‘You are the gate sergeant of House Dracons, Raskan. You wear my father’s old moccasins and you have ridden at his side. He sent you to me, remember? And you said what needed to be said.’
Each statement seemed to strike the man like a blow, and he sat down on the slope.
‘Stand up!’ Arathan snapped. ‘You taught me how to ride Hellar. You fed Sagander blood-broth and saved his life.’
Raskan drew a deep, shuddering breath, squeezed shut his eyes for a moment, and then regained his feet. ‘As you say.’
‘They’re getting a meal ready. We should join them.’
But Raskan hesitated, and then he said, ‘I am sorry, Arathan. I misspoke.’
‘You made no sense.’
‘That is true enough. No sense, none at all. Forgive me.’
Arathan shrugged.
Raskan resumed the climb, but slowly this time, without vehemence. After watching for a moment, Arathan tried to follow, but his legs would not move. She was up there, and she carried his child. A girl had been made, by him and her. In the heat and wet, in the hunger and need, a child had been made. The thought terrified him.
He managed a step, and then another, although it seemed, all at once, that this was the hardest climb of his life. Feelings swarmed him in chaotic confusion, until they all blended into a solid roar; he felt that sound then rush away, leaving only a numbed silence, too weary for hope, too exhausted for expectation. All that remained was the taste of the terror he had experienced earlier, dull now, metallic.
They had made a child, but Feren needed nothing more from Arathan. She already had all she had wanted from him. In giving her one thing, he had thought it only right to give her everything, all of him. The foolish were ever too generous — he had heard Sagander say that often enough when stuffing scrolls and manuscripts into a chest that he then locked. His private writings, the culmination of his life as a scholar. Kept, for none to see. Arathan understood that now. What is given away for free comes back wounded. Value is not always shared and some hands are rougher than others.
Father, this is what Old Man said to you, in warning.
I don’t think you were listening.
Feren touched the wound on her cheek. Rint had pulled from it a shard of clay, sewing the gash shut with gut thread. The bitch had laughed and that laugh still echoed in her skull, sharp as claws. Her mind felt full of blood, as if the wound from the clay fragment still bled, but only inward now, in unceasing flow.
Rint crouched nearby, building the cookfire, but she could see that his hands were shaking.
The witch had only confirmed what the corpse in the barrow had told them: she was seeded. A child was spreading roots through her belly. But now it felt alien, monstrous, and this sensation made her spirit recoil. The midwives were clear on this: love must line the womb. Love, forming a protective sheath. Without love, the child’s soul withers, and she so wanted to love this creation.
The seed had been given in innocence. The hunger for it had belonged to her alone, hoarded like a treasure, a chest she wanted filled to the brim. And it had seemed that, night after night, she had cast in the boy’s precious gifts by the handful, only to find that chest still gaping come the dawn. An illusion, she realized now. She was swollen with wealth and this sense of pallid impoverishment was her failing, not his.
She recalled looking upon pregnant women in the Bordersword villages, not too long ago, and seeing in them the sated satisfaction that she had, on occasion, derisively called smug. She had been a fool, quick to forget when she had known the same, when she had sauntered bold as a glutton — but such memories delivered spasms of pain and grief: it was no wonder she rejected all of what she too had known, leaving nothing but contempt and spite.
But now all she could feel was the girl curling like a fist inside her. Around blood most unusual! The boy had been more than just a boy. He was the son of Draconus, and the witch knew something — a secret, a buried truth. The unknown mother was not unknown to her, or so Rint now believed.
The wound in Feren’s face stung as if licked by flames. It throbbed, shouted with pain in the centre of her cheek. It had torn her beauty away — what beauty she possessed and she’d never gauged it a thing to admire or envy — and she felt marked now, as if with a thief’s brand. She stole the seed of a lord’s son — see her! There is no hiding the truth of that!
She wanted to love the child growing within her: that first gift of protection offered up by all mothers, and if the shock of birth was as much the surrendering of that protection as it was labour’s own pain, she was a veteran to both and nothing awaiting her was unfamiliar. She had no cause to fear: every desire had been appeased; every prayer answered in the white stream’s perfect blessing.
A girl, damned in conception, and when Feren imagined looking upon its newborn face, she saw her own, cheek gashed and bleeding, with eyes that knew only hate.
The torment of her thoughts shredded and spun away when Raskan clambered into view and she saw what had been done to him. He looked aged far beyond his years, his motions palsied and febrile as those of an ancient with brittle bones as he tottered to the fire and slowly sat down. He looked more than shocked; he looked ill, and Feren wondered if the witch’s brutal sorcery had stolen more than peace from his soul.
Rint was stirring a broth on the fire. He did not look up when he spoke and his words were gruff. ‘Every witch has cold hands. The touch wears off, sergeant.’
‘She is Azathanai,’ the sergeant replied, making the statement a rejection of all that Rint had offered him.
‘A witch all the same,’ Rint responded doggedly. ‘Even the Jheleck know of this Olar Ethil, who looks out from flames and yearns to meet your eyes. They call her power Telas. We have all felt it, when the night slumps just before dawn, and we look upon the hearth, expecting to see nothing but embers, and are shocked at the sight of fresh flames.’ He nudged another stick into the fire. ‘And then… other times… who hasn’t fallen silent when sitting round a hearth, eyes trapped by the deadly spirit in the flames? You feel the cold on your back and the heat on your face, and it seems that you cannot move. A trance grips you. Your eyes are locked, and in your mind, moving like half-seen shadows, ancient dreams stir awake.’
Feren stared across at her brother, half in wonder and half in fear. Rint’s face was twisted into a grimace. He stirred the broth as if testing the depth of mud before his next step.
Beside Feren, Raskan’s breathing was harsh and rapid. ‘She has touched you, Rint.’
‘She has, though I knew it not at the time. Or perhaps I did, but kept the truth from myself. We are ever made uneasy by what we do not know, and there is no virtue in recognizing that, since it speaks only of our own ignorance.’
‘Better ignorance than this!’
With that hoarse admission from Raskan, Arathan arrived. He halted a few paces from the fire, and Feren saw how he would not look at her. This was a relief, since the single glance she had just cast his way burned like a knife blade in her chest. She felt her eyes drawn to the flickering flames and quickly looked away, off into the night.
Better ignorance than this! Voice that cry as if the words were holy, for they are surely that. Words to haunt our entire lives, I should think.
Rint rose. ‘Feren, if you would, the bowls are here.’
She did not object, as it gave her something to do. She set about ladling the broth into the bowls, while Rint moved off to his pack. When he returned he carried a flask which he offered to Raskan. ‘Sergeant, I’m of no mind to test your command this night. Nor shall Feren.’
The man frowned. ‘Meaning?’
‘Get drunk, sergeant. Get good and drunk.’
A faint smile cracked the man’s features. ‘I am reminded of an old saying and now wonder at its source…’