The Pillars Of The World

understood that, the old man might still be alive.
    His father had been a younger son who would inherit no property, his mother a beautiful woman who owned a substantial piece of land. He suspected his father had married as much for the land as to satisfy lust, and must have been cruelly disappointed when he discovered that the land wasn’t signed over to him but remained in his new wife’s control. Still, she had done what she had promised. Whole sections of the forest were cut down and the timber sold. Virgin meadows felt the bite of a plow for the first time, and tenant farmers planted tame crops. The wealth they harvested from the land surpassed what the rest of his family could claim, and he had been well pleased.
    But his father never forgot that she had kept the land in her own name, and he never forgot that his own pleasures were dependent on how well he pleased her .

    Despite that, they had been happy together—until the day when his mother had complained that her bedroom was cold and he, their first-born son and barely six years old, performed the trick he’d just learned and lit the fire for her. He clearly remembered the blank way she had stared at him, and how pale her face had become.
    The vicious arguments had started after that. Accusations and denials. His father had lied to her by omission, had failed to admit that there had been a foul union between Fae and human somewhere in his bloodline. The son must have inherited this perverse magical power from the father because her bloodline was pure.
    I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was wrong.
    You’ll not shame me with these tricks that make your mother doubt me. I’ll not be a penniless younger son again because of the likes of you. If I have to beat this mischief out of you, then that’
    s what I’ll do.
    Yes, her bloodline had been pure in that she was a witch who was descended from witches as far back as her family could remember. But she had never mentioned that when she’d let that younger son woo and win her. She never mentioned it at all.
    But that was something that Adolfo didn’t realize until much later, after he’d been disinherited in favor of a younger brother who had shown no signs of impurity, after he’d run away and had learned, haltingly, to use the power that had destroyed his childhood.
    That first display of magical power had been the beginning of his mother’s hatred for him, and that hatred had changed a warm, happy home into a pit of horrors for a child who couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong and didn’t have the self-control to deny something inside him that felt so natural.
    He had suffered the beatings, the humiliations. He had learned a great deal from the walking evil his father had become in an effort to placate a wife who hated.
    At fourteen, he ran away and lived from hand to mouth for several months before he found his calling. It was in a village that had experienced several incidents of bad luck. Milk going sour within hours of being taken from the cow. Chickens on several farms producing two-headed chicks. Wagon wheels breaking on the way to market. Fields that would begin to grow, only to wither when it was too late to plant again in time to harvest.
    At first, he sensed the magic as a feeling of something familiar and frightening. After being in the village for a few days, doing whatever work he could to earn a meal, he saw the woman. He saw the easy way she greeted and spoke with the other villagers. He saw the wariness in the eyes of one handsome man. And he saw her eyes when that same man met another young woman outside a shop.
    A couple of days later, when a riding party was taking a cross-country run, the young woman’s horse stumbled for no apparent reason and went down. The fall crippled the young woman in ways that would make a young man look elsewhere for a wife.
    That was when he realized what it was about that woman that had troubled him.
    She had felt like his mother. And there had been that same shuttered look in her eyes that his mother had had whenever someone’s luck had turned bad.
    He went to the young woman’s family and told them he believed that the accident had been caused by the witch living nearby. And he told them he had some small skill in gaining a confession from such creatures.
    They had doubted his professed skill, with good reason, and they had doubted his assurance that the woman they knew was a witch. But they had a crippled daughter, and they