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‘Lord Draconus! I knew you would return! It was the Azathanai,
setting fire to the stables – can’t you hear the horses screaming? Oh, please, stop it now – stop all of this—’
He reached for her, lifted her from her feet – she’d not known him to be so tall, big as a giant. But hostages were always young. It was being young that made them precious, so Lord Anomander told her, laughing as he wheeled her through the air, and how she squealed her delight, safe for ever in his strong hands.
But now she hung suspended in the air, in a chamber with its stone walls gouged deep on all sides, as if clawed by a trapped beast. With more rents crisscrossing the wooden floorboards, with the ceiling beams looking chewed, shredded.
She felt something like a fist curl in her belly, low down, and it grew. Back arching, Sandalath gasped as her clothes stretched, as she swelled, skin tightening. Galdan! Look what we did! I didn’t know! Mother is furious with me! She says it’s a snake – a snake inside me, and it’s growing!
Fluids spilled from between her legs. She saw Draconus, looming before her, his face twisted in something like helpless frustration. She felt one of his hands reaching down, reaching in, and dragging the baby out.
She watched as he lifted the thing between them, and saw immediately that it was lifeless, a slick, red doll with flopping limbs. Snarling, he flung it away.
Another fist made a knot in her belly, began growing.
Another dead child. A bellow of fury from Draconus as he threw it to one side.
She lost count. Stillborn after stillborn. Mind glazed with shock, eyes unable to close or even blink, with not a single breath drawn, she watched as the scene played out again and again. There was no pain, no sense of anything beyond the swelling, the terrible release, and then his howling anger.
Until everything changed.
A child’s cry, small fists waving about, feet kicking.
Mother, I didn’t mean it. I swear. I didn’t know.
Draconus pulled her close, pushed the wailing creature into her arms.
She looked up into the man’s eyes, but those eyes, she saw now, did not belong to a man. They were as black and depthless as the waters of Dorssan Ryl. When he opened his mouth, as if attempting to speak, the inky waters poured from it. Anguish twisted the face. