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He is in the grip of it. He is lost to it, a mass of feeling. The smell of moist nests freshly expelled stings him like a rain of arrows showering down on him, each one piercing him to the bone.
Pity poor Alain. For him, every day is as this day, scarred by the pitiless and bottomless maw of emotion.
Hakonin’s YoungMother emerges from shadow, a graceful, massive shape like to the most beautiful granite. She watches him steadily, the weight of judgment in her gaze. Beyond her, fresh nests glisten in shallow pools, masses of tiny globes whose colorless membranes are bathed rose-red under the curtain of heavenly light dancing above, the wind off the sun. Their complex perfume tangles with the thread grown into his body to make him part of the weave. Down by his groin, a sac buds and swells, ready to erupt. Others follow.
He is no longer his own creature. For this night, he belongs to Hakonin’s Mothers, and he will serve their purpose, which is the life of the tribe. He staggers forward, hating this, reveling in this as his last rational thoughts are obliterated by the raw red hunger of a thing he cannot name in his own language but only in the language of Alain, which is “desire.”
o;Ah! I misunderstood,” continued Yolande. “I thought you said that Lavastine himself was laid to rest today. What fine workmanship this is! It is very lifelike. I swear I have seen nothing like it even at the chapel in Autun. There is a stone statue of the great emperor himself, lying in state, rather like this, but I swear that the workmanship is not so excellent.”
Tallia whispered. “It was a curse.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Yolande sharply, glancing at Alain. Geoffrey had come forward and he ran a hand over one stone shoulder, then pulled his hand back quickly as if he had felt something disturbing.
“God cursed him for not letting me build a chapel in honor of Our Mother and Her Son,” said Tallia. “That is why he died. But everything will be different, now.”
“So it will,” murmured Yolande, glancing at Geoffrey, “if you make it so. What of an heir? Are you pregnant yet?”
Geoffrey’s head came up. Stillness settled so profoundly over the group that Alain heard dust falling from the eaves and mice scrabbling in the walls. Tallia took in breath to speak. The last lance of sunlight through the western windows made a path along the stone floor, trembling, as brief as a human’s lifespan, one passing tremor in an angel’s wings.
It flickers, a pale rose curtain in the air, light trembling in the sky and then fading. Was that the passage of an angel’s wings? Nay. He knows better. The WiseMothers say that the curtain of light seen sometimes in the winter sky is wind off the sun, blown to earth. He supposes they are correct; they see much farther than he does. But on such a night as this, he wonders if it is not wind at all but a kind of water, some deep inexplicable tide that drags back and forth, rising and falling, between the earth and the heavens. Here he stands, caught in the current, waiting.
The air breathes around him with the slow exhalation of earth, warmth rising into the chill night sky as heat fades off the rocks. He waits in a crater, a bowl of stone on the high fjall. He waits alone, because he alone was marked by the spoor of Hakonin’s OldMother. Because he defeated Hakonin’s warriors five seasons ago, because he earned a name by becoming chieftain of Rikin tribe, because he drove off Jatharin’s raiders who harried Hakonin’s outlying farms, because of all this, he was chosen by Hakonin’s OldMother to enter the nesting cave deep in the rock. The ways are hidden from all but the SwiftDaughters, traps and pitfalls await the reckless, those who seek what is forbidden, the secret of the nests.
He walked through rock halls and along the phosphorescent gleam of tunnels, following the faint chime and scatter of the golden girdle of the SwiftDaughter who led him. She brought him here, up stairs carved into the rock, to this bowl of stone open to the air, stung by the wind off the fjall. Here, he waits.
He perceives it first as a tickle along the back of his neck, a penetrating pain at the base of his spine. All at once the scent blooms as sharp as obsidian’s edge.
Hakonin’s YoungMother has spawned.
The smell hits him hard. Pain rips through his belly. He is torn in half, eviscerated. All of his senses reel under the onslaught. As with a needle, a thread is sewn through him, woven into him, so there is no ending to what he was before and no beginning to what he is now. When the tide comes in, the strand is helplessly engulfed; when a waterskin is filled too full, the water bursts and spills over because it cannot contain more than what it is: when a smoldering fire catches dry tinder, it rages.
