have done it.”
    “Such decisions are not ours to make,” Brother Timothy replied. “Perhaps that is a blessing in itself. Nor is such a desire unselfish, for its root is merely the cowardly wish to escape your own pain.”
    A surge of contempt swelled within me and, somewhere deeper, where I was wont to look, shame. “Pray, do not speak to me of blessings,” I said without meeting his eyes. “There is no mercy in your God, and I seek no favors of Him.”
    How glibly I uttered sacrilege in those days of innocence and sorrow, and how very little I knew of damnation and devils, gods and angels! I was yet a lad, after all, with a child’s blithe certainty of a multitude of things.
    Brother Timothy laid a hand on my shoulder, and though he was smaller in stature, his grasp was forceful enough to stop my progress. “Your grief makes you bitter and angry,” he said with a tenderness that made me yearn to sink, weeping, to my knees. ‘Those feelings will pass one day. The wounds will heal. In the meantime, though, you must turn your heart toward heaven, where comfort