Our Little Gods 1: RABATEA, the first World of the Daughters.

Chapter 2

One Hundred and Sixty Five Years Later, Mainland Limore.

The vast sky was dotted with a few towering giant clouds, perfectly white and absolutely unconcerned with the white-haired man picking his way across the busy courtyard of the sprawling Keregan's Tall-House. Someone was singing in the kitchens in a clear voice raised effortlessly in a rendition of a popular love song about a maid and a fountain and a blind boy, and further away, from beyond the defensive palisade, the smoking lodge's high chimney puffed continuously heavy clouds of dark grey smoke and one could get the scent of meat sweating its fat . The man waved at master Stöllan who was sitting in the sun with a group of seven children teaching them about herbs. Their relations had not always been cordial. The resident master had seen the arrival of the senior man directly from Ael, four years earlier, as a comment by the churches on the quality of his work. But since the man was granted leave to tutor only the lord's sons and never interfered with the healing lodge, the younger Stöllan mellowed and finally was won over by master Limero's offer to share the volumes he had brought with him directly from the Holy archipelago.

Limero knew intimately that it wasn't in the habit of the churches to dispatch tutors from beyond the Descot sea, certainly not for the kids of some very minor aristocracy of mainland Limore. He also knew what had happened fifteen years ago, of the multiple births on the very same day at daybreak when it had crashed in carefully tended Ferollian vineyards. It took the churches four years to track most of them down and to discover that most of them were already dead. The odd sudden sickness, the freak accident, the random poisonous berry in a bowl of ordinary fruits, except that they were always exactly that: odd, freak, random. Just not exactly bad luck and then there were the more recent violent deaths, families murdered, butchered even, at times missing but the tally never stopped climbing and the churches decided to act, send senior members, versed in the Inanite and the Dinian subtle arts, the forbidden ones. His pick of this family had not been random, he had been appraised early on of the destruction of a whole Mark in the forests of Limore in the brasier that raised their home. Sole survivor the boy born on that day, sent as a ward to this Tall-House, closest of kin and five years later, an other of the children, a second boy, his whole family and retainers butchered in a dispute with a local warlord bandit or something, came here on his own, now a ward. Limero had felt right as he was reading the report that he had them, the children it had told them about. Which meant Limero then knew who was trying to get them killed. It took him five years almost and dozens of reports to convince the Council of Eight that they had to send protection to the remaining children, of course he volunteered for this place. He was weary of the masters of the house, Roras and his wife Sithane had surprised him with the simplicity of their intelligence, it sometimes bordered on clairvoyance he felt. He had had to adapt his approach and change his strategy several times in the first ten days, it had now been almost five years and he still spent as little time in their close company as he could which wasn't that easy on a daily basis what with the daybreak rituals, the midday libations and the Setting Ceremony and of course all the information a rural lord could get from a learned man educated on the Sacred Archipelago, but Limero was so much more and his mission here was nearing its term and he had to find an elegant way to present it to the Keregans for them to not only agree to his terms but to wholly support the endeavor.

He was allowed inside the ground floor of the square based tower, that was the Tall-House, by the four guards on duty and took a moment to adjust to the comparative obscurity of the room, the stone walls made from the shape of the room only allowing for the supporting pillars of the upper floors to give it features and the one staircase leading up. There was a guard there too who nodded to the priest and allowed him to go up. Master Limero climbed the long narrow stairs and entered the study of the Keregan's at the top of the Tall House to find the lady of the house leaning over a crop rotation chart while her husband was going through the reports of the day and the minutes of the last Assembly of the lords of Limore.