MHHC Chapter 139

Laura

The divine power he had given her—whether one called it authority or miracle or something that simply transcended both, that force which defied all earthly categories.

The being who could surrender that power through his own will. Who could lay hands upon the oracle itself. And who—

'...could have told her she would become more exalted than anyone in this world.'

Adele pressed both hands hard around her arms, which had begun to shake like aspen leaves in a rising gale.

Her reason counseled her to stop dwelling on unconfirmed suspicions. But her emotions would not be stilled—they lurched and pitched, wild with a fear she could not name.

What if every one of these suspicions proved true? What if Valentin had been cultivating her misery—and her mother Laura's misery before her—in service of some purpose she could not yet see?

'Before I draw any rash conclusions... first speak with him, first...'

The arm she had braced against the floor gave way, and her body swayed.

How tenacious a monster doubt was. It swelled itself to monstrous size in an instant and cast a person down into something unspeakable.

"My lady."

Kook's anxious voice broke through the dark, and Adelheid jolted back to herself.

"There's someone—there's someone coming down... it sounds like the young master. Run, quickly, run..."

He was right. The sound of footsteps descending reached her—slow, dragging steps, punctuated at every interval by the measured tap of a walking stick against stone.

The torchlight, faint at first, grew larger and more distinct as it descended, until at last it delivered a human shape from the darkness.

"Adelheid. I have been searching for you quite some time."

The voice was that of a man worn thin by age. Adelheid raised her eyes to a face she knew.

"Whatever were you doing in a place like this?"

The priest stood before her, looking as though years had fallen upon him all at once since last she had seen him. Father Padre—her godfather. A figure too familiar to her, and too implicated in too much she was only now beginning to understand.

She met the reproach in his eyes without flinching.

Was it mere coincidence that the one man who knew the origins of this terrible entanglement had come to find her now, of all times?

"...Forgive me, young master..."

The silence stretched. Beside her, Kook gave a small sound of distress that she heard as if through water.

Adelheid pressed his hand once—a gesture meant to soothe—and then rose to her feet and faced Padre squarely.

"How did you know to find me here..." She stopped herself. "No—it doesn't matter. I had been meaning to seek you out regardless. There are a great many things I find myself needing to ask you."

"......"

"About the oracle, in particular."

The oracle. At that single word, the old man who had been carefully avoiding her gaze lifted his head, slow as a tide.

"......"

For a long moment Father Padre said nothing—lips pressed shut as though speech had abandoned him entirely. But Adelheid could see, with perfect clarity, that he was not caught off guard.

The deeply resigned lines of that aged face did not belong to a man who had been ambushed. They belonged to a man who had been waiting for precisely this moment to arrive.

At last, a long breath escaped through the old priest's lips.

"Come with me. This will take some time in the telling."

"Please drink. It is warm tea. I understand you have been unwell—it may help restore your strength a little."

Adelheid left the cup he had placed before her untouched, watching him with eyes that refused to soften.

Only when the steam had begun to subside and the silence had grown unbearable did she speak.

"When did you first know the contents of the oracle?"

"......"

Father Padre set his half-emptied cup back on its saucer. The woman who was demanding, without any softening of her words, whether he had known everything all along and deceived her throughout—there was little trace in her of the timid creature she had once been.

He found the faint anger he could sense in her to be remarkable.

As a rule, anger was the first emotion that those long subjected to cruelty taught themselves to let go of.

When his silence continued, Adelheid frowned slightly and pressed him.

"You are listening to me?"

"I am listening."

The old priest studied her for a moment with his creased eyes before he answered.

"If I am to answer your question honestly, I must tell you that I knew from the very beginning."

"From the beginning? Then that means..."

"Lady Laura was a woman born with the qualities of a saint. Even in her childhood, while the Duke of Nassau still lived, she spent more time in the temple than in her own home."

"......"

"The oracle came down only a few days before she was to take her vows as a priestess."

A lowborn maid's bastard. A whore. A woman who had ensnared a count. A woman who had ruined a family. Those were the words that had followed her mother through every waking hour of her existence, the words that had ground her into the earth. And yet that same woman had been, all along, Lady Laura.

Adelheid did not know what shape to give this fury, so she simply pressed her hands into fists in her lap.

"The turmoil that followed after that oracle was delivered is... not something I wish to revisit in memory. Every person of power who obtained its contents reached out their hands toward Lady Laura. She received death threats. She was confined against her will. She very nearly suffered abduction on several occasions."

