Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Eight

The rumours started on a Thursday.

It began with the Perrin daughters; the three girls whose mother was a widow and who Aldric had been quietly checking on since his return. The eldest, Nan, was sixteen and had been one of the worst cases of the swelling sickness in the village. By the second week of Seraphel's presence in Ashenmere, Nan Perrin was walking again.

People noticed. They were a small village, and they had time to notice things, because the plague had taken everything else: the market, the mill-work, the ordinary business of life, and in the absence of ordinary business, recovery became something to watch.

"The healer-woman. From the south. She laid her hands on Nan Perrin."

"My grandmother says she came to our house in the night and touched Thomas's head, and he stopped burning."

"She doesn't eat. Has anyone seen her eat?"

Aldric brought the problem to Seraphel on Friday afternoon. She received it with the expression of someone who had been expecting it.

"They're calling you a miracle-worker," he said. "Which is either accurate or an understatement."

"The attention is dangerous. Ridley will hear."

"Ridley has already heard, I expect. The question is what we do." He sat across from her at the kitchen table. "We can't stop people talking. We could reduce the visibility of what you're doing, but that means helping fewer people, and I'm not prepared to"

"Neither am I."

He looked at her. She said it with a flatness that made it clear it wasn't a surprise to her either. "When did that happen?" he asked.

"I do not know what you mean."

"When did you go from 'I cannot intervene further' to 'neither am I' in the same breath? That's a significant distance, Seraphel."

She was quiet, her hands flat on the table, "said Agnes Thatcher's grandson. Thomas. When the breathing eased." She looked at her own hands. "I have watched a great many people breathe their last. I have observed the cessation of breathing as data. Information about the progression of an event." A pause. "I watched Thomas Thatcher breathe more easily, and it was not data. It was" She stopped. "I do not have the right word."

"Relief," he said.

She looked up. "Yes. Relief." Saying the word as if she were testing its weight. "Is it always that physical? The feeling of relief?"

"Usually, yes. The body does most of the feeling."

"I see." She was quiet again. Then: "We will manage the visibility as best we can. But I will not stop."

"Good," Aldric said.

They looked at each other across the kitchen table. Neither of them said what they were both beginning to think: that the distance between what she was and what she was becoming was narrowing in ways that had nothing to do with the plague, and everything to do with this table, and the fire, and the forty-one days that had passed since she first came to this house.

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