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The child didn’t want it, but that didn’t bother Agnes Everybody has a choice That’s the whole point

Sauve-Majeure belongs to its de a creature of profound order A demon cannot function alone If they could, banishment would be no hurt A denes was a wolf abandoned by her pack She could not help how she sniffed and howled for her litter-netic pull for the sort of hu in its place, all souls accounted for, everyone blessed and punished according to strict and immutable laws

The first settlers were ether hatever stray Puritans they’d picked up along the way north Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that’s no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it

The demon waited She waited for Martin le Clerq and Melchior Pelerin to raise their barns and houses, for Remy Mommacque to breed his dainty little cow to William Chudderley’s barrel of a bull, for John Cabot to hear disputes in his rough parlor She waited for Hubert Sazarin to send for both money and a pair of smooth brown stones from Sauve-Majeure Abbey back home in Gironde and use them to lay out the foundations of what he dreamed would be the Cathedral of St Geraud and St Adelard, the grandest edifice north of Boston She waited for Thodeleine Loliot’s first and darkest beer, then march over to the Sazarinhis Papist devilry in the face of good honest folk She waited for Dryland to take up a collection a with John Cabot and Quentin Pole, raised the fra House just across ould eventually be called Schis down the infant Cathedral She waited for Dryland to press Quentin’s serious young son Lamentation into service as pastor She waited, most importantly, for little Crespine Moutonnet to be born, the first child of Sauve-Majeure (The toas naregation at the Free Meeting House up until Renewal Pole was shot over the whole business by Henri Sazarin in 1890, at which point it was generally agreed to let theof the place—which they did, once Sazarin had quietly and handsohter in coin, wool, beef, and blueberries) The demon waited for the Dryland twins, Reformation and Revelation, for Madame le Clerq to bear her five boys, for Goodwife Wadhale stillborn son She waited for Mathelin Minouflet to bring his gentle wife Charlotte over the sea fronant, as she had by then been separated froood husband for five years Mathelin would have beaten her soundly, but upon discovering that his brother had the fault of it, having assumed the elder Minouflet dead and the responsibility of poor Charlotte his own, tightened his belt and hoped it would be a son The derow up, for enough village to spring up, for enough order to assert itself she that could walk a, noisy lot of new young folk fighting over Schisrey, damp wool for hard, new potatoes

The deeneral marketplace ruled wholly by an elderly, hunched Hubert Sazarin and his son Augustine Adjoining it, Faith-My-Joy Square hosted the Protestant inia pipe tobacco in Faith-My-Joy nor Margery Cabot’s sweet butter and linen cloth in Adelard, a great deal of furtive passage went on between the two The de the tallow candles and roasting fowl and pale bluish honey sold by the otherin thethe husbands of Sauve-Majeure Young Wrestling Dryland, though recently bereaved of his father Thoe when Father Siovern the souls of St Geraud and Adelard, had no business at all sneaking across the divide to snatch up a flask of Sazarin’s Spanish Madeira Wrestling worked hiure in a black bonnet, and screwed in his courage to confront the devil-woman He took in her severe dress, her covered hair, her table groaning with the kind of breads he had only heard of from his father’s tales of a boyhood in London: braided rounds and glossy cross-buns studded with raisins (where had she got raisins in this forsaken land?), sweet French egg bread and cakes dusted with sugar, (what act of God or His Opposite granted this brazen even the sar?), dark jams and butter-plaits stuffed with cream He fixed to shaht of her, his gaze meant to cut down—but when he looked into the pits of her eyes he quieted, and said nothing at all, but h his mother Anne made a perfectly fine loaf of her own

Geishkirihallat had been the baker of Hell

It had been her peculiar position, her speciality a all the diverse amusements and professions of Hades, which performs as perfectly and sine, but never acco in its place, all souls accounted for, everyone blessed and punished according to strict and immutable laws She baked bread to be seen but ultimately withheld, sweetcakes to be devoured until the skin split and the stoh the flesh, black pastry to haunt the starved ishkirihallat were cathedral towers of fire and onyx, her under-bakers Akala out soft and perfect loaves with bone paddles But also she baked for her own table, where her coares, Duke of R

unaways and his loyal pet crocodile, Saina, Marquis of the Drowned, Countess Greathered to drink the wines crushed beneath the toes of rich and heartless ishkirihallat She prepared the bloodloaf of the great Emperor’s own infinite table, where, on occasion, she was per the slabs of meat beloved of Celestial Marquis Oryax

And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and est loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes ith tears The Great Duke Gusion, the Baboon-Lord of Nightoods into his hairy arms and bore them off to the Pool of Sleep

Those were the days the deed for in her lonely house with only one miserable oven that did not even co, the weaver of Hell, to e her in the dark like a good neighbor should Those were the days she longed for in her awful heart—for a demon has no heart as we do, a little red fist in our chest A de and pulsing and thundering in time to the skull-clocks of Pandemonium

Those were the days that floated in the de last, her most perfect breads to Adelard-in-the-Garden She would have her pack again, here between the mountains and the fish-clotted bay She would build her ovens high and feed them all, feed them all and their children until no other bread would sate the had worth

They burned her as a witch some forty years later

As you h the fingers of Mme Sébastienne Sazarin as well as Father Simon’s successor Father Audrien made their places in the pyre

The demon felt it best, when asked, to claim membership in a convent on the other side of Bald Moose Mountain, traveling down into the bay-country to sell the sisters’ productions of bread She herself was a hermit, of course, consecrated to the wilderness in the manner of St Viridiana or St Julian, two venerated ladies of whom the poor country priest Father Sireat deal, since a woht at any nes had such a fine hand at pies and preserves, it couldn’t hurt to let little Piety and Thankful go and learn a bit from her—even if she was a Papist deet a piece She’s a right modest handmaiden, let Marie and Heloise and Isabelle learn their letters fros so beautifully at Christmas Mass, poor Christophe Minouflet fell into a shen she sang the Ave—why not let our girl Beatrice learn her scales and her octaves at her side?

And then there was the arden Not a soul in Sauve-Majeure did not burn to know the secret of the seely inexhaustible earth upon which their local hermit made her little house How she loith red health, how her peas came up alroaned by June with the weight of their dark fruit Let Annabelle and Elisabeth and Jeanne and Martha go straight away and study her methods, and if a seed or two of those hardy crops should find its way into the pockets of the girls’ aprons, well, such was God’s Will