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

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      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.

       Crown Council

      Winter 5647-5648

      Far СКАЧАТЬ