Читать книгу The Girl and the Stars - Mark Lawrence - Страница 6

Many babies have killed, but it is very rare that the victim is not their mother.

When the father handed his infant to the priestess to speak its fortune the child stopped screaming and in its place she began to howl, filling the silence left behind.

Omens are difficult and open to interpretation but if the oracle that touches your newborn dies moments later, frothing at the mouth, it is hard even with a mother’s love to think it a good sign.

In such cases a second opinion is often sought.

On the diamond ice out past the northern ridges is an empty place where the wind laments and no one listens. Alone in all those miles is a cave where a witch lives. Or rather where she exists, for little about her might be called living. Agatta waits, nothing more. With the blood frozen in her veins she waits, moving only to crack the ice that forms around her and to let it fall.

The father and the mother came wrapped in sealskins and the furs of hoola, so bulky that they might be great bears roaming from the south. They set the salt price before the witch, and then the baby, swaddled in skins.

‘Go.’ Agatta creaked when she moved. She sniffed the air, and scowled, her face cracking. ‘The present.’ She looked down at the baby through frozen eyes. ‘This smells like the present to me. Such a thin slice between what was and what will be, and yet always so much going on in it …’

The witch waited for the parents to retreat from view. She watched the silent baby, aware of its pinkness. Her hand, in contrast, was the white of early frostbite.

‘What have we here? A little drop of warmth in a cold world.’ Agatta reached for the child, stretching her senses into the future and the past as she did, seeking out the roots leading to the seed and following the shoot across the years, branching into possible tomorrows.

‘Let me see …’ Icy hand touched warm skin.

Instantly there was fire. A fierce bright fire consuming frozen flesh.

The parents returned, cautious, summoned less by the single piercing scream than by the silence that followed. They entered the cave, blinking at the gloom and wrinkling their noses against the stink of burned meat.

Agatta stood where they had left her, one hand pointing at their infant, the other behind her back, still smouldering.

‘Take your child and go.’ Her voice creaked like the pressure ridges where the ice flows.

‘A-and the oracle?’ The father stuttered the words out, wanting to run but having come too far to leave without answer.

‘Greatness,’ Agatta said. ‘Greatness and torment.’ A pause. ‘And fire.’