In Calamity's Wake Read Online Free Page A

you—Miette, should be donated to the service of God, then the child’s hands should be wrapped and in one hand a petition should be placed so that the parents’ intentions would be clear. These were not unwanted children; they were the offspring of noble families.
    Father, I wish I were yours. I wish—
    Shh, you don’t understand what that would mean.
    T HERE WAS no town at all behind the hills where the crazy man who hit my horse and claimed to be my brother had pointed. I saw no one on the trail after him until I arrived at a hamlet in magic hour.
    The low sun shone more yellow on the walls of the houses as the pink sky deepened and the heat began to lift. Certain birds sing at different times of the day but the birds that sing at magic hour are all like doves, cooing. Even the moulting ravens sound like cooing doves if they make a noise at all. Though I heard children laughing, hidden behind walls in the yards of their houses, the place where I stopped (I did not know what it was called) seemed hushed as if the roofs had absorbed the last human energy of the day along with the red stains of sunset. My footsteps echoed on the cobbled paving stones of the main street. I felt quite suddenly all right, no longer wondering about the ravings of the crazy stranger who had cursed my mother dead and hit my horse. I released him completely from whatever ill he meant me and said a little prayer for his health.
    The picture of my father I carried in my pocket began to sweat with the heat until it was almost like he himself was sweating up against my heart. I took it out and studied it. It was an old photo, ragged all around the edges, riddled with pinpricks from where I had postedit many times, and with a hole the size of a pencil where the paper had decayed. It was the only image I had ever seen of him before he took the robes. I had found it in a flowerpot filled up with herbs: dried lemon balm, castilla blossoms, rue. I took it without telling him and pinned it inside my dresser drawer.
    He was sitting in front of a bookcase in a suit and tie and hat. His moustache and sideburns looked fuller and darker than I had ever seen them. He looked like a man that women might have conspired to be near in the dusty summer hours. But stiff and so still because he couldn’t move for the picture, and that made him a stranger, for I never saw him alive when he wasn’t moving, farming, hiking, hammering, digging a grave, or soothing something. He was restless and he liked to be away from people but maybe that is what it takes to be a man devoted to God in a place where you build and rebuild Heaven alone. I touched my pocket and wondered if the picture would help my mother to remember the young priest she saw that day she surrendered my little self.
    All the doors to all the houses were shut, which was strange when any breeze was worth gold. A few doorways were overgrown with weeds. When we were about to reach the edge of town I saw an old woman, wrapped in a coarse dark shawl, cross the street ahead someways. I saw her long loose white hair picked at by the wind, and then I didn’t see her and then I blinked a few times and saw her again cross the street in the other direction. Finally, a person, I thought.
    Evening, I called out. Evening—where am I?
    She stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me. Heaven, she said.
    What?
    Only a joke. This is Enchant, she said.
    I calculated how long we had been walking the streets and not seeing anyone and I thought, I must be dreaming. But when I tested the smell of the air and I stomped my feet in the dust it seemed as if, in spite of the absence of children or birds to match the sounds I could hear, and in spite of the blue shadows creeping over the doorways burdened with weeds, the town felt alive. I looked at the woman, who had stayed in the middle of the street, and her mouth was full of teeth and her eyes blinked the way that living eyes blink. I had been