Lys: Holy War

Aithne concentrated on drawing the water, but her concentration came hard. What with the snatches of conversation she'd heard in the atrium, and the general uneasy feeling of the valley as a whole, she felt as though every movement was being watched- watched and laughed at as a pitiful attempt to win a lost day.

There was an evil out there that was not just the Gauls, not just Cunorix. There was a holy war boiling up around them, one they could not see. She did not think she wanted to see it. It was more than enough to feel it. Her heart quailed a moment, but she thought it better than the terror of seeing the whole truth.

She took comfort in her smallness, for the first time that day. She would break her pot and blow her horn, and let the One God rout the enemy, both seen and unseen.

These musings brought her to the end of the bucket-filling, and she stood in the atrium with her hands on her hips, not unlike Lucretia, surveying the goings-on and trying to find a new task.