Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

to the richness life held for him.
    Eventually, she had pulled a rope that rang a bell. They’d been expecting her. Of course they had. A very large sum would have been provided to ensure she was admitted—and never left. Leonora had gone in, heard an iron gate close behind her.
    Time had passed in that place. Her body grew. A child was born and was taken away. There were prayers at dawn and sunset. Awake, asleep, seasons and sorrow.
    The Council of Twelve sent two men to speak with her.
    She hadn’t been sure how they even knew she was there. Now, she is certain she is not the first woman brought to the retreat to have been asked to assist the council. Money will have changed hands for this, as well. The retreat is extremely wealthy.
    She never asked about this, but it makes sense, and after that visit, after what was carefully hinted at then directly queried, she’d begun thinking in terms of what made sense in a life. Of choices and chances, decisions to be weighed.
    The same two men had come back from Seressa a little later, after giving her time to consider what they offered—which was an opportunity to be in the world again.
    She had accepted. She’d left the Daughters of Jad this morning at dawn. They’d had a horse for her. She was a Valeri, she had hunted from childhood, of course she knew how to ride. They’d known that, too. She’d looked back once in misty greyness: the stone walls, the sanctuary dome, the bell by the gate. The gate had already closed behind her.
    And so now, that same night, she is in Seressa, away from that solitude and judgment and false sanctity, the pinched, fearful bitterness. Not all, to be fair—there were genuinely pious women in that place, kind ones. They had tried, but had been no help to her at all: she was never one of the bitter, she was simply claimed by sorrow.
    And she doesn’t want to live her days under the god’s sun that way.
    She’d needed to be out from those walls. And if her new path—offered by these endlessly subtle Seressinis—might, at its end, bring more shame upon her, upon her family, at least it
was
a path. It went somewhere. Her mind would be engaged, her spirit. And she wasn’t going to spend a single morning, not the length of a dawn prayer, not a candle-flicker moment, dwelling on her family’s pride or shame or her father’s views about what she did.
    Did she love Seressa? The republic she was now to serve? Of course not. She wasn’t sure most Seressinis did, though she might be wrong about that.
    They were proud of their independence, their republic. They valued power, wished to defend it and extend it, were aware of threats moving through the world. They were no worse than anyone else, she told herself, perhaps better than some. She could help them, in exchange for a gate unlocked. She would do that, and let no one judge her but Jad, who sees all with mercy and understands sorrow.
    She had taken herself to that place in her mind, while preparing to leave the sanctuary.
    And then, so unexpectedly, the doctor she was to pretend to have wed turned out to be a shy, decent man. She thought there might be kindness in him.
    She was the one who was kind that first night. There were things she had learned (in joy) from the boy she’d loved and been loved by. These could be shared. It was necessary, what she did in the dark of Miucci’s room. They were to pass as husband and wife, newly wed, and their assigned servants in Dubrava would be watching them, and listening. But Leonora discovered, with surprise, that eliciting gratitude carried a different sort of pleasure, and she permitted herself to feel that, accept it, a form of mercy after a shadowed year.
    The sun would emerge from the sea on a different world for her. She would still wonder, then and every single morning when she rose with the god’s light, where her child was that day, if it was alive, cared for, if it was