Читать книгу Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 7

Thirty-five thousand marched to war. Their weeping widows all died poor. Swords against Darkness, reap for Light Fell Shadow’s Prince and rend false night.

—verse of a marching song from the campaign of Dier Kenton Vale Third Age 5647

Strong arms closed and locked around Elaira’s slim shoulders. Fingers strengthened by the sword and sensitized to a masterbard’s arts tightened against her back. The dark-haired, driven man who cradled her surrendered at last to his blazing crest of passion. His lips softened against hers, the restraint, the control, the terrible doubts which bound him consumed all at once in a rush of tender need. She responded, melted. Her being exploded into sensation like fire and flight. At one with the prince who had captured her heart, her spirit knew again that single, suspended moment, with its promise of inexpressible joy.

Then the fulfillment of union snapped shy of release, doomed ever to fall short of consummation by the rough intervention of fate. This time, a harried, insistent pounding snapped the dream into fragmented memory.

The small-boned enchantress entangled in threadbare quilts jerked out of her fretful sleep. A muted cry escaped her. Chilled in the drafts which flowed over the sill of an unglazed croft window, she fought to regain full awareness. Once again, she grappled the irreversible reality: Merior’s mild sea winds and the Prince of Rathain lay two years removed in her past.

Elaira squeezed her eyes shut against the ache. Instead of the muffled boom of breakers creaming against stainless sands, the ferocious, clawing breath of winter whined over the white-mantled dales of Araethura.

Yesterday’s blizzard had delivered a biting, cold night.

Over the open glens, through stands of scrub oak and across the rustling flats of frozen marsh, the ice whipped in driven bursts, to rattle the ill-fitted shutters of her cottage at the fringe of the moor. Crystals found the cracks, tapped at the lintels, and fanned a frosted arc of silver across the leaked bit of moonlight admitted through the same chink. While the eddies moaned and clawed past the beams of the eaves, and the spent tang of ash commingled with the fragrance of cut cedar and frost-damp miasma of moldered thatch, Elaira exhaled a deep breath. Given time, the runaway pound of her heart would subside.

She untangled the fist still clenched through a coil of auburn hair. Too many times she awakened like this, struggling against the blind urge to weep, while the ripping, slow agony of Arithon’s memory threatened to stop her will to live. In desperation, against the vows of the Koriani Order which tied her lifelong to a celibate service, her refuge from despair became the fiercely guarded shelter of her solitude.

Tonight, even that grace was forfeit. The disturbance which had torn her from lacerating dreams came again, the insistent hammer of a fist on wood.

There would be some emergency, of course. Elaira grumbled a filthy phrase in the gutter vernacular of her childhood and kicked off her tatty layers of quilts. “Fatemaster’s two-eyed vigilance! Do they all think I’m deaf as a post?”

Whoever pounded for admittance, the abuse threatened to burst the tacked strips of leather that hung her rickety door.

Sped by awareness that she lacked any tools for small carpentry, Elaira heaved up from her hoarded nest of warmth amid the bedclothes. The shock of cold planks against her bare soles dissolved her invective to a gasp. She had retired unclothed, since yesterday’s storm had soaked through to her shift. Through forced delay as she fumbled past the clammy folds of her cloak to snatch the first suitable garment from its peg, the hammering gained a fresh urgency.

“Fiends plague!” The dank cloak would just have to serve. “Whoever you are, I don’t dispense remedies naked!”

Elaira bundled the soggy wool over her shoulders. She closed shivering fingers to secure the cloth under her chin, then shot the bar and stepped back as the door swung inward.

A dazzle of moonlight flooded through. The collapse of the drift left pocketed across her threshold doused her bare ankles in snow. Elaira yelped and leaped back. Her cloak caught in an eddy of wind, snagged the latch, and tugged itself free of her grasp.

The herder boy outside froze in startlement, saucer eyes pinned to the slide of the wool down the firm, naked swell of her breast.

Elaira managed the grace not to laugh at his expression. She caught the errant wool and snugged it back up to her collarbones. “Are you going to come in?” she asked with mild acerbity. “Or will you just stand ‘til you freeze with your mouth hanging open?”

The shepherd boy shut his baby-skinned jaw with a click. Too young for subterfuge, still innocent enough to flush to the roots of his tangled hair, he ventured a slurred apology behind the snagged hem of his sleeve.

