Read Online The Safe-Keeper's Secret by Sharon Shinn - Free Book Online

shoulder. “Maybe,” she breathed, “they helped bury the bodies.”
    Reed leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Maybe,” he said, “there’s one buried in our root cellar.”
    Fiona shrieked and covered her ears, but now she was laughing. “No! I won’t be able to sleep tonight!”
    â€œFi-o-na,” Reed moaned in an unearthly voice. “I’m coming back to find my bones.”
    She screamed again and scrambled to her feet. Reed chased her all the way home, crooning her name and making her laugh so hard she almost couldn’t keep her footing.
    That night, Fiona was under the covers with one candle still lit when Damiana came in to tuck her into bed. Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress and brushed her blond hair back, as always.
    â€œSo are you still upset with me?” her mother asked.
    Fiona stared up at her, trying to read secrets on the smooth, composed face. She wondered if this was why Damiana always seemed sountroubled, no matter how hectic the day; she knew of so much that was so much worse. “I’m trying to understand it,” she said at last.
    â€œEverybody has a part to play,” her mother said. “Bart Seston raises cattle, the butcher slaughters them so we can have food. A midwife brings people into the world, an undertaker buries them when they die. Life is good sometimes, hard sometimes, bad sometimes, and good again.”
    â€œI don’t always understand your part,” Fiona said.
    â€œI am the voice that says ‘I know’ when someone tells me ‘This is too hard for me to hold on to by myself.’ I am the soul who reminds other souls that they are not alone. I cannot bring them solutions, I cannot make their troubles disappear, I can only say that I hear them and I understand. Sometimes that’s enough.”
    â€œSometimes it’s not,” Fiona said.
    â€œSometimes it’s not,” her mother agreed. “And then they look for help from someone other than me.”
    â€œYou said you knew other secrets, even ones worse than Madeleine’s.”
    Damiana was quiet for a moment. “One or two,” she said at last.
    Fiona shook her head against the pillow. “But aren’t they ever too much for
you
to know?” she asked.
    â€œSometimes. Sometimes I have to hear someone say ‘I know’ when I have a secret too great to hold on to in silence. And then I tell Angeline. Or the Safe-Keeper in Thrush Hollow. Someone else who understands silence.”
    â€œYou can’t tell Thomas, though.”
    â€œThomas is the last one I would tell.”
    â€œIt’s strange that the two of you would be friends, then.”
    Damiana smiled. “Ah, but Thomas is my mirror image, don’t you see? Or perhaps it is stronger than that. He brings light where I create darkness. He gets to say aloud all the things I have kept to myself. When the time for secrets is past, and the time for truth has arrived.”
    Fiona turned on her side and folded her hands together under her chin. “I think it would be hard,” she said. “To hide the truth or to tell it. It would be so hard.”
    Damiana leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Any task worth doing is.”

Chapter Five
    T hat fall, Fiona’s greatest secret was that she was desperately in love with Calbert Seston. He was two years older than she was, a swaggering, honey-blond farmer’s son with an angular face and the well-developed muscles of a laborer. He could beat up any boy in the schoolhouse, both older and younger, and he had a fine, defiant way of answering Miss Elmore when she asked him a question in class. All the girls in the second classroom blushed and sighed when he looked their way, but he was not much interested in girls. He would rather win a footrace from the quarter-mile marker to the schoolhouse door than spend five minutes making conversation with the prettiest girl