Three (The Godslayer Cycle Book 3) by Ron Glick

Author:Ron Glick [Glick, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ron Glick, incorporated
Published: 2015-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Erias shifted her weight in the saddle. She so disliked traveling by horse. It was much easier when she could do so by carriage. But her present mission for the church required that she journey into the Wildelands, and no horse-drawn carriage would ever have made it through some of the narrow passes where she wished to go.

Zantel's church was perhaps the greatest in all the land, if for no other reason than the God of Merchants controlled the very coin that so many of the other Gods' faithful sought to coax from their faithful. Zantel's church was actually a bank in and of itself, so it controlled fabulous amounts of wealth - even that which had not been clearly contributed to the church's purpose. With such monumental resources at their disposal, how could they not be the greatest faith in all the land? Even if one did not openly claim to be the faithful of Zantel, commerce was its own religion that everyone in the civilized world practiced - and the God of Merchants oversaw all commerce.

This had been the most appealing aspect of Zantel's faith to Erias when she was a young girl - the idea that priests of Zantel never wanted for anything. They always had money, and they never had to do any menial chores to obtain it. Erias' mother, Gerelda, had been a barmaid, her father some traveling vagabond who had not stayed long enough to see his own child take her first breath. By contrast, the church was paradise on Na'Ril.

Erias had been raised poor, often going hungry if her mother's patrons had not seen fit to offer her any gratuities for her service. Her employer, the wretched innkeep who owned her mother's work deed, was a miser. Sometimes he would pay Erias' mother, other times he would find some fault or another to penalize the woman with as an excuse not to. Had Gerelda been required to pay for her lodging, she would never have been able to afford it - she barely fed her daughter.

Gerelda had been a good mother in every way she could. She had never been overly abusive with young Erias, and more often than not, she would go without food herself so that Erias could eat. But the sheer poverty in which the two were forced to live left young Erias bitter and resentful. And it had made her ripe for being culled by the church.

When a priest of Zantel had come into the inn where her mother worked, Erias had been spellbound. When the priest learned of Gerelda's plight and that of her daughter, he offered the innkeep a gold pence for the barmaid's child. Gerelda had refused, but her employer sold the child all the same. And it would be the last day Erias would ever see her mother. Not that the child protested much past being taken from her mother's presence that first day.

Erias had not missed her life with her mother for long.

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