“Of course there’s trouble,” Elaira said more gently. “You’ve a year yet to grow before you start calling on ladies for that sort of randy interest, yes?”

The boy shrank and turned redder. Since he was also frightened enough to bolt back into the night, the enchantress caught his arm in a grip like fixed shackles. She bundled him inside, wise enough to slam the door before she plonked him on the stool by the hearth and let him go.

“Who’s fallen sick?” she demanded, brisk enough to shock through his stunned silence. She groped meantime across darkness to sort through the pile of last night’s discarded clothing. The fire had done its usual and gone out. Gusts hissed down the cottage’s flue and scattered ash across the stone apron where her herbal still rested, a dismantled glint of burnished copper and glass reflecting a meticulous upkeep. Seized through by a shiver, Elaira drew on the icy linen layers of her underthings, then laced the stiffened leather of her leggings overtop.

The herdboy huddled under mufflers on her stool and could not seem to find his tongue.

“Don’t say no one’s sick,” Elaira murmured through chattering teeth as she turned her back, cast off the cloak, and wormed into the dank, frowsty cloth of her shift. The hem which had been dripping as she drifted off to sleep now crackled with thin, crusted ice.

“My aunt,” mumbled the boy. He stared at his toes, unaware of the stockyard pungency of goat carried inside on his clothing. “She’s in childbed. The midwife sent me to fetch you.”

Burrowed into her tunic and struggling with numbed hands to hook the looped leather fastenings, Elaira said, “How long since her labor pains started?”

“Since just after midday,” the boy replied, miserable. “I couldn’t run. Snow’s piled too deep.” He worried his chapped lip with small teeth. “Will she die, do you think?”

“I’ll try not to let her.” By reflex, Elaira stilled her thoughts and used the trained edge of her talents to sound the night for the time. Past midnight, she sensed. The tidal pull of the full moon just dipped past the arc of the zenith. She crouched to retrieve the fleece boots she had kicked off and left where they fell. One hid in deep shadow under the worktable, scattered still with oddments of tin stamped with the sigils for fiend bane. The mate perversely eluded her. “Do you know if her water had broken when you left?”

“Aye, so,” the boy affirmed in his broad-voweled grasslands dialect. “That’s why the midwife would have ye. The birthing’s gone hard, and the caul broke and let forth an unlucky color, so she said.”

Elaira caught a half breath in foreboding. “What color was the fluid, do you remember? Was there blood?”

“No blood.” The boy paused to trace a symbol across his left breast, to avert the eye of ill fortune. “The stream was thickened and greenish. That’s bad, yes? My aunt’s going to pass beneath the Wheel?”

“No. She’s unlikely to die.” Sure of that much, Elaira blew on her fingers, reached, found her other boot, the one she had dunked at the ford when she slipped on a stone and the ice broke. The fleeces were still clogged and soggy. “It’s the babe trying to come who’s in trouble.”

She gritted her teeth and thrust her toe in the cuff before her nerve snapped. No time could she spare to warm the wet out, even were the fire still alight. Every second counted, if in harsh fact the boy’s call for help had not already reached her too late. She scrambled up off her knees and snatched her satchel from the table. Another minute strayed as she struck light to a candle stub and gathered up the specialized herbs she might need, ones the midwife was least apt to carry. More minutes fled, as she groped amid the disassembled coils of her still to twist the curved segment of glass tubing from the cork which capped the collection flask. She could only pray it would be the right size as she stowed it amid her remedies, to chinking complaint from the crockery and small flasks that held her stock of alcohol and tinctures.

“Come on,” she urged the boy. “I’d make you some tea to warm up if I dared, but truly, your aunt’s babe can’t wait.”

No coals lingered in the hearth to be doused. That lapse in comfort became a twisted sort of blessing as she rammed out the door and plowed knee-high tracks through the dunescape of drifts to the shed. A rumbling nicker greeted her from inside. Then a white-blazed face peered out from the dimness, hopeful.

“You idiot butterball,” Elaira replied. “You won’t be begging more grain.”

The slab-sided roan gelding had come with the croft, no replacement in her heart for the spry little bay who had died of old age the past spring. Some frivolous initiate had named the beast Tassel, for reason outside of all logic. Elaira unhooked the rope hackamore that served as his bridle and looped his whiskered nose through the cavesson. He butted her, snuffling in quest of a carrot as she flicked his ears through the headstall, then blew a resigned sigh as she bent to raise his forehoof and treat the cleft with goose grease to keep snow from balling up against his soles.

