Light in the Darkness by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CJ Brightley

ONCE SHE WAS home and had her Pa comfortably settled in bed – though not without argument – Lainie took a long bath and slept the rest of that day and all the next. When she woke up the day after that, she lay in bed for a long time, remembering her adventure with Mr. Vendine and that night in the meadow, and wishing things could be different. Then she told herself sternly she could wish her life away and it would never do her or anyone else any good, and it was time to get up and get on with her life.

She cooked breakfast and cleaned up, then she patched the clothes Pa and Dobay had been wearing when they were shot. She wished she could make new ones for them, but try though she might, she had never been able to sew a piece of clothing that anyone could wear without looking like a ragamuffin. At least she was good at sewing on patches. She had heard tell of a machine of foreign invention now being made in Amber Bay, far away on the west coast of the Wildings, that could sew. Some seamstresses used them now to make the ready-made clothes that were sold in the mercantiles faster and more cheaply. If she had one of those machines, maybe then she could stitch a seam worthy of the name, maybe even sew herself a dress someday.

The mending done, she started working on the beans for that night’s supper. She sat at the kitchen table, picking through dried beans to sort out the moldy ones and bits of dirt and gravel. Without the distraction of sewing, her emotions started churning around inside her again, and she tossed aside the debris as though it had personally offended her.

She didn’t know if Mr. Vendine was still around. It didn’t seem likely that someone like him would stick around Bitterbush Springs for days, waiting for her to make an impossible choice. More likely, he had gone off hunting the next rogue mage and had sent a message to the Mage Council in Granadaia telling them about her, and one day someone would come to either take her away or destroy her mind.

Not that she would let them. She would fight them, and she knew that her Pa’s ranch hands would fight them as well. If it came down to it, she would die before she let them take her away and turn her into someone like her grandmother.

It was just as well if Mr. Vendine had left, she told herself. It didn’t matter to him what happened to her. She had been silly to hope that what had happened in that mountain meadow meant anything to him, that it was anything more than that magical hunger. And anyway, who was she to talk? Hadn’t it only been the hunger for her, as well?

Her hands slowed in their task as, despite her best efforts, she found herself unable to deny what she already knew.

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