Her appetite wasn’t what it had been. And while she had braided her own hair today, even coiling it around itself at the crown of her head and securing it with pins, she had seen herself in the mirror. Simon was right — she looked like a ghost of herself, hollowed out.
Ru waited for Lady Bellenet to speak, to make some impossible request of Ru, to threaten, to cajole. Instead, after a time, the lady rose from the table and went to the window. She wore a dove grey dress, and her hair hung loose around her shoulders. To Ru, she appeared almost childlike in that moment, framed in sunlight, squinting against the sparkling snow.
At last, she turned back to Ru, her expression unreadable. “You went to the temple.”
This caught Ru off guard. She had believed it was a secret between herself and Taryel. Had he told her?
“I saw you,” Lady Bellenet said, as if understanding Ru’s thoughts. “In a dream. I see many things. They are often vague and unclear, these messages from my god. But this one, I understood. Ask me.”
Ru fumbled for a response. “Ask you? I…”
“About my daughter.”
The room was warm, heated by a roaring fire in the hearth, but goosebumps formed on Ru’s arms. “The one in the note.”
Lady Bellenet said nothing, her hands folded perfectly in front of her, her face still half-turned toward the sun.
“What happened to her?” It was the only question Ru could think to ask. She knew that the daughter was Lord D’Luc’s, that she had died as an infant. She knew that the infant’s death had led to Lady Bellenet’s faith, her power, and, in some tangential way, to the artifact and Ru.
“She was sent away,” said Lady Bellenet, casting her gaze toward a not-so-distant past. “She was beautiful. So sweet, a perfect child. Always smiling. I named her Dulcinea, my name, and my mother’s name. She used to hold my thumb in her tiny hand, and refused to let go.” She tilted her head as if in thought. “I never wanted to marry. I had never yearned for motherhood. But when she came, it was as if my life had found its purpose. I would, I thought, be happy forever.”
She paused for such a long time that Ru began to wonder if she was waiting for a question or a prompt. But no words seemed right.
Finally, Lady Bellenet touched the tip of a finger to her eye, as if to staunch an unshed tear. Then she continued. “Hugon was devoted to her. Devoted to me. He would have given anything for us. But it wasn’t enough. I had always wantedmore, you see. I had imagined Dulcie and I traveling the world. Seeing distant shores together. Hugon wanted me at home, doing needlework, speaking soft words, and doing soft things.”
Ru couldn’t imagine Lord D’Luc expecting such a thing from a woman he loved. He was drawn to ambition, to progress. But that had been nearly a decade ago. Perhaps, she thought, the loss had changed him. “So you refused him,” she said. “But Dulcinea…”
Lady Bellenet turned at last to look at her. Grief shone bright in her eyes. Her fingers twisted. “I wanted to keep her. But he wouldn’t have his reputation sullied by a bastard child. He wouldn’t seeminesullied. I didn’t care. I would have made do without my social standing. As long as I had my Dulcie,and the world at my fingertips. But he…” A tear ran down her cheek, catching the sunlight. “He and my father overpowered me and sent Dulcie away. There was a home for orphans and bastards, not far from Hugon’s country estate. He promised to be generous, to send yearly payments for her upkeep. That she would have a comfortable life. No one but our families ever needed to know. It was best for us, he said. Dulcie had only been there for two months when I received word.”
She brushed the tear from her cheek with hurried fingers, and it was the first time Ru had seen her shaken. It was the first time her movements had not been practiced, poised, delicate. She was, after all, a young woman. Not much older than Ru.
“What happened?” Ru asked, suppressing the irrational urge to reach out. Lady Bellenet needed no one’s comfort, least of all Ru’s.
“A sickness,” the lady replied, lifting her chin. “It took a quarter of the children at the house. All of the infants were lost.”
“So you left,” said Ru, remembering. “But why didn’t you tell Hugon?”
Lady Bellenet’s jaw tensed. “He had not earned the courtesy. It was he who had sent Dulcie to her death,hewho insisted. He might have discovered the fate of our daughter for himself if he hadn’t drowned himself in drink immediately after sending her away. He never read the letters the orphanage sent, never bothered to check in. His accountant had continued to send yearly payments, all that time, to a dead daughter.” She took a long, unsteady breath. “For many years I called him a murderer. It was only when I found faith in Festra that I…” she shook her head, glancing at Ru. “That I found it in myself to forgive.”
“He didn’t tell me,” Ru said, and the admission stung. He had painted himself the victim, a man abandoned. “About the orphanage, I mean.”
The other woman let loose a bitter laugh. “Of course he wouldn’t. You know as well as I that Hugon D’Luc acts for no one but himself. It will be his downfall. But I didn’t bring you here for your sympathy.”
Ru understood now, on the most basic level. Lady Bellenet had been a woman with no escape from her grief. There had been no one she could turn to for comfort, her sadness wrapped tightly and concealed beneath a veneer of ladylike poise. Festra, somehow, might have been the first and only being to grant Dulcie Bellenet some measure of comfort. Of relief.
It was no wonder that the woman clung so tightly to her faith. She had written a note, pleading for her child’s peace in the afterlife. And Festra had given her a power beyond mortal reckoning.
“I envy him,” said Lady Bellenet.
The words startled Ru. They were broken and raw, as if she spoke with a voice that was her own for the first time. “Lord D’Luc?”
Lady Bellenet’s face twisted. “No. Taryel Aharis. He and I are more alike than you might guess. Both touched by a god, each of us unworthy of forgiveness. His heart, like mine, broken and hardened beyond recognition. Both calling out for a thing it cannot have. But his…” she looked at Ru, and her eyes were aflame. Warring emotions seemed to dance across her face, and color rose high in her cheeks. “His heart found its counterpart. Its anchor.”
She reached out one hand, shaking fingers brushing Ru’s face. “That is why,” she said, deep voice catching, choking on emotion, “your Cleansing will be more powerful than Taryel’s Destruction could have ever been. It will draw from the love between you like water from a bottomless well. It will spread like a dark flood from one end of the world to the other. No one and nothing will be left to defy it.”
Dread rose in Ru like the dark flood Lady Bellenet so reverently spoke of. She had thought that maybe this vulnerability from the other woman had been a crack in the facade. That it might all come crumbling away at last, like the storybooks from childhood — the tortured villain turns to love, accepts that she can change, and then does.
Ru took a step back from Lady Bellenet. This was no storybook.