“Wise one,” said the boy in whispered diffidence, “I don’t ride.”

“You will. If your aunt’s to have help, you must.” Elaira stepped to the gelding’s quarters and grasped a feathered fetlock, not without heart to spare sympathy. “I’ll see you don’t fall off.” In belated, breathless courtesy, she asked his name.

“Kaid, wise one.” From the corner of the eye, she caught the clumsy, mittened gesture he made with intent to ward off spells.

Her stifled smile of irony was lost as the wind flogged her hair against her cheek. “You’ll do fine, Kaid. Not to worry.” The odd contradictions of countryfolk, to summon her for the magics that refined the craft of healing, then to trace out a hedge witch’s symbols to avert the dread effects they feared from the selfsame mysteries.

Elaira had never known the reverent respect once offered to initiates of the Koriani sisterhood. The arts of her order had been viewed with trepidation for as long as she could remember. The ignorant intolerance arisen since the uprising that upset the rule of the old high kings had not lessened with defeat of the Mistwraith’s fell fogs, which had masked Athera’s skies for five centuries. Quite the contrary, the entrenched distrust the townborn folk held for sorceries had been inflamed to root deeper since the hour the vanished sunlight had been restored.

The Koriani Prime Enchantress held adamant opinion on the reason: the new strife arisen through the Mistwraith’s curse of enmity, laid upon the two princes whose gifts had brought its captivity, just provoked such misguided beliefs. Blame was not shared equally upon the shoulders of Lysaer s’Ilessid, birth-born to wield the powers of light. Only the Master of Shadow, Arithon s’Ffalenn, was raised mage-wise. The Prime and her Senior Circle were swift to point out his shortcomings. Unlike the royal half brother set against him, he had spurned the strictures of his training and invoked the high arts without scruple.

Few would deny that across four kingdoms, Arithon’s name was now linked to destruction and unconscionable acts of bloodshed.

Elaira stamped back that distressed line of thought. The Shadow Master’s part in the ruin of Lysaer’s war host on the field at Dier Kenton Vale must never become her concern. She knew his heart; had once shared his deepest fears, and knew of the visceral horror of killing that tormented him, mind and spirit. As sharply as she longed to know whether the affray had unstrung his grip on integrity, the unruly emotions burned into her heart lent iron to her resolve. Her order must never be offered a second opening to use the attraction shared between them. Shamed to rage that her love had ever come to be tested as a tool to set Koriani ties on Arithon’s destiny, the enchantress applied herself to the crisis of the moment. She slapped grease in the roan’s last hoof, straightened up, and wiped her hands on a scrap of old burlap.

“Out, you.” She gave a suggestive tug at the roan’s headstall, too pressed to delay for the saddle. “We’ve a hard night ahead. You’re going to have to do a generous bit more than shamble.”

Another gust screamed past the corner of the shed. Gossamer veils of snow unraveled from the lip of the drifts. The eddy streamed Elaira’s hair across her eyes. She clawed back the tangles, impatient. “Come, boy.” A swift touch adjusted the hang of her satchel. “You’ll need to show me where to go.” She raised her wet boot in quest of a foothold in the buried logs of the woodpile, vaulted astride the roan’s back, then extended her arm to haul the herder child up before her.

He was shaking through his furs, mostly from fear since he shrank as her arms clasped around him.

Elaira sucked in a breath musked with wool and the rancid tang of goat. “Which way?”

The tilt of Kaid’s chin said north. Elaira faced the gelding around into the teeth of the wind. Its cold pierced her clothes like honed steel. The stars overhead were like flecks of chipped ice, and moonlight sheared the hillcrests in razor-cut brilliance against the streaming, knotted shadows sliced by trees.

“Hup!” Elaira cried. She gathered the roan’s reins and thumped him with her heels. The gelding shook his mane, grunted back as she drummed another thud against his ribs. His steaming warmth penetrated the damp layers of her leggings, and a breathy snort smoked from his nostrils. Too lazy to show displeasure beyond a flick of his tail, he roused into a short-strided walk.

Elaira shook her cuffs down to muffle her exposed hands. “How long did it take you to reach me?”

