Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