>>6050357Astoria reaches for the fragile arms of the poor, confused girl. She’s sweaty, muttering words she cannot certainly comprehend.
“Here, here,” she sighs as she gently turns her away and towards the inside of the carriage. “You need rest, lady-in-wait. You cannot—”
“No!” Soralisa’s feverish brown eyes turn into pinpricks as she struggles to get away from her grip. It’s a bit of a novel sensation for Astoria, who has not received similar resistance since—
Well, since the last time she truly butted heads with that upstart of an angel.
“They need me! Don’t you understand? I have to go! I have to help them, they are lost… I have seen them, She has shown me, the Sun-Birther—”
Astoria raises her two fingers and taps on Soralisa’s head.
The girl’s panicked eyes roll in her head and she falls in her arms, slumbering softly.
“Preposterous. That Ansàrra would reveal such a thing to a broken little thing such as you. Did they not teach you the value of deference, child? <span class="mu-i">Felice!</span>” She shouts at the chaplain who is quickly besides her, taking the girl out of her arms. “Put her on the bed and make sure she stays asleep. She has need for recovery and I do not want to see those gauzes wasted.”
“At once,” he sighs, entering the carriage and putting Soralisa on the same bed, washing her still-sweaty face. Behind her eyelids she is still struggling, for some reason.
He tells himself it must be nothing.
Outside, Astoria walks back and forth, trying to put a lid on the fury. How dare she talk back to a Blessed Blind? The girl may have an inkling of ability with Sanctions, but that surely did not allow her to act like a petulant child.
And what was even more important, more pressing — Astoria would see that her own intuition about Salicera Fors was correct.
And like a pebble growing into a rushing landslide, she would be the one to wave the thread of fate this time.
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[cont.]