“I left our steading before nightfall. Snow fell too thick to know the time.” The boy clenched his jaw to still chattering teeth.

Questions remained, over details the midwife might have shared that would tell how far the aunt’s labor had progressed. Yet as the gelding breasted through chest-high drifts, or plowed a crumpled trail across the pristine vales carved trackless by the scouring winds, Elaira held her silence. Nothing but hurry could improve the babe’s threatened chances. If she failed to arrive at the steading before the moment of birth, the infant might already be lost. Rather than pass her distress to the boy, she reined alongside a thin stand of alder and picked off a branch for use as a switch to force the placid gelding to trot.

The night engulfed her in its landscape of silver and black. Amid the wind-tortured swirls of dry snow, the horse underneath her seemed all that moved in the world. If hare ventured out to gnaw bark and dry grasses, or if owls flew hunting mice, she saw no sign of anything alive. The tattered plumes of the gelding’s breath embroidered hoarfrost on her patched leggings. His hooves stitched the hillcrests to avoid the soft drifts, and the boy sent as guide lolled against her shoulder and slept. Where the ground was swept bare, she flicked the gelding to a canter, the glassy chink of snapped ice compacted under the thud of his passage. The gentle, rolling downlands stretched ahead and behind, sere under unrumpled snow, the rippled ink of oak copse and the grayed trunks of alders snagged through by tinseled skeins of moonlight. Over marshes herringboned in storm-trampled cattails, and past the treacherous, inky wells of sinkpools, Elaira forged ahead in relentless urgency.

The fugitive hours were her enemy. The sensitivity of her talent let her feel them, slipping inexorably by as sand would sieve through a net. She drew rein at the crest of a dale, confronted below by the steep flanks of a gully, and the snake black outlines of iced-over current. Araethura’s downs were famed for such, obstructions to any traveler unfamiliar with the lay of the valleys. Elaira cursed, remiss with herself. She ought to have wakened the boy sooner to ask guidance, for the narrow, swift-flowing streams which fed the River Arwent ran in treacherous, deep beds, too wide to jump over in snowy footing, and unsafe to attempt a crossing without a known ford. The same had been true of Daon Ramon, long ago, before the diversion of the mighty Severnir’s flood by Etarran townsmen had rendered that golden land barren.

Elaira gave Kaid’s shoulder a shake before the cold let her thoughts stray further. He said as she roused him, “No need to cross over. Our steading’s beyond that stand of alders.”

Shadows obscured the building’s outline, a patched, oblate pattern where drifts had silted over the mosaic outline of roof shakes against the vale beyond. From some hidden byre, the bleat of confined goats breathed in snatched fragments between gusts. Elaira shook up the tired roan, pressed his laboring step downslope. The pricked gleam of stars came and went as the alders closed around her, branches wind racked against the zenith. Two hours until dawn, her tuned awareness told her. That time of night when death was most apt to be welcomed by a body and spirit in distress.

She slid off the gelding’s back, left the reins to the boy, to dismount as he could and see it stabled. She wasted more seconds, fumbling to close the iron latch of an unfamiliar gate. Finally arrived in the sheltered space between hay byre and cottage, she thought for a second she heard the pained groans of a woman. Whether the sound was born of labor, or grief, or just a last, cruel trick of the wind, the weight of the moment crushed hope.

Stiff, stumbling across the rutted yard, Elaira tripped the door latch and shouldered her way across the threshold into the cottage of Kaid’s aunt. Darkness swallowed her. Cut off from the clean bite of winter, the closed-in smells of lavender and birch coals and the ingrained musk of grease left from simmering a thick mutton stew made the air seem stagnant and dead.

Then, muffled through board walls, the midwife’s voice arose in terse encouragement, “Bear ye down, dearie. The time’s come upon us, and naught can help now by delay.”

A brittle, third voice made shrill with the quaver of old age remarked, “Let the babe come. The fferedon’li’s here at last.” The chosen term was a bygone word for healer, corrupted from the Paravian phrase which meant ‘bringer of light.’

