—The Early History of the Tearling, as told by Merwinian
Miles, Lord Marshall, had never wanted to come down here in the first place. He’d heard enough about the Creche to want no part of it, and most of the others seemed to feel the same; looking around the dim, crowded room, Miles saw expressions of boredom, exasperation, disgust. But no one made a move to leave.
Lord Williams had produced the crone off of one of his tenant patches. Even Miles, whose acreage was more than fifty miles away in the Almont Plain, had heard about this woman: Orra, the Eye of the Crithe. They said she could foretell the weather, and though Miles did not quite believe in such things, it could not be denied that Williams had been extraordinarily lucky. Bumper crops, averted floods . . . Miles had even heard that Orra had helped foil a plot by the Blue Horizon to rob one of Williams’s caravans on its way to New London. Several lords from the northern Almont had tried to steal the old woman once, Miles had heard, but she had seen them coming, and her entire village had beaten the would-be kidnappers off with sticks. Miles didn’t know if the rumor was true, but it made a good tale, and he loved a good tale.
What am I doing here? he wondered again, looking around the dingy room, an incongruous background for the crowd of well-dressed nobles that filled it from end to end. Miles was by no means young, but he was certainly the newest lord here; his father had died unexpectedly four years before, launching him into the family lands and titles at the age of thirty-eight. Miles had never been to the Creche before, for his vices were minimal—cards and an occasional drink—and they could be well serviced in the Gut. As the group traveled through the endless warren of tunnels and intersections—Miles praying, all the while, that they would not get lost, for he could think of nothing worse than wandering directionless in this dark, dank hell beneath the streets of New London—he had begun to understand that the Creche was another animal entirely. He tried not to look, but he had never had that gift some had of turning away from degeneracy entirely, and so he saw them: children, rooms and rooms full of them, their eyes big and dark with want. Some of them were skinny to the point of emaciation, and many looked as though they hadn’t bathed in weeks. In one room, Miles had seen a girl no older than his youngest daughter, doing a strangely sinuous dance for a group of men, and that single glimpse had convinced him that all of the stories about the Creche were true.
Now there was a shuffling and murmuring at the far end of the room. The crowd of nobles parted to admit the old woman, who walked with one hand on a cane and the other wrapped around Lord Williams’s arm. As she came closer, Miles saw that she was blind, both of her eyes milky with cataracts. As her sightless gaze passed over him, he shuddered.
“Ellens!” Williams deposited the old woman gently into a chair that had been placed beside the six-foot slab of stone in the center of the room. “You have the girl?”
Ellens came forward, leading a slight figure in a hood and cloak. When Ellens pulled back her hood, Miles saw that she was very young, surely no more than fourteen. She had a peasant’s simple face, her nose dotted with freckles. Her eyes rolled vacantly toward the ceiling.
Drugged, Miles realized.
“Well, let’s get on with it!” someone barked from the back. Miles thought it was Lord Tare. “I don’t want to spend a moment more in this shithole than I have to!”
“No one begged you to come, Tare!” Williams snapped back. “In fact, I seem to recall lifting a hundred pounds from you for the privilege.”
Tare muttered something inaudible but venomous. Ellens removed the girl’s cloak and helped her to lie down on the stone slab. Now that Miles’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw that the slab itself was covered with odd symbols that had been etched into the stone: sun and moon, the crude rendering of a ship, even a five-pointed star. That last was a pagan symbol, Miles knew, and he wondered—not for the first time—what Bishop Wallace would say if he could see Miles here, in