Starling (86 page)

Falco got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. He
turned away and walked to the far side of his cell and then back
again. “Well, in case we do,” he started, “I want you to know that I’m
sorry for all of my harsh words. I’m sorry for not believing you
sooner.”
“I know,” Cass said. “You say things you don’t mean when you’re
angry. We both do.”
Falco nodded. “Some of it, I did mean, but it’s because of things
that happened to me a long time ago. Still, I had no right to try to
force my beliefs about the Church upon you. I can see that you derive
strength from your faith, even now. I should never have tried to take
it from you.”
“I don’t understand why you would choose not to believe,” Cass
said. “You could embrace faith and feel strong just as I do.”
Falco shook his head. “It isn’t a matter of choice, Cassandra.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a girl I had known my
whole life. Her father was a shoemaker; mine was a cobbler.” Falco
smiled to himself. “It seemed perfect, really.”
Fate,
Cass thought. A wound opened up inside of her. When she
had first met Falco, it had seemed so inevitable, a destiny handed
down by God. But now she knew that wasn’t it at all. Perhaps meeting
him had been random and meaningless, or more likely it had been to
teach her about the sort of person she was, and the sort of person she
wanted to become someday.
“Ghita was unusual,” Falco continued. “She excelled at hunting
and trapping, things at which most women had no skill at all. She
wore her hair short. She enjoyed playing with the boys of the village
instead of staying at her mother’s side and learning to cook and sew.
As she got older, she grew incredibly beautiful, and many of the village women did not like her.”
Cass could almost see the girl, sprite-like, frolicking in the woods
with the town boys. Pale skin. Dark hair and eyes. A devilish grin. A
girl who might pass for a boy from a distance, but was still very beautiful in her own right.
Falco laced his hands together and squeezed. “I loved her, though.
I thought I would marry her, but before I had a chance to ask for her
hand, our village was hit by a horrible bout of plague. Overnight, it
seemed as if half of the villagers had fallen ill. Two days later, our
village was rife with dead. Bodies piled up in the streets. My mother
forbade any of us to leave the house. My father didn’t even go to the
shop.” He paused for a moment, his face contorting as if this part of
the memory was particularly painful for him. “Ghita’s whole family
died. She came to my parents’ house and begged us to let her in, but
my mother refused, saying Ghita was tainted with sickness—she had
to be. I will never forget the sound of her fists banging on our door,
the sound of her cries as they gradually faded away.
“But somehow she didn’t fall ill.” He looked down at the floor.
“The villagers began to say there was something wrong with her.
That if she were not a witch, she would have contracted the disease
like the rest of her family. The villagers decided the only way to
make the scourge of plague go away was to offer Ghita up to the Black
Death itself. Women went from home to home, saying that Ghita was
evil and the plague was punishment for our village letting her live.”
Falco shook his head. “I know it sounds like madness, but I suppose
when people are falling dead around you, it’s easy to cling to any