Elaira moved on, tense and sharply uneasy, unsure she merited the confidence and trust implied by the use of the ancient title. The room she crossed seemed too still, too close, its eaves sealed tight against the weather, as if the vast, rolling moorlands of Araethura were an adversary worthy of a barricade. The cottage held its carven chairs and furnishings the way a miser might grasp a hoard of coins. A close-fisted family, Elaira sensed through observation; not the sort to ask outsiders for favors. The trained perception of her gift allowed her to pass their cherished clutter without tripping, to avoid the spinning wheel and stool jutted between the wool press and a tub of drawn water arrayed on the flagstones by the hearth. Boards creaked beneath her hurried tread. This steading was prosperous, to have glazed and shuttered windows, and better than a packed earthen floor. Her next step fell softened by a throw rug. The byre and fenced pastures should have prepared her for comforts. Those Araethurian herdsmen less well off let their stock graze at large on the moors.

A paneled door creaked open. Raw, orange light spilled out in a swathe to guide her through to the cottage’s back room, a walled-off chamber beneath the beams of the loft, where a row of younger children peered down, their expressions all dread and curiosity. Elaira caught another flurried gesture to avert spells before she gained her refuge in the bedchamber.

A tallow dip in a crockery bowl rinsed the broad shoulders of the midwife, a middle-aged matron of competent presence, sleeves rolled back over rawboned wrists where she knelt to administer to Kaid’s aunt. The woman she attended was small as a deer, dark haired and wrung limp, far beyond fear or caring whether an enchantress or a demon had entered. She crouched on the birthing stool, her face lined with sweat, a plait wisped into tangles draped over the wet shine of her collarbones. Her feet were bare. The rest of her torso was swathed in a crushed mass of down quilts, her shift of undyed linen rucked into bunches above her thighs.

As though sensitive to censure, the midwife said, “It’s hot enough she is, but the husband insisted.” Past a sound of disgust through her nose, she added, “Matter of her modesty, he claims. It’s all foolishness. No wisdom in it, but the man wasn’t born in these downs who isn’t bullheaded useless over the propriety of his wife.”

The girl on the stool convulsed in another contraction, long since too tired to scream.

“Steady,” murmured the midwife in a striking change of tone. Her beefy fingers closed over the straining woman’s in comfort. “Don’t falter now, dearie. Just bear down.” She held on, encouraging, thick wrists gouged in crescents where suffering fingernails had dug through the violent cramping pains, weathering the terrible, fraught minutes of waiting, holding, resisting nature’s overpowering drive to push out a babe long since ready to be born.

Over the girl’s exhausted grunting, from the corner by a clothes chest, a mass first mistaken for a bundle of old rags stirred to scratch. Attenuated, white-boned fingers went on to sketch out a blessing sign in welcome. Behind the gesture, faint in the gloom, a withered face surveyed the enchantress who came as healer.

The traditional seeress, Elaira identified, grateful at least for one courtesy. A matriarch gifted with Sight attended every birth, death, and wedding held in these isolate downlands, her place to interpret the omens and deliver a guiding augury appropriate to the occasion. Elaira made her response in accentless Paravian. “May the future be blessed with good fortune.”

Then she knelt on the boards beside the midwife, and caught the laboring woman’s other, clammy hand in reassurance. The wavering glow of the tallow dips threw a sultry gleam off the crown of the babe’s head, just emerged and cupped within the midwife’s other, guiding hand, which pressed gently downward to ease the child’s shoulder past the bone beneath the pelvic girdle.

“Ath preserve,” Elaira murmured. “I’m not too late to try and help.”

The laboring woman gasped a question.

“Lie easy,” Elaira told her. “Let the midwife instruct you. If all goes well, your babe will stay living and healthy.”

She straightened, unslung her satchel from her shoulder, and shed her snow-dampened mantle. While she struggled to unfasten the thong knots with chilled fingers, she added quick, low instructions to the midwife. “Now the birth is accomplished, cut and tie the cord as usual. But do not stimulate the child. It must take no first breath, nor rouse itself and cry before I can clear the fluid from its air passage.”

The midwife raised no question in protest. Quietly busy with towels and knife, she knew best of any which complications lay beyond reach of her knowledge; had seen warning enough when the mother’s water had broken, clogged and discolored. The trauma of birthing had stressed the unborn babe and caused it to void its bowels before it could be pushed from the womb. The fluid which had cushioned its growing had become fouled by its own excrement. If it chanced to draw such taint into its lungs, the newborn would perish of suffocation. No herbal remedy in her store of experience would change the outcome. The child would die within minutes.