He is in the grip of it. He is lost to it, a mass of feeling. The smell of moist nests freshly expelled stings him like a rain of arrows showering down on him, each one piercing him to the bone.
Pity poor Alain. For him, every day is as this day, scarred by the pitiless and bottomless maw of emotion.
Hakonin’s YoungMother emerges from shadow, a graceful, massive shape like to the most beautiful granite. She watches him steadily, the weight of judgment in her gaze. Beyond her, fresh nests glisten in shallow pools, masses of tiny globes whose colorless membranes are bathed rose-red under the curtain of heavenly light dancing above, the wind off the sun. Their complex perfume tangles with the thread grown into his body to make him part of the weave. Down by his groin, a sac buds and swells, ready to erupt. Others follow.
He is no longer his own creature. For this night, he belongs to Hakonin’s Mothers, and he will serve their purpose, which is the life of the tribe. He staggers forward, hating this, reveling in this as his last rational thoughts are obliterated by the raw red hunger of a thing he cannot name in his own language but only in the language of Alain, which is “desire.”
The stripe of sunlight shivered and vanished as the sun set in the west. He felt her breathe beside him, the merest tremor as she let out the breath she had taken in a moment ago; ages ago. Her fingers brushed his; she flinched and shied off, like a butterfly, as beautiful, as fragile. He remembered it all, then. All of the desire he had ever felt for her swept him as does a wave the shore. She was even more beautiful now, the palest rose color in her cheeks, her hair washed and clean and as fine as the tawny stands of wheat under the summer sun. Her neck had the supple grace of a swan’s. She had put on enough weight that her breasts pressed against her gown and her hips swelled under the fabric, a resting place for loving hands.
She did not look at him, but she flushed, the color of a woman who sees her beloved for the first time in the intimacy of the bedchamber. Was it not obvious that she loved him, he who was surely not worthy of her, the granddaughter of queens and kings?
At last, she spoke in as firm a voice as he had ever heard from her. “God has heard my prayers. I remain a virgin. I am not pregnant.”
Geoffrey let out a sharp, satisfied breath, turning to Yolande. “Did I not predict this? God have made him impotent! It is a sign. If he was the rightful heir, he would have gotten her with child by now.”
Ai, God. His own desire had blinded him. Tallia stared at him defiantly. Finally, he stammered out words. “Say what you mean, Lord Geoffrey.”
“I mean,” said Geoffrey, warming to his subject, “that you duped my cousin Lavastine. You are a fraud. I knew it all along. I have already sent a message to King Henry asking him to judge this matter.”
“King Henry has already judged this matter,” retorted Alain. “He himself sealed my father’s claim. I didn’t ask to be acknowledged as my father’s heir. Lavastine himself took me forward before the king before I knew what he meant to do!”
“So you say now. But everyone knows Lavastine was ensorcelled at that time. I was loyal to King Henry all along. But you consorted with that Eagle, the one who was outlawed and excommunicated for sorcery. You gave her gifts. Who is to say you didn’t ensorcell my cousin Lavastine? That you convinced him of what was never true? He was taken by a fit, that is all, a fit brought on him by witchcraft. That is why he named you as his heir.”
Duchess Yolande watched him with the weight of judgment—and opportunity—in her gaze. Hadn’t her own father ridden with Sabella, against Henry? Who could know where her loyalties lay? Tallia had a legitimate claim to the throne. Geoffrey had a wife with powerful kinsfolk, and an infant daughter whom he had, until last spring, expected to install as count of Lavas. And Yolande had an infant son, second child, who—if he lived—would need to marry a powerful noblewoman.
Ai, God! No wonder Lavastine had had little patience for court. Intrigue was nothing more than a palace of coils, all tangles and knots, and once you wandered in, it was impossible to find your way out. There you would starve, and the scavengers would eat you, flesh and blood and bone.
