In Which Doing the Wrong Thing Turns Out Right

Then, after twenty minutes or so, when Fred was spent and Tarsa was tryiing to rouse him for a second round, the look of passion on her face was suddenly replaced by one of bewilderment, which a moment later became one of abject horror. "By Granas, what have I done?!" she wailed, disentangling herself from him and scrambling to her feet. "I am defiled! And I killed a man! And poor Skye! I broke his wings!" With that she broke down in tears.

Fred put his arm around her in an attempt to comfort her. He half expected her to push him away, or maybe even angrily to accuse him of having taken advantage of her, but she just kept on crying, seemingly oblivious to his presence.

"The man isn't dead," he assured her. "He just bled a lot. You haven't killed anyone. And you weren't responsible for your actions. You were under some sort of curse, but thankfully it seems to have been broken now. I'd better put on my underthings, and then see if I can find the rest of my clothes and my armour. Or would you like to wear my clothes? Yours must be somewhere back up at the top of the cliff, I suppose. Then we need to try to find a way back up the cliff so we can rejoin Skye and Sister Sharon and make our way back to the Temple."

"What's the point of that?" Tarsa managed between sobs. "I can't perform the ceremony now. They will have to choose someone else. A priestess must be a virgin, so I am a priestess no longer. I will be expelled from the order. And I don't want to see Sister Sharon or Skye now that I have been shamed."

"You told me that no one else could perform this ceremony. [19824] If it's as vital as you people think, then you have to do it. The order won't expel you if they don't know that you are no longer a virgin."

"Granas will know."

"Maybe, but I'm sure he won't tell them."

For a moment Tarsa's hopeless expression was replaced by one of anger, which Fred thought was an improvement. For a moment he thought she was going to hit him. "Look, if this ceremony is the only way to defeat Valmar then I'm sure that Granas won't mind," he added. "Your religion is supposed to be one of forgiveness, isn't it? It's not as though, under the curse, you could help yourself. And it seems to have been us having sex that broke the curse, so maybe that was what Granas wanted. And what you did was the order's fault anyway. If their Ceremony of Purification had worked properly, you would never have been in this position. What with each attempt they made seeming to make matters worse, I almost wonder if someone could have deliberately sabotaged it."

1. Fred manages to talk Tarsa round.
2. Tarsa is adamant that she's not going back to the Temple.
3. Meanwhile Sharon has found the broken-winged Skye, who tells her that Tarsa and Fred have both gone over the cliff.

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