If the Koriani witches knew a spell to avert tragedy, the midwife was too practical to spurn the aid of the one who had recently taken residence amid the fells.

But Elaira did not reach to free the chain at her neck from which hung the crystal her order used to refine magics. She rummaged instead through her satchel, found the thin, curved tube borrowed from the apparatus of her still, then warmed the cruel, outside cold of it away between her shaking hands. Methodical, she rinsed it clean of contaminants in a dish filled with her precious store of alcohol.

The laboring woman moaned through locked teeth at the weakened spasm of another contraction.

“No need to push further, dearie,” soothed the midwife. Her practiced fingers knotted the slippery cord, last tie to be severed from the mother. “Work’s all done. Ye’ve naught beyond the afterbirth left to drop now.”

Through the frantic few moments remaining, Elaira shut her eyes, wrapped a hold on her nerves to force controlled calm over screaming uncertainty. These were fells herders, distrustful of her kind, and knit close with unbreakable ties of kinship. Should she fail in her effort to help this child, she well understood its death might be taken as a bloodletting offense.

To the woman’s soft query, the midwife said, “Well-done, girl. By Ath’s grace, ye’ve delivered a fine son.”

Elaira steeled herself, turned, received from the midwife’s competent, broad grasp the sticky, warm bundle of the child. His blood-smeared skin was pale gray, his limbs unmoving, not yet quickened by the first breath of life. She laid him head toward her on the table, aware through the crawling, unsteady light that his wet, whorled hair was coal black. She pried open the tiny, slack mouth, arranged the skull and neck, and with a hurried prayer to Ath, inserted the tube from the still down the throat and into the infant’s airway. She must not tremble. The curved glass was thin, very fragile. Any pressure at an angle might snap it. Where a straw reed might have offered less peril, no interval could be spared to search one out. Need drove her. She must not miss the opening, nor tear the newborn’s tender flesh in her haste. All the while the awareness skittered shivers down her spine, that she had but seconds to complete what must be done.

If the child were to die now, it would be of her own, rank clumsiness.

She felt the tube slide in. A sixth sense, born of her talents and training, told her the insertion was successful. She bent, set her lips to the glass, sucked, and spat the juices into the bowl she used to mix remedies. Against the white porcelain, the secretion was greenish, foul. She sipped at the tube again. Another mouthful, and still the drawn fluid was discolored. She repeated the procedure, was rewarded with a slight change in hue. The fourth mouthful came out clean.

“Ath bless,” she gasped. She eased the tube free. The hot, close room seemed formless around her, the pinpoint focus of her concentration the lynchpin of her whole being. She slapped the infant’s feet. “Breathe,” she said fiercely, the exultation of success at last tearing loose, to burst from her heart in searing joy. “Breathe, new spirit. It’s safe for you to join the living.”

The child’s fingers spasmed. His tiny chest shuddered. Small mouth still opened, he sucked in clear air and screeched as lusty a first cry in outrage for expulsion from the dark, wet safety of the womb.

Elaira bundled the squalling infant back into the care of the midwife, then found the nearest chair and let her knees give way. She sat, head bent, her face in her hands, while emotion and relief shuddered through her. The cries of the child grew louder, more energetic. His flesh would be blushing to pink, now, as exertion flushed life through his tissues. Elaira pushed straight, scarcely aware of the commotion which swirled through the outer room, then the blast of changed air as the door opened. Feeling every aching bone, and all the weight of a night without sleep, she looked up.

Then froze, jolted through her whole being as her eyes met and locked with a man’s.

He had black hair, green eyes. A face of lean angles bent toward her, the rage in each tautened muscle burnished by the hot flare of the tallow dips. The rest of him was muffled beneath a caped cloak, tied with cord, and woven in the fine, colored stripes preferred by the herders of Araethura.

Rocked out of balance, Elaira felt a cry lock fast in her throat. For a moment fractured from the slipstream of time, she could not move or think. Then the nuance of observation she was trained to interpret showed her the subtle differences: the fist, clamped in rough wool, with thick fingers too clumsy to strike song from a lyranthe string. This man was larger, coarser in build; not Arithon s’Ffalenn, Prince and Masterbard. The rough-edged male who loomed over her was the husband of this house, and the newborn child’s father.

“Daelion avert!” His fury bored into the enchantress. “What’s her kind doing here!”