He raised a hand to stop Adelheid from interrupting.

"Among all the men who coveted her, the worst was her own full brother, who dreamed of rebuilding Nassau. Almost immediately afterward, the Lady begged the temple to give her sanctuary. She had intended, once things quieted, to flee somewhere no one would ever think to look for her. What followed... was not favorable."

Not favorable. Adelheid steadied her breathing and asked:

"How did she... how did she die?"

It was the first sign of discomfort the old priest had shown since this conversation began. But he opened his lips and answered plainly.

"The Count mentioned the ships he owned and used them to draw her out of the temple—he hid her among the housemaids at his estate. He persuaded her that a married man who was seen giving special protection to an unmarried woman would attract her pursuers immediately, and so concealment was necessary. But he soon revealed his true nature, I have no doubt."

"......"

"I received only word that she had delivered a child. I do not know exactly what took place within the Reichenau manor. What I can tell you is that when she finally managed to escape the Count's close watch and reach me at last... it was already too late for Lady Laura."

"......"

"We took the child into the temple's care as the Lady had requested, and we told the Count that the infant had also perished. After the Lady's death, the oracle faded from memory. His Holiness the Pope dismissed it entirely—declared that no such oracle had ever been given—and so... there are very few left who remember it."

The rest, she already knew. Around her fifth year, Count Reichenau had come to the temple and found her and Greta.

A face resembling Laura's. An age resembling the daughter he had lost. And Padre, throwing himself between them with a desperation he could not entirely conceal.

The Count's fierce protests had eventually broken Greta, who told him everything plainly. The temple had had no choice but to surrender her.

He had placed my name in the registry, they told me. He hadn't been able to let go even after news of my death reached him. He had kept looking. I remember—I was around five years old. He took my hand, and he said something to me like that. But once he understood I was useless to him, he never did it again.

How many years had she spent, lacerated by those words, turning them against herself. Snared in the senseless delusion that if she made herself useful enough, her father would become kind to her again.

Adelheid shook her head and cast the memory away. How contemptible a man Count Reichenau was—that was not what mattered most right now.

"The task given to me by His Holiness was to ensure you grew up properly—to watch over you. What was in his heart when he assigned me to this, I truly cannot say. Whether it was to see you kept alive, or whether..."

Adelheid understood what he left unspoken.

Kill her if she shows signs of awakening. Or at the very least—report it first.

The title of master of the world would have read, to every wielder of power, as nothing more than the announcement of a figure come to overturn the existing order.

"Whatever the case, I cannot deny that I did not fulfill my given calling to its fullest. If there is anything at all that I can do to assist you now..."

Something unmistakably tender had crept into Padre's voice. But Adelheid pushed aside the hand he had extended toward her and answered with absolute steadiness:

"There will be nothing I require your help with. Least of all from someone who spent so many years deceiving me."

"......"

"You knew everything. How could you—through all those years—not give me even a single word of warning? You knew what I was putting myself through. What efforts I was making. How in the world could you—and how exactly did that oracle come to be given?!"

Father Padre averted his gaze into a silence that felt long as death.

"Since that oracle was delivered, God has maintained silence for thirty years. There are occasions when His Holiness receives Morig's will through dreams, but the last time the Grand Cathedral's Revelation Plate resonated was then. And when that oracle was received... the one who received it was..."

"It was you."

Adelheid's face twisted with something close to anguish.

"That is why you knew everything. That is why the Pope put you forward as his successor—why he entrusted you with watching over me..."

"......"

"Because you were the one person who could not possibly not know the oracle. Even when I came to you seeking counsel about my husband's condition—when you told me that I, of all people, would be able to recognize it..."

The scattered shards of her past, long tangled and unordered, had begun—one by one—to fit themselves into place.

Adelheid, seized by a fury so complete it felt almost clean, pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. Everyone she had ever known had been lying to her.

From the priest who had looked after her since she was very small, to the Pope himself, to the Count and Countess who had known all of it and still treated her as nothing more than a cast-off bastard, to Greta herself—

"Adelheid. You feel anger now."

Adelheid raised her flushed face.

There was something strange in the old priest's tone—something she could not quite place. Whether she was simply hearing it wrong because she was losing her composure by degrees, or whether something had actually shifted in the air between them, she could not yet say.