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Benedictine.”
    Daria walked forward, noticing the priest in his cheap wool cowl for the first time. “Father,” she said.
    â€œMy child,” said Father Corinthian. He pulled back the hood from his monk’s cowl and took her hand. Daria felt a shock that drove the color from her face. She wanted to pull her hand away, but she didn’t. She looked into the priest’s dark eyes and she knew him.
    She knew him to the very depths of her, and it was as terrifying as it was unexpected, this amazing and overwhelming knowledge, and she was consumed with dark feelings that she couldn’t comprehend and that made her reel with their force. Here was something that was fearful yet real, and it was overpowering. For the first time in her life, Daria fainted, collapsing in a heap to the rush-strewn floor.

2
    Daria awoke with Ena crouched over her, her face parchment white, her lips trembling with fear and prayers.
    â€œI’m all right,” Daria said, and then turned her face away. But she wasn’t all right; something had happened that she didn’t understand. It was frightening. No, nothing was all right.
    â€œBut, little mistress, what happened? The earl just carried you here. He said naught. Did he speak harshly to you or strike you in front of that new priest? Did you speak sharply to him? Did he—?”
    â€œPlease, Ena, take your leave. The earl did nothing to me. I wish to rest. Leave me now.”
    The old woman sniffed and retreated to the far corner of the chamber. Daria stared toward the narrow window. A shaft of bright sunlight knifed through, illuminating dust motes in its wake. What had happened to her in the great hall was inexplicable. The priest, that beautiful young man who was a Benedictine, a young man who was dedicated to God—and she’d somehow known him, recognized him, felt his very being deep inside of her. How could that be? It made no sense.
    It had happened but once before in her seventeen years, this prescience, this foreknowledge, this tide of feeling that had been the curse of her grandmother, a bent old woman who’d died howling curses at her son and daughters. A crazy old woman with wild stringy hair and mad eyes, eyes the same color green as were hers.
    When Daria was twelve her mother had told her that her father would be coming home to them shortly to visit with them until he left for the Holy Land. He was currently in London, fighting in a tourney. It was in that instant Daria saw her father, handsome and awesomely forbidding in his gleaming silver armor, astride his destrier, and he was charging, his visor down, lance at the ready. She saw him as clearly as she saw her mother who stood in front of her, staring and silent. She saw his lance buffeted to the side, saw him lifted off his destrier’s back and flung into the dirt. She saw the other man’s destrier rear back in fright and come crashing down on her father’s head. She heard the crunching of the metal, the smashing of bone, and she screamed with the sight of it, the sound of it, the dark feel of it in her mind, the bloody horror of it. And she’d told her mother what she’d seen, but her mother had somehow known she was seeing something, and she was already as pale as the wimple that hid her beautiful auburn hair. “No,” her mother had whispered; then she’d left Daria, nearly running, and Daria had known her mother was afraid of her in that moment.
    And the word had reached them five days later. Her father’s body followed three days after that, and he was buried on the family hillock, his body never again seen by his wife because the destrier had smashed his skull under his hooves.
    Now it had happened again. Only this time it wasn’t death and terror and pain that wouldn’t cease. This time it was a strange shock of recognition, a knowing of another person she’d never seen before. She didn’t understand what it meant or how