Best not to think about it. Best to just get it done.
“Light,” the old woman croaked, froglike. She wasn’t really so old, Miles saw now; it was only her sight and the cane that gave the illusion of age. She might be as young as fifty. She stood patiently, waiting, while three of Williams’s men brought torches and stationed them in the stands around the slab, creating a bright circle of light around the young girl in the center of the shadowy room. The girl wore a thin white dress, little more than a shift, and Miles had the unwilling thought that she must be cold, drugs or no. It was early April, warming outside, but in this dank, mold-dripping hell, there was no warmth.
“Go ahead, Orra,” Williams told the old woman, his voice deep and solicitous, and Miles felt a sudden, poisonous envy. Williams wasn’t even a good Christian; he went to church, certainly, as they all did, but that didn’t stop him from keeping two mistresses in his manse. Rumor said that Williams was so brazen about it that the mistresses slept on the same floor as his wife.
He will get his reward in the hereafter, Miles thought, feeling a grim satisfaction at the idea. And there won’t be any seers to grease the skids there.
The old woman had bent over the younger one now, pulling her arms from her dress. She rolled the bodice of the dress down to the girl’s waist, revealing her breasts and the milk-white skin of her torso. Miles crossed himself and looked away, but a moment later his eyes had gone back, almost unwilling.
The old woman began murmuring, low words that Miles could not hear, and the young woman began to writhe. As she twisted on the slab, her eyes rolled up into her head, showing the whites. Miles was growing more uncomfortable by the second, and he didn’t think he was the only one; there was an almost imperceptible movement in the crowd of nobles, shifting and fidgeting, as though they all wished they were anywhere else. When Miles first heard about Williams’s offer, it had seemed a downright bargain: one hundred pounds to find out the year’s forecast! His acres had been devastated in the drought, and the hundred pounds would bring the family treasury down to its last thousand, but a man who knew the year’s weather could make ten times that much, not only by planting the right crops but by hoarding his own long-term stores to create a shortage. Paying Williams had been the easiest decision that Miles had ever made; only now, in this dank room, did he understand that there might be an additional price. His fellow nobles knew it too; they shifted uncomfortably, none of them willing to look at each other, all of them trying not to look at the girl. She had arched her back now, lifting her torso off the table, and her eyes continued to gaze whitely at the ceiling, almost as whitely as those of the old woman who stared down at her, her palm placed flat between the girl’s breasts. The woman’s other hand emerged from the shadows, and Miles saw that she held a dagger.
“God save us,” someone muttered nearby, and several of the lords who stood opposite Miles crossed themselves. But none of them moved to interfere, not even when the old woman made a shallow vertical cut along the line of the girl’s breastbone. Blood welled immediately, a red river cutting a ravine between mountains, almost shockingly scarlet in contrast to the girl’s white skin. Several of the lords in the audience cursed, and behind Miles, someone drew a shaking, hissing breath. As the old woman removed the dagger, the girl stopped writhing and lay still, so still that Miles could not even see her breathe.
“Is she dead?” Lord March asked timidly.
“Shut up, March!” Lord Williams hissed, his eyes focused on the old woman.
My God, Miles thought, he has seen all of this before. How many times?
“I come to speak before you now,” the old woman said, and her voice made Miles jump. It was not the voice of an old woman, or even of a woman at all. The words were hollow and cold, less than human. That night, and for many months afterward, Miles would wake gasping from dreams he could barely remember, dreams in which that voice spoke to him, taunted him, stalked him, coming closer and closer