Silver's Lure. Anne Kelleher

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СКАЧАТЬ out beside the cold hearth, apparently asleep, and Catrione gasped to see Deirdre, mountainous belly spilling over the armrests, sitting in the chair. Deirdre turned to look at her, beady eyes unnaturally bright in her puffy face. Her cheeks were flushed, but in the gloom, her skin appeared mottled gray and white. A white coif covered her hair. “What’re you doing here?” Catrione faltered with a hand on the door.

      “We know what they want you to do, Catrione.” Her voice was a low rasp.

      “It’s not what they want me to do.” Catrione collected herself as quickly as she could. Deirdre’s unblinking stare unnerved her, and she was puzzled that Bog didn’t stir. “Deirdre, this can’t continue—the child will grow so large, it won’t be able to be born. Don’t you see—we’re all worried about you.”

      “Why do you want to hurt us?” The final sound was an almost reptilian hiss.

      Catrione knelt beside the chair and picked up Deirdre’s hand, swallowing revulsion. Deirdre’s fingers looked like five fat sausages, her slitted eyes like a pig’s. But Catrione forced herself to look into Deirdre’s eyes and say, as gently as she could, “No one wants to hurt you. We want to take care of you. We’re worried about you, Deirdre. Strange things have been happening lately—”

      “My baby is not a strange thing!” Deirdre cried. She pulled her hand away, cradling her vast stomach with both arms. She shut her eyes and tilted her face so that her cheek nearly touched the rounded tops of her enormous breasts, as she murmured in a low horrible croon, “Leave us alone…leave us alone…Why can’t you all just leave us alone?”

      Revulsion turned into resolve. The others were right. How could I have been so blind? she thought desperately, even as she said, “I have left you alone, Deirdre, and I see I was wrong. Please, don’t argue with me—the midwives won’t give you anything that hasn’t been given to hundreds—”

      “What they want us to take will kill us—” Again, Deirdre’s voice trailed away into a soft hiss as her coif fell off, revealing lank strands of sweat-soaked hair and wide patches of blotchy scalp.

      Only druid discipline kept Catrione from recoiling openly. “When did your hair start falling out?”

      But Deirdre was on her feet and moving faster than Catrione could’ve imagined possible. “Leave us alone. Don’t bother sending for the men—” There was something in the way she said it that told Catrione she knew what the still-wives had planned. “We won’t go with them.”

      “How did you know—?” whispered Catrione. Deirdre’s continued use of the word we was ghoulish for some reason.

      “It’s amazing how delicate an expectant mother’s senses can be,” Deirdre snapped. She got to her feet, head lowered, ponderous and slow as a boulder slowly gathering momentum. “We know it was you, Catrione. Even he never guessed. But we know. And we know something else, too, something you don’t think anyone else does. We know who you want. We know who you need.” She leaned closer and the wet stench of her body enveloped Catrione in a sickening miasma that made her gag. “You’re so blind, Catrione. You don’t see, and because you can’t, you think no one else can, either. Well, you’re wrong.”

      The silent, sudden words struck Catrione like stones pelting her chest. Her jaw dropped, and before Catrione could gather her wits, Deirdre was gone and out the door. She knows…she knows. The words pulsed through her brain. That can’t be possible. No one ever knew. Even when she taunted me…I never admitted anything.

      Catrione put one hand on the nearest chair to steady herself, and Bog caught her eye. Forgetting Deirdre, she knelt beside him, one hand on his head. He didn’t stir at her touch, didn’t open his eyes, didn’t thump his great white plume of a tail, and in a moment of awful realization, she knew he was dead. He’d seemed fine all that day, she thought as disbelief descended on her. She tried to remember the last time she’d looked into his deep brown eyes, fondled his silky ears, tried to think what she’d been doing the last time she’d seen him. Her mind was a complete blank, filled with a raven’s screech. One for sorrow, was all she could think.

      Deirdre. Find her. The unequivocal command yanked Catrione into the present, galvanizing her. With one last look at Bog’s poor limp body, she shut her door, and paused, looking both ways down the empty corridor. Find her.Catrione picked up her skirts and ran down the shadowy corridor toward the rain-shrouded dusk.

      Hardhaven Landing, Far Nearing

      Wind-driven rain slashed against the panes of yellowed horn, and the shutters rattled against the latch as the storm howled around the tower room. In the hearth, a log cracked and split in a shower of sparks, stinging Cwynn’s bare legs like a hundred bees, chasing him out of yet another dream of the woman with the honey-blonde hair. Her now-familiar features dispersed into a swirl of color as he came to himself with a start, just in time to wonder briefly who she could possibly be. The girls who caught his eye were usually dark-haired, like Ariene the midwife’s daughter, the mother of his sons. He knocked his head against the stone hearth and opened his eyes to see his grandfather, Cermmus, watching beady-eyed from his pillow. “Sorry,” he muttered.

      “Hard day?”

      “Thought it would never end.” Cwynn cleared his throat and shook himself awake. The storm had risen fast out of flat water and hazy sun, catching him off guard and farther away from the shore than a one-handed fisherman should be when the weather was bad. Until his feet had actually touched land, Cwynn’d believed it more likely than not he’d find himself feasting in the Summerlands. The sound of off-key singing, followed by loud laughter and catcalls filtered up from the hall, and he remembered there were three strangers in the keep tonight who wore odd-patterned plaids and supple leather doublets with high boots polished to a fine sheen. He’d had no chance to speak to them himself, for Cermmus had left word with every occupant of the house, apparently, that Cwynn was to come to him directly. A whoop from the floor below sounded like Shane, Cwynn’s uncle, who, at thirty-five, was only five years older than Cwynn. “I lost the whole day’s catch, and the nets—the mast—the boat’s going to need a lot of repairs.” He held up his hook. “I put a hole in the side.” He braced himself.

      But to Cwynn’s disbelief, Cermmus only shifted under the sheet. “Forget the catch, never mind the boat. There’s—”

      Cwynn stared. “Never mind?” Was his grandfather not aware there were two more mouths to feed this summer? Duir and Duirmuid, his twin boys, were weaned and hungry. And there were no men in the midwife’s house to provide for them. “We needed that catch, Gran-da—the fish aren’t running this year like they should. Why, Ruarch was saying—”

      “Did you get a look at those strangers down there?”

      “I saw them. I figured if there was something about them I needed to know, you’d tell me.”

      “I was waiting for you to ask.”

      “No sense wasting your breath, eh?”

      The old man nodded, and what lately passed for a smile flickered across his face. Then his expression grew serious and he rose up on one elbow, fumbling beneath his pillow. “Come here, boy. I have something for you.” He began to cough, a hard, hacking cough that brought Cwynn to his side, his right hand extended to help him sit up, a clay cup of water awkwardly held in the curved iron hook that had served as his left ever since the accident.

      “Drink this, Gran-da,” he said.

      The old man waved him away. “Don’t fret about me, boy.” Cermmus cleared СКАЧАТЬ