Free Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

who had been spoiled; not allowed to ease from innocence into experienced womanhood with gentleness or the guidance of either a parental or spousal hand.
    Noah Banks was not one of these hard, ruined women. She wore her experience and knowledge easily. It did not emerge in her demeanour as coquettishness, which Thornton would have despised, or as pride, which he would have loathed even more thoroughly, but as a deep peacefulness of which he was—he sighed, admitting it to himself—deeply envious.
    She was a girl ( a woman ) who Thornton suspected had such boundless compassion combined with her strange store of knowledge and experience that she would, to whoever loved her, become an endless source of comfort.
    Of shelter.
    Thornton slouched in the wooden chair, his half-drunk glass of wine resting on his chest. This was a rare moment of relaxation for him. The Reverend Thornton was a man who never relaxed in another’s company, only in his own. He was a tall man, his long legs now stretched out before him, crossed at their ankles, with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair worn swept back from his brow. He had a thin humorous mouth, and dark eyes that sparkled with what might appear to be mischief—save that Thornton so habitually clothed himself in the dark tones of Puritan garb that the humour of his mouth and the mischief of his eyes was (thankfully for thereverend’s public persona) quite obscured and shadowed. Thornton had dedicated himself to God and to instil the knowledge of God into his young charges; his humour and mischief he tried to bury or to ignore.
    Now relaxed, at ease, Thornton’s eyes drifted lazily over the deep twilight outside, the still of the gathering night broken only by the movement of a small group of deer towards the shelter of a stand of great oaks and the haunting cry of an owl, out hunting mice and kittens.
    There was a movement—the sudden sweep of the owl’s wings as it launched itself from one of the trees—and Thornton sighed, and sipped his wine.
    The only reminder of the day past was the line of gentle light sinking across the horizon of the hills. It was a beautiful sight, peaceful and powerful, and Thornton imagined for a moment that the land was about to rise up and reach out to him, seeping in through the window until it embraced him and made him part of its earthiness.
    “Do you feel it, John?” she said, and her voice seemed so much a part of the gathering night and of the gentle landscape beyond the windows, that Thornton was not perturbed, nor even overly surprised, to hear her speak, here, within the inner sanctum of his private chambers.
    He turned his head, slowly, almost lazily, but otherwise did not move.
    She was standing a pace or two inside the door, and Thornton, so given over to the magic of the twilit landscape, found himself thinking that she had not entered the chamber as any mortal person would have done, through the door, but had instead just materialised where now she stood, just as the night slowly fell outside without any discernible movement of arrival.
    Then his reserve roared to the fore.
    “Noah!” Thornton said, rising so abruptly from his chair that the remnants of his wine spilled from the glass. He suddenly realised that he stood before her in bare feet, clad only in breeches and a linen shirt that he’d unbuttoned in the warmth of the night, and he almost dropped the glass in his haste to set it to one side so he could pull the shirt closed about his chest.
    “John,” she said, and smiled.
    It was very gentle, that smile, and so unexpected in a sixteen-year-old girl, so comforting, so deep , that Thornton’s hands stilled where they fumbled at the shirt.
    Noah was still dressed as she had been this evening, when she’d sat with Thornton and the earl and countess for an hour after supper. In the past year she’d taken to wearing the costume of a woman rather than a girl, and this evening she was wearing one of her favourites: a full skirt