Four and Twenty Blackbirds

This is not good. I would rather not contemplate the consequences of renegade Priest-Mages wandering about, feeding their own mad agendas. Granted, they had been stripped of their powers, but it hadn't been their magic powers that were the cause of their incarceration. They could still do harm.

They could set themselves up as Priests of some other Order out in the back of beyond, and go back to abusing those who are in their care. And we wouldn't know unless someone reported them, or the local Priest got curious because they stopped attending services in his chapel. Even then, we wouldn't know unless he made an inquiry—

She shook her head. The only thing that she could think to do was to send letters to the Clerks of the Records of all the other Orders, describing the runaways, advising that they might try to set themselves up in their own parishes, and asking that copies of any suspicious inquiries be sent to Kingsford Abbey.

If they dare try that and we catch them—She gritted her teeth. They would be made very unhappy.

I wonder how they would like serving the Church as oxen at one of the hermitage farms? That would be particularly appropriate in the case of Revaner.

She did what she could among the records, made a first draft of the letter she was going to have to send to the other Orders, and locked it in a drawer. She'd have to make some special preparations tomorrow, but this was one time when it made more sense to make copies magically than by hand. Someday, perhaps, she could allow Kayne to know this particular secret, but for now it was best kept as private as possible.

She turned back to the letter from her cousin, for the final paragraph troubled her. Talaysen very seldom asked her for anything, and the request he had for her this time was a disturbing one.

I have been receiving reports from Rayden of the murders of several Free Bards and Gypsies, he wrote. Ardis, I will be the very first to admit that my people tend to get themselves into trouble of their own accord, and occasionally some of them do end up on the wrong end of a knife. But these have all been violent, senseless, horrible murders by absolute strangers; no one understands why or how they happened, and all the victims have been women. Some of my people are becoming very alarmed; they don't know how to explain it, but the ones with magic think that there is some power that is deliberately seeking them out to slay them. I don't know what you can do—but you are a Priest, a mage, and a Justiciar. Can you try to find out what is going on and put a stop to it?

She smoothed her short hair back with both hands and stared at that last paragraph, cursing Talaysen for not sending her all the facts.

But that assumed that hehad them; he might know nothing more than what he had told her. Still, if she had names, dates, places—she might have been able to start an investigation. It would be a great deal more difficult to do so with 'information' that was this vague.

She had already told him, though, in an equally vague sentence at the end of her letter, that she would do everything she could to 'help him with his problem.'

She folded up his letter and locked it away with the other sensitive material in her special desk drawer.I'll put it in the back of my mind and sleep on it, she told herself, knowing that she often came up with solutions to difficult situations that way.Right now, more than anything, I need a little time to myself. My mind feels as bloated and stiff as a cow-gut balloon.

Now—now was her one hour of indulgence, the hour she kept solely for herself, when she could read in silence and peace, and not have to think of anything but the words on the page before her.

She'd only begun taking this hour for herself in the last few weeks; until now, things had been too hectic even to steal a single hour for herself. This was the quiet time she had been hoping for since the Great Fire; in the months that had followed the conflagration, she had been forced to do the work of four people. There had been the situation in her own Order to consolidate, by making certain thather allies in the Order were placed in every position of importance and those whose loyalties were in doubt were put in positions of equal stature, but where they could do her no harm—such as Father Leod. Occasionally, she had been forced to manufacture such positions, to avoid making an outright enemy by demoting him. Then there had been the relief effort in the city—the number of deaths had been appalling, and as the days passed, more and more of the missing had to be added to the rolls of the 'presumed dead.' The number of burned and injured was even worse than the number of dead, for at least the dead no longer suffered. The injured suffered terribly, for fatal burns made for a long, drawn-out, agonizing death when there were not enough painkillers to treat more than a fraction of those hurt. For those who were most likely to die anyway, she had had to make the unpleasant decision to give them the painkillers with the worst long-term side effects—since after all, they would not survive long enough to suffer them—but while they still breathed they could have less agony. Then there were the homeless . . . and the illnesses that followed exposure to the elements, food and water that could not be kept clean, and of course the overwhelming shock and grief.

The one saving grace had been that it was summer rather than winter. The one miracle was that some of the warehouses where the tents used in the Kingsford Faire were stored had been spared. One of Ardis's first acts was to order the warehouses broken into and the tents erected on Faire Field to shelter the homeless, no matter who owned them. Her second had been to commandeer as much canvas as existed within several days' journey and arrange for it, rope, tools, and poles to be made available to the refugees. It was amazing how many of them acquired tent-making skills when the raw materials were left at hand for them to use. She had ensured that no avaricious profiteer could scoop it all up and sell it by having the canvas parceled into reasonable bits and rationed by armed guard.

All of the resources of the Church had been put to the task of making it possible for people to begin salvaging their lives again, and between the Church and their Duke, by that winter, most people had some sort of reasonable shelter to meet the snow.