Chapter 47 #2
Shadows played over Lisbeth’s face as they walked under the arching canopy of blossoming flowers.
She eyed Amryn. “If I believed in witches, I would have thought your mother was one. Aileen Varden bewitched Ferrin with a mere smile, and he couldn’t strike her from his thoughts.
He could barely focus during our prayer hours or scripture study. All he could think about was her.”
The high cleric’s lip curled. Amryn was certain the action was unconscious; Lisbeth seemed wholly lost in the past, her gaze taking on a distant glow.
“Aileen and her brother, Rix, were close friends of Torin, the new young king of Ferradin. While the king visited the chapel as mandated by the emperor, and Rix accompanied him, Aileen did not. She stayed outside, talking with the locals in the markets instead of attending the sermons. We could often see her through the church windows. She was not easy to miss, with her flaming red hair.” Lisbeth’s eyes flicked to Amryn’s own fiery locks, but she was quick to look away.
“Ferrin’s eyes would stray to her constantly,” she continued.
“When I caught him talking to Aileen in the market one day, he told me he only wanted to save her soul. I warned him that she had no desire to serve the Divinities, and that it would be better for him to focus on more willing souls.” She shook her head.
“I tried. The Divinities know I did.” She sighed, her shoulders falling.
“I should have tried harder. When he asked me not to tell our superiors that he was meeting her in secret . . . I should have done exactly that. But I didn’t.
I thought no true harm could come to him.
We were only going to be in Ferradin for a few more months, and I was sure all would revert to normal once we returned home to Daersen.
” She grunted, the sound low and hard. “That assumption died when it was discovered Aileen was with child. Ferrin’s child. ”
The bloodstone warmed against Amryn’s chest, probably responding to her chaotic emotions. Even though she knew this story ultimately didn’t have a happy ending, she was breathlessly hanging on every word.
“It was a scandal, of course.” Lisbeth’s hands curled to fists.
“A holy initiate, on the cusp of becoming a cleric, getting a young woman pregnant? Not just any young woman, but a non-believer?” She made a sound in her throat.
“Ferrin broke every sacred law of our faith. Every vow he’d ever taken as an initiate.
He never should have touched a woman—even looked at a woman—in such a way.
And now he’d fathered a child out of wedlock.
Even worse, with a noblewoman high in King Torin’s court.
When our superiors found out, they were understandably appalled.
But Ferrin was a favorite in the church.
They were willing to spare him the disgrace of such a public sin.
They offered him forgiveness. All he had to do was repent and serve his penance without complaint, and all would be forgotten. ”
“Penance?” Amryn asked, her voice sounding weak to her own ears. She was reeling from Lisbeth’s story. A story that bound her and the High Cleric of Craethen in ways she never could have conceived.
“Yes,” Lisbeth said. “They demanded he leave Ferradin immediately. They would send him to Palar to finish his training so he could still become a cleric. They planned to take Aileen to the temple in Daersen. They thought it best for everyone if she gave birth there, in secret, so she could be saved from the scandal as well. The child would then be raised by the church as an orphan, and Aileen could return to her life in Ferradin—with coin, if she promised to never speak a word of what had happened.”
Amryn tried to imagine her mother’s panic.
Aileen would have been younger than Amryn was now, and she’d found herself unmarried and pregnant.
Not only that, but with the child of an initiate of the church.
A church that believed all empaths were monsters who deserved death.
She had to have been so afraid. The clerics wanted to take her to a temple in Daersen.
They wanted to take her baby away from her.
The mere thought of her mother’s situation—the terror she must have felt—made Amryn sick. And it made her wonder . . . Had Aileen loved Ferrin at that point? Had she trusted him enough to tell him that she was an empath? Or was she facing the full consequences of this on her own?
“The clerics laid out their plan to Ferrin,” Lisbeth said, interrupting Amryn’s swirling thoughts.
“It was a path to redemption, but Ferrin wouldn’t listen.
I had never seen him lose his temper before that night.
In all our years together, he was always controlled.
Calm. But I will never forget the way he faced the clerics in that chapel.
