“Lord, if you are in that much pain now, we are foolish to go on.”

“You call your Firelord a fool, handmaid?” He tried to sound angry, but sounded grieved instead. He bent his head in his hands, and sighed.

I turned the raven on the spit, and stirred the vegetables. I felt all his torment like waves over me. I stood up and went to him, crouched at his side, and put my hand on his arm “Lord, I love you, and your suffering hurts me. Is there any way I can go and light the fires for you, on your behalf?”

He lifted his head and looked at me His face was grey like stone, and steeled against the pain. Even so, he smiled. “God, Elsha, have you no fear at all? They’d kill you. A Quelled in the holy place is the most foul of all abominations.”

“Who says so?”

He chuckled quietly, took my fingers in his, and squeezed them. “Elsha, sometimes you terrify me. I question things, and that is frightening enough – but you cut them open to the core.”

“The core’s rotten, lord. The Chosen made the laws, the traditions. The Chosen, not God, branded us and made us Quelled. The Chosen made two fires, hung the curtain between, and caused the separation. And that separation is the abomination in the temple, not me.”

He looked at me as if I were possessed. “Who told you those things?”

“No one, lord. I just know them. I’ve known them since I was a child.”

“Not the truths, Elsha. The curtain. Who told you about the curtain? No one goes in that room except me once a year, and the old priest who tends the fires. Who told you about it?”

I moved away from him, and sat staring into the fire. “I had a dream,” I said. “I dreamed about the two altars and the fires on them, one for the Chosen and one for the Quelled, and with the great black curtain in between. I dreamed that the curtain was torn down, and that both fires burned on the high golden altar, together.”

He wiped his hands down over his face, and looked so shaken I thought he was going to pass out. I moved to help him, but he raised his hand.

“I am all right, Elsha. But I’m beginning to think I’ve been mistaken about you. Badly mistaken, about a lot of things.”

My heart fell. My whole world fell. I dared not speak, or look at him.

“Elsha, you told me once that you had divined, and I … I laughed, as I remember. Tell me again what happened.”