Read The Fire and the Fog for Free Online Page B

spread-eagle, onto his bed, staring at the ceiling and
trying to make sense of what had just happened.
    He ignored calls from his mother, trying to
get him downstairs for dinner, and instead lay in bed thinking,
staring up at the ceiling yet seeing nothing till he fell asleep,
and yet he was no closer to an answer than when he had started.

 
The Girl

    I
     
    Erris was excited. She woke up excited, she
worked excited, she went to sleep excited. Every day in the past
week she had been excited, and she knew nothing would be different
in the next two days either. In two days, she would be sixteen.
    Not that it was as important for her as for
other girls, or so she’d heard. She wouldn’t be pampered and
trained to be a lady like some city girl, pretty and plump and
useless. She would continue to work on her fathers’ farm, the way
it should be. But she could be married now, if her father ever
found her a suitable husband. Or at least she could be in two days.
She wondered, sometimes, what that would be like. Cooking and
cleaning, helping to run a farm. Someday having children…
    Still, turning sixteen was supposed to be an
important day for a girl. She wasn’t quite sure why, but it was, so
she was excited.
    She would be sixteen; no longer a child in
the eyes of the Church, although she couldn’t yet be called an
adult. She would be allowed to commune and confess when her family
went to church, but not to vote. They seldom went to church, it was
rare to be able to put the time in to go; even more rare to be
called in to a vote. A day’s ride away, the nearest church was
small, with an even smaller congregation. Well, the nearest Regan
church. There were several Rognian churches closer, but they
weren’t allowed to those. Rognia was very strict about its
churches.
    The border between the two countries was
fluid, and both churches worshipped Ragn. Why it mattered which
church someone worshipped at though, Erris didn’t know. And her
father had been vague the last time she asked, saying something
about different hierarchies and different rules. She suspected he
didn’t know either.
    Still, while the confession and communion
might be nice, there were better rewards for turning sixteen; she
had convinced her father to take the family into town, to the
tavern, for her birthday supper. Trips into town were rare, and she
was sure there would be cute soldier boys there for her to practice
blushing over; there almost always were.
    So if Erris woke quickly that morning,
excited and ready to hurry through another day, well, at least
no-one could blame her.
    Of course, having a birthday soon never meant
the chores disappeared. Chores were like time; they were always
there, even when you didn’t notice them. So, as the sun rose slowly
in the East, as it did every morning, and as roosters rushed to be
the first to wake everyone, as they did every morning, Erris rose.
She doused her face quickly with water from the washbasin in her
room, slipped on her rough-woven wool trousers and tunic and slid
barefoot out the window of the room she shared with her sisters, to
the dirt below.
    She could have left the room through the
door; it was a working door, and more than adequate in size. She
could even have gone through the door without waking her sisters;
Joahn and Serah were not exactly light sleepers. But then she would
have run into her parents and brothers, all likely already at the
breakfast table. If she made an appearance in the morning, her
mother would try, again, to force her to eat till she burst. Her
mother thought her too skinny, but Erris simply didn’t feel like
eating ninety-seven helpings of eggs and bread every morning. She
wouldn’t eat unless she was hungry, and right then she wasn’t, so
why force it.
    So instead of padding lightly across the
polished wooden floors of the house towards the kitchen to sit on
whichever of the eight sturdy wooden chairs happened to be
available, Erris’ bare feet hit soft soil, still