At the Hill of Tolle

After the passing of three days, two people crept out from their beds. They were both uneasy to see each other, but moved toward their agreed meeting place rather than coming together closer to their homes. Consciously, they thought it was because they might miss the other, and become scared that they were being abandoned. Beneath the surface of their thoughts, it was the touch of the woman from Ughelor that moved them. Tolle Hill called, and they answered.

Rachel was watching them from the sanctum hidden above her bedroom. The water of her scrying pool boiled, filling the dark room with a balmy fog. Sweat poured down her forehead, down her reddened neck and between the curve of her breasts; she wore a robe painted with spell runes to strengthen her influence. This was the most sensitive moment of her plans, more sensitive even than the moment when the great work would be completed. Tonight, if her power failed, the two would realize that their imagination of the other couldn't live up to reality, and the affair would die. Lila might, if she felt remorse, even admit it to the village priest, who would undoubtedly demand she confess her sins as penance. Fenn might flee Durmhall to take up a life on the road in shame. But from this distance she could do little to ensure success without subverting their wills entirely, and to do so would undermine the purpose behind it all.

Fenn came from the south. He walked down a trail that was thought secret from the lords of Ughelor, but had been used by endless generations of Durmeans. They still believed it was secret because when Saewulf Oakshield had intercepted and crushed the rebels who tried to flee along it, decades ago. The east was Lila's way, and she walked without light or path to guide her. There wasn't a person in Durmhall who didn't know the Hill of Tolle, which had always been a gathering place for people trying to come together away from the watchful eye of their neighbors or masters. She was worried that if she took the path, then her husband might find her; it was based on the silly thought that the butcher could awake and follow her without having seen her go to start with. But adulterers were irrational by nature, and she was new to the craft of it.

The man arrived first. He walked out onto the jutting plain where the statue of a saint was normally found. Rachel had disposed of it the day before. In his anxiety, Fenn didn't notice its absence. He paced around the meeting place, sure that she wasn't coming, or that maybe it had all been his imagination. A willing self-deception to cushion himself against the pain that would come if Lila didn't soon show her face.

But show her face she did. The woman paused for a moment at the edge of the trees, looking up at where Fenn was waiting halfway up. She stared and tried to overlap this man, wearing only his breeches, with the servile workman she passed by during the day - and with the man who had come to her by night. Though she'd wanted to judge him without him seeing, she waited too long, and he noticed her standing there. Their eyes met with the moonlight between them.