The Empty Ones (Fantasy Romance)

2. The stones of the priory

"What stone?" I asked timidly.

"Oh you really don't know, do you? Then again, I didn't know about this god-forsaken place either until I landed here."

"I know this is a place to foster orphan girls. I have never heard about any stone though," I confess.

"How did your parents die?"

"My mother died a long time ago and my father was killed," I answered placidly.

For the first time, this girl's eyes were not presumptuous but rather sympathetic, but only for a few seconds as if she were afraid to show that.

"Just do what I told you, alright? Then you will survive," she said adverting her gaze.

"Survive?! Can I die?!" I ask astonished.

"Fetch the bucket and fill it," she said pointing at the big silver jug. It was damn big and even empty quite heavy. "You can always die, every second of every day but yes, when you get your stone it's more likely. So like I said, a limp will, and it will be fine."

"This is barbaric. Why do they do that?"

"This is the world, you dummy. Where have you lived before, under a rock?"

"In my father's estate, I told you. Stop being so rude, I didn't do anything to you."

I try to lift the full bucket and almost caved under the weight. Mairi rolled again her eyes but put a hand on the handle to help me while carrying her own full bucket too. She was thin and not particularly tall but likely the strongest girl I had ever seen.

"No, you didn't, but you seem very spoiled and damn weak. It annoys me," she said in the spirit of her attitude so far.

"Well, I am weak and empty. But I still didn't do anything to you. Now tell me what that stone is for," I ask exasperated.

"We are all empty here, stop thinking you are special. So are most people as you might have noticed. But unfortunately for me and you, they think we can still make a magic child. That's what the stone is for, so whoever acquires us can control us," she said and pulled her hair up to show me the silver stone, the size of an egg planted on the back of her neck."

I felt like fainting only looking at it and imagining how painful it would be.

"I have read about a lot of things but my father didn't have books about this in the library. I am not sure why. He had books about everything else on the face of Alard. This is awful, this is so awful," I couldn't help whispering and started crying again.

I always knew I would be wedded off at some point to someone that my father would choose, I just saw it far in the future and I didn't know about any life-threatening control device. The marriage age for a noble girl was starting with eighteen, more than five years in the future, so I didn't really get to think what that meant. Now this problem came to meet me with striking force.

Luckily mundane issues didn't let me think too deeply about that. Cooking breakfast for thirty people when I had only been cooked for, so far, was not easy at all but at least not as horrible as carrying that damn bucket up the more than a hundred steps from the yard to the kitchen.

Cooking wasn't easy either when it was your first attempt. I had cut my fingers while snipping vegetables several times while Mairi laughed or rolled her eyes. The blue moon of midday was not even up in the sky when I decided I hated it there and wanted to go home. It was just that there was no home left for me and everyone I knew was dead. Whether I liked it or not, that was my life starting from that point on.

I was sharing the breakfast table as well as the room with the five girls I saw in the morning. There were eight other tables just the same with older and younger girls grouped by age. The bigger table in the eating room of the monastery was reserved for the white sisters, that were seven in number, the quita woman being one of them. Alone in the middle of the room was The White Grace, that seemed to be the authority above everyone here.