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Our family hating each other. Find us a way out of this, Grandfather, Grandmother, or if there isn't a way then get God to open up a way because this can't go on."
Then an exhausted silence, both Ela and Quara breathing heavily.
"Em nome do Pai e do Filho e do Espirito Santo," said Ela. "Amem."
"Amem," whispered Quara.
Then Ela embraced her sister and they wept together in the night.
***
Valentine was surprised to find that the Mayor and the Bishop were the only other people at the emergency meeting. Why was she there? She had no constituency, no claim to authority.
Mayor Kovano Zeljezo pulled up a chair for her. All the furniture in the Bishop's private chamber was elegant, but the chairs were designed to be painful. The seat was so shallow from front to back that to sit at all, you had to keep your buttocks right up against the back. And the back itself was ramrod straight, with no allowances at all for the shape of the human spine, and it rose so high that your head was pushed forward. If you sat on one for any length of time, the chair would force you to bend forward, to lean your arms on your knees.
Perhaps that was the point, thought Valentine. Chairs that make you bow in the presence of God.
Or perhaps it was even more subtle. The chairs were designed to make you so physically uncomfortable that you longed for a less corporeal existence. Punish the flesh so you'll prefer to live in the spirit.
"You look puzzled," said Bishop Peregrino.
"I can see why the two of you would confer in an emergency," said Valentine. "Did you need me to take notes?"
"Sweet humility," said Peregrino. "But we have read your writings, my daughter, and we would be fools not to seek out your wisdom in a time of trouble."
"Whatever wisdom I have I'll give you," said Valentine, "but I wouldn't hope for much."
With that, Mayor Kovano plunged into the subject of the meeting. "There are many long-term problems," he said, "but we won't have much chance to solve those if we don't solve the immediate one. Last night there was some kind of quarrel at the Ribeira house--"
"Why must our finest minds be grouped in our most unstable family?" murmured the Bishop.