‘Yes, my lord,’ he said and went to fetch his materials.
* * *
*
Marek lay awake in his bed. He couldn’t sleep. He had tried to tell Lispeth that the nun looked like his dead mother, but she refused to care.
‘Did you see her hair?’
‘It was ugly hair—is that what you mean?’
‘She looks just like my father described her.’
‘Who?’
‘My mother,’ Marek said, tears rising in his eyes. ‘Maybe she’s back from the dead. Maybe she’s here to save me.’
‘From what?’
‘From you, maybe,’ Marek said.
‘Guilt will make you crazy,’ Lispeth said. ‘Just shush and go to sleep. You’ve been nothing but trouble all day.’
Marek was appalled that Lispeth would attack him now, after everything he’d gone through. ‘Have you forgotten that I buried my father today?’
‘Maybe you’ll feel less crazy if I move my chair away.’
Lispeth dragged her chair to the corner and sat down.
‘Better now?’
‘Yes,’ Marek said.
They were quiet for a while. Marek turned his face away from his pillow. It smelled like Lispeth, of cabbage and sweat and fine blond hair and the girl’s downy skin.
‘Think Jacob might come back, too?’ Lispeth asked.
‘Go to hell,’ Marek said into the darkness. ‘Maybe you’ll be happy there.’
‘Maybe, my lord,’ Lispeth replied.
‘I think I’ll sleep better if I am alone.’
Lispeth got up wordlessly, went out, and shut the door.
The hallway was quiet as she walked down the stairs and through the great hall. She didn’t need a candle to light her way. She knew the manor like her own breath, moving past corners and through passageways, down steps and up steps, through doorways, never thinking of the manor as a place, but as the only place. Like Clod, she had never been off the hill. Luka had left, and the stablehands sometimes went down to Lapvona, but they never spoke of what they saw. Lispeth had no curiosity. She would rather travel up into the sky than down into the village, where nobody would understand her, and where everyone toiled in vain. She passed through to the kitchen and down the stairs into the cellar where the cabbage was stewing. Lispeth was hungry, and she knew this because she could feel her hands itch to join together in prayer. She thought of eating as an act of ritual, worship. God was infinite, so just a symbol counted. To eat more than a single leaf of cabbage was greedy, akin to asking for proof of God from God Himself. The thing Lispeth despised most in people, or at least how she imagined people to be, like Marek, was their expectation that faith ought to be painless. As if faith required no effort. Anyone could whip himself and say he’s faithful. Real faith was earned through self-denial. Lispeth could live off a speck of dust if that was what she chose as her food. She scoffed at the other servants who ate as they cooked and took scraps from the table, picked fruit freely from the trees. Lispeth didn’t. Perhaps God liked her best, she thought, because she asked for so little.
* * *
*
Dibra decided not to pack more than a few apples and a carafe of water on her trip to look for Luka that night. She worried that if she took any more, Jenevere would tell Villiam that she had prepared for a long journey. She didn’t want anyone to come after her.
‘Won’t you take a torch?’ Jenevere asked.
Dibra shook her head. A torch would only draw attention. She planned to sleep on the horse, let it follow its nose to wherever Luka had gone, whether it was to Krisk or beyond. She thought, maybe he is waiting for me, enacting a plan that I was deaf to hear in my sorrow. Luka could be very nuanced in his language at times. Maybe this was his big romantic gesture, Dibra wondered. Could Luka be so naive to believe that the fantasy of running away together could come true? Did he think Dibra would be swept away in that dream? She was not so romantic. But she did want to leave the manor. There was nothing to keep her there: her child was dead; she felt no loyalty to Villiam, especially now that her father in Kaprov was long dead, the risk of humiliating him eliminated; and her brother, Ivan, was so obnoxious, he deserved the stress and trouble he’d go through if she disappeared. Ivan had been the one to convince their father to marry Dibra off to Villiam. ‘Lapvona dirt is good dirt,’ Ivan said. ‘So what if the man is a skeleton? You don’t marry for love,’ he’d said. She should have run off with Luka the first time she’d ever seen him. They could have gone anywhere in that carriage. Stupid to think of it now.