Fires of the Faithful Read Online Free

underneath us. I grabbed her and tried to hold her still, but her jerks pulled her out of my grasp. Then a moment later it was over, and she lay still. I held my hand lightly over her lips; she was still breathing. I sat back silently, clasping her limp hand. Mira’s hand was like carved marble—cold and impossibly smooth. I rubbed her palm with my thumb and suddenly my own blood turned cold. Mira had no calluses on her hands—not even the sort she’d have had from light garden work.
    One of my brothers had trained for the priesthood for a while. He’d given it up after falling in love with a girl in the village, but I clearly remembered his complaints to our mother about the work. The elder priests and priestesses talked a lot about communing with the Lord and the Lady through reaping their bounty, but my brother thought that was just an excuse to stick the novitiates with all the heavy farm chores. I’d grown up on a farm and my brother was no stranger to hard work, but after a year at the seminary his calluses were thicker than my father’s.
    I touched Mira’s soft hand again. She had never been an initiate priestess. That whole story was a lie.
    Why would she make up a story like that?
    I lit a globe of witchlight to get a closer look, and Mira threw her free hand over her face with a groan. “Hurts my eyes,” she muttered. “Put it away.”
    I dispelled the witchlight with a flick of my wrist. Mira drew her hand away slowly.
    “Play for me,” she said.
    Her violin was in reach and in tune, while mine wasn’t, so I picked hers up.
    “Play the funeral song,” she said. “The song I was playing earlier. I know you were listening.”
    So it had been a funeral song. I added that mentally to my repertoire and began to play. I have always been able to pick out tunes quite easily, and I experimented a little as I played, adding a forceful downstroke to the strong beats and pairing them with the same note an octave up. Domenico had told me to hold still while I played, but Old Way songs always made me want to use my whole body, and I swayed back and forth with the music. I closed my eyes, watching the flicker of the candle against my eyelids. Then I opened my eyes.
    For the first crazy instant, I thought a third person had silently entered the north practice hall, dressed in the uniform of a soldier. Then I thought I recognized my own face around the dark, riveting eyes. I started to my feet, and then realized that all I was looking at was a crumbling fresco. This was one of the oldest buildings at the conservatory, and had once been lavishly decorated.
    I forced out a laugh. “I’ve been listening to too many of Bella’s ghost stories,” I said. Mira was silent. Slowly, I sat back down on the stone floor, more shaken than I thought I had any call to be. “The candlelight is making me jumpy.”
    I set down Mira’s violin and took her soft hand again just as the candle went out.
    I stayed beside her through the night, talking when she roused enough to ask to hear my voice. Mira seemed to waver from consciousness to unconsciousness like a sputtering flame, but when she woke she seemed glad to have me there. In the last part of the night, her tremors calmed, and I asked if she’d like me to help her back to the room, where she might be more comfortable. She sat up, still shaking a bit. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.”
    I packed up her violin and slung both hers and mineover my shoulder, then wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and slipped my arm under hers. If anyone was out and about at that hour, they were on their own business and pretended not to see us; I helped Mira up the long staircase and into our empty room, then helped her sit down on the bed. Mira lay down and pulled her blanket over herself, closing her eyes. Her shaking had finally eased.
    There was an hour or so before I’d have to get up, and I quietly slipped my boots off. As I hung Mira’s cloak up, something