We do not decide who to kill or why or when. “We are mere instruments of Mortain….His handmaidens, if you will. Mortain, where nuns teach her hundreds of ways to kill a man. A hedge priest and herbwitch spirit Ismae to the convent of St. When the pig farmer who paid three coins to wed Ismae sees the red scar across her back, he cracks her in the skull and hurls her into the root cellar until a priest can come “to burn you or drown you.” The scar shows that Ismae’s mother poisoned her in utero Ismae’s survival of that poisoning proves her sire is Mortain, god of death. Fiction and history coalesce in a rich, ripping tale of assassinations, political intrigue and religion in 15th-century Brittany.
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