“Never mind,” Elaira said quickly. She had expected hostility in some form or other, since Kaid had appeared on her doorstep. “I’ll be on my way directly.” She arose, tipped the filth in the basin into the slop jar beside the birthing stool, then turned her back, stepped over the pile of wadded, bloody towels, to repack her things in her satchel. Her part was done. The child’s danger was past. If the man was illmannered enough to dare set his hand on her, he would regret the presumption.

Like the whine of a whip, the seeress protested. “The fferedon’li will not go just yet. Not until the child’s augury is spoken.” Across the irate glower of the husband, the trembling, diffident anxiety of the mother, the crone arose from her corner, moved, an animate bundle of shawls, to present her appeal last to the midwife. “Tempt no ill luck. There’s a sacrifice owed by this babe. He would have gained no firm foothold in this world at all, if not for the hand of the fferedon’li.”

The husband swore with expressive, fresh venom, his glare still locked on the enchantress.

Comprehension dawned late, like a douse of chill water, or a sudden fall through thin ice. Elaira understood where the brittle, steel tension had sprung from. Her heart leaped at once to deny her own part. “I wish nothing, no tie for my service!” Through the longer, louder wails of the newborn, her voice clashed in rising dissent. “Let the boy’s life hold to its own course, with no interference from me.”

“Ye know better, gifted lady!” the seeress said, tart. “The debt against this young spirit is a fair one, and to refuse his given charge, a sign of ill favor and disrespect.”

The father spun about, his bellow of rebuttal cut short by more withering reprimand. “Foolish man! Were ye raised by a nanny goat? Here’s a strong son ye’ll have, perhaps to beget other living children of your line! Now let the augury say what he’s to grow and become. He may bear your blood. Yet the fate he’ll be asked in payment for his birth is nothing else but his own!”

Silent, even mollified, for it had been her summons which had brought Elaira to the steading, the midwife lifted the naked, newborn babe, wiped clean of the fluids of birthing. A rutched comb of dark hair arched in a cowlick over the vulnerable crown of his skull. His face was rosy, suffused with crying, and his miniature feet lashed the air in what seemed an impotent echo of the father’s outrage.

At the dry, cool touch of the seeress’s hands his wails missed their rhythm and silenced. The crone raised the boy’s small body. Her eyes were dark brown, clear-sighted and deep, schooled to reflect the infinite whole, from which grand source came the spark to animate all that held shape in creation. Watching the finespun aura of spirit light flare up as the woman tapped into her prescience, Elaira experienced both relief and sharp dread. The old woman’s Sight was no sham, but an untrammeled channel attuned to the resonance of true mystery.

Then the words came, sonorous and full, to augur the coil of the future; they were directed, not to the babe’s kin, but to Elaira.

“One child, four possible fates, looped through the thread of his life span. He will grow to reach manhood. Should he die in fire, none suffers but he. Yours to choose when that time comes, Fferedon’li. Should he die on salt water, the one ye love most falls beside him. Should he die landbound, in crossed steel and smoke, the same one ye cherish survives, but betrayed. Yet should this child’s days extend to old age, first the five kingdoms, then the whole world will plunge into darkness, never to see sunlight or redemption. Your burden to choose in the hour of trial, Fferedon’li, and this child’s to give, the natural death or the sacrifice. Let him be called Fionn Areth Caid-an.” The ancient seeress lowered the babe, the hard spark fading from her eyes as she closed her final line. “Let his training be for the sword, for his path takes him far from Araethura.”

Elaira stared transfixed at the child just born and Named. She wished, beyond recourse, that her hand had slipped in its office, or that the dull-witted roan had mired in some drifted-over streamlet and fallen. Better, surely, if she had arrived too late, and this herder’s son had gained no saving help to survive his transition into life. As her wits shuddered free of paralysis, the enchantress could not shake off a terrible, pending burden of remorse. The feeling which harrowed her lay far removed from the soft, stifled sobs of the mother. Elaira could not react to the rattling slam of the door, as the father stormed out in mute rage, nor to the midwife, murmuring phrases of helpless consolation for the destiny forewarned by the seeress.

The enchantress felt the trained powers of her focus drawn and strained in a web of disbelief. The babe had such tiny, unformed fingers, to have tangled the destiny of the Shadow Master between them, and all he entailed, the misled fears which had raised marching war hosts; the bloodshed and sorrows of an age.