Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Online Free

waste cash on another.” Volpa waited. “How old are you?”
    “Fourteen years, signore. So she said.”
    “Now I see you, you look less. Skin and bone.
    Skinny red fox. Let me see that hair.” Volpa drew off her scarf with reluctance. “Ah, you’re nothing,” said Ghaio.
    “Worthless. I might sell you. What’d you bring me, though? A copper venus and a sneering laugh.” Then he said, “Go up the ladder and open the chest nearest the door. It’s not locked. Inside is a paper with a list of men’s names, men that owe me money.”
    Volpa did what he said. Her whole life had been molded in obedience to him.
    She knew he looked at her as she climbed.
    In the upper room, she glanced about. She had been there often to wipe the floor and collect the night-pot, but always when the Master was from the house.
    There was a tiny window, shuttered against the weather and the dark. The bed was low and spread with a moldy fur—normally her mother would tidy thebed, but today the man slave had done so. In the room was a bad smell, not merely from its enclosure and the accumulation of bodily stinks. It was a corrupt smell.
    When Volpa came down the ladder, Ghaio again looked at her. She had to lift her skirt away from her legs to manage the ladder. She gave him the paper.
    Then Ghaio reached out and took hold, through slave’s tunic and shift, of Volpa’s center, the mound of her sex. Her instinct—entire and vital—was to leap away. But she was property. She kept still, as she had mostly had to do in the streets and market. Presently, apparently dissatisfied, he let go.
    But, “We’ll see,” muttered Ghaio, as if promising her something. He was.
    That night, Volpa dreamed.
    Generally it seemed to her she never did. Rather it seemed that she went—elsewhere. And coming back at sunrise to the Auroria bell over the marshes, she was dazed from a long journey, exhausted by her slumber. And this lethargy mostly only left her gradually in the hour after she rose.
    The place or places she had gone to in sleep she recollected only in fragments—some glimmering piece, like a bit of a broken dish, made of some costly substance, yet worthless since broken off. Besides, it soon faded. As she revived, she lost all memory, all
sense
of the countries of the night.
    Her dreams she considered differently, and they were rare—or rarely did she recall them intact. The last one which she could at that time remember had been dreamed at the farm or estate from which her mother and she were sold off. Volpa had been then less than fouryears old. She was, in the dream, in an orchard, where all the trees were bold with fruit—perhaps only like the orchards of the foot hills and the Veneran Plain. Yet on one tree, at the orchard’s center, was an unfamiliar crop. The globes that hung from its boughs were of gold and silver—the image not of metal, but of sunlight and moonlight. (Told of gold and silver once by some traveler at the farm, she had only been able to picture them as such.)
    The tree of gold and silver, of suns and moons, attracted Volpa in the dream. She went to it, and began the slow circling dance her mother had taught her for trees.
    Then, high in the branches, something moved that also shone. She thought it was a cat at first, but then she saw it had no legs, or ears, and instead of a pelt it was smooth and sheened as any of the fruits of the tree.
    As she had told her mother this dream, the mother had grown anxious. “What did you do? Did you pick any of the fruits?”
    “Oh no,” said the child, “they would have burned me, I thought.”
    “And the snake?”
    “Was it a snake?”
    The mother nodded.
    The child said, “It slid down and stared in my face. It had such beautiful eyes.”
    “But did it speak—or offer anything?”
    “No, mumma.”
    Her mother’s face had eased.
    “And then?”
    “Then you woke me.”
    “God forgive me that.”
    The night after her mother’s death, and going up theladder with Master