The Passion of Dolssa Read Online Free

lifetime lived in my parents’ house, to be part of the world and make a difference in it. To do something, however small. To speak, and be heard, if only in my own home. I thought I would speak in the city squares, but Mamà forbade it. “You do not dare do such a thing,” she said. “This city is full of inquisitors, combing through the people for hidden heresies. To preach on the street is to arouse their alarm.”
    It didn’t matter. People came. People sat outside and listened under windows. Just so, I later learned, did one eager young inquisitor and his elderly companion sit and listen. I didn’t know it at the time.
    I preached almost daily. One day, I remember, I saw the tall man who had come to our home when Papà died. He sat and listened to me speak. His face was so grave, he frightened me. Afterward, while the other guests mingled and broke bread, he approached and thanked me for my holy message. He offered me a pair of apricots. They sat so temptingly soft in his hand—did he know I couldn’t resist apricots?—but I said no. A storm cloud moved across his eyes. He bowed and walked away.
    Not long after, Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore began to preach in the square closest to our home. His voice was musical, but his accent was French and northern. He had keen dark eyes that missed no detail. Were he not a tonsured friar, he might have been a comely man.
    Day after day he returned, raising his voice of warning. I could hear him from the upper window where I sat. We must flee the treacherous heresy, he said, that entwined itself around our way of life—the false beliefs that slithered through the grasses of our fair Provensa, with false teachers leading people away from the true faith and toward unholy rituals and vows. Lucifer’s enticements, he warned, were no less beguiling today than those he’d planted in the Garden. The heretics, those false teachers of no authority, were serpents, and we ignorant Tolosans were Eve, deadly fruit poised upon our lips.
    Upon my lips.
    In our Father’s house, I told the believers, there is never alarm, but only gladness, love, and peace.
    Not long after that, the interrogations began.

BOTILLE
    made my first match when I was thirteen, but it was so easy, I don’t know if I should even claim credit for it. Make no mistake, I charged a fee. I never let qualms get in the way when money is involved.
    We had only just moved to Bajas, my sisters and Jobau and I, and taken over the derelict tavern on the skirts of town, near the water but not too near, for Plazensa required an ale cellar. The villagers still looked at us with some suspicion. We weren’t local. We spoke Oc, but our accents were different. We came from the city of Carcassona, and we weren’t a fishing family. And then there was Jobau. Mamà had charged us to look after him, keep him out of the way, and prevent him from provoking others. Plazensa grew skilled at fermenting just about anything, and we followed Mamà’s orders by keeping Jobau drunk.
    The fishwives especially distrusted Plazensa, who at sixteen stood tall and buxom, with the thickest head of long black curls this side of the Pirenèus Mountins. I didn’t attract much notice, but Sazia did. At nine, she wore boys’ trousers and wandered up to villagers offering to tell their fortunes for a penny. She made people wonder. They wondered all the more when Sazia’s predictions about where the fisherman would net the greatest haul proved right again and again.
    Plazensa said we should call the tavern the Three Skylarks. Sazia suggested the Three Pigeons, and it stuck. “After all,” she said, “you might bake a pigeon into a pie, but never a skylark.” All that summer as we patched and painted the tavern, and Plazensa scolded me for notdoing enough to help, I watched out the window as the goat-cheese man’s daughter, Lisette, sat in her parents’ back garden, uphill from us, eating plums and stitching something in her little cloth book. To