With such fury, such . . . rebellion.” A shudder went through her, her eyes pinching shut.
“He rejected their offering of forgiveness. He refused to give up Aileen, or their unborn child. He denounced everything on the spot. The church. The vows he’d already taken as an initiate.
He renounced every dream he ever had of becoming a cleric—a high cleric, even.
” Her eyes opened, and she pinned Amryn with her stare.
“Ferrin chose excommunication that night, and he lost everything because of it.”
Because of Aileen.
Lisbeth didn’t say the words, but Amryn felt them. The air between them was nearly strangled by the high cleric’s barely restrained rage and pained resentment of a woman long dead.
Suddenly, Amryn understood the depth of the high cleric’s emotions. And even though Amryn didn’t want to have sympathy for a high cleric . . . she did. Because she had experienced this pain herself. “He left you,” she whispered. “You considered him your brother, and he chose her instead of you.”
Lisbeth blinked slowly. Amryn could see the moment the high cleric realized she may have revealed too much.
Her jaw tightened. Her jealousy thinned but didn’t disappear.
“It is in the past. It matters little, now.” Her words were dismissive, yet her emotions remained barbed.
Defensive. “Ferrin invited me to their wedding, but I refused to go. I would have no part in his sins. How could I condone his choice, when he was ruining his life and refusing to listen to me? We were family, and he rejected me just as easily as he rejected his faith.”
Lisbeth’s pain from that rejection still lingered, a sting that time had not been able to dull. She’d been left behind by the one person she’d always counted on. The one person she’d trusted. Her family.
Saints, Amryn knew how that felt.
Apparently, Ferrin Lukis excelled at abandonment.
Considering what he’d done to his family, Amryn knew she shouldn’t even be interested in learning more about him. She certainly didn’t want to feel a shred of sympathy. And yet . . .
Amryn knew, at least a little, of what it might have felt like for her father during that time in his life.
She’d left behind everything she’d ever known to go to Esperance, just as he’d left behind everything he’d ever known when he’d severed ties with the church.
Amryn had even fallen in love as he had, with someone who could have been considered an enemy.
And Amryn had abandoned her mission with the Rising, just as Ferrin had abandoned his faith.
She didn’t appreciate the comparisons. Because in the end, they didn’t matter. Her father had made his choices.
Amryn had had to live with them.
“Did you ever see him again?” she asked Lisbeth.
A surge of old pain rose. It was faded, yet still carried a sting.
Her voice was almost remote as she said, “He wrote letters, in the beginning. I read them, though I never responded. He told me about the birth of his son, Tiras, and, later, the birth of his daughter.” She glanced at Amryn.
Her spine straightened. “Ferrin professed to be happy, but I’m not certain it was the truth.
You must understand, he had no real skills.
An orphan raised by the church is educated in basics and given a foundation of faith.
But at age twelve, they’re given the choice—become an initiate, or leave the temple to become an apprentice and learn a trade.
Ferrin had made his choice. He was trained in prayer and the holy word.
Without them, he had no means to provide for his family.
If Aileen hadn’t been such a close friend to King Torin, they probably would have starved on the streets within their first year of marriage.
” Her head tilted as she looked at Amryn.
“You were young when your parents and brother were killed by those thieves.”
It was the story Rix had created. The story even Torin believed. That thieves had targeted the Lukis family, and they’d killed everyone but Amryn, who’d hidden under a bed at the inn they were staying at.
In those first years afterward, Amryn had wondered if her father would come forward to disprove the story, but he never had. He probably knew Rix would kill him if he ever surfaced.
“There is a detail about Ferrin’s death that haunts me,” Lisbeth said. “Something that makes me certain he had regrets about choosing your mother.”
The man certainly had regrets, or else he wouldn’t have betrayed his family to the knights. Amryn didn’t say that, of course. All she could ask was, “What makes you think that?”
Lisbeth’s stare was intent. “Your family was killed in a small city along the imperial highway. A city located between Ferradin’s capital and Daersen. It’s the path Ferrin would have taken if he’d wanted to return home—to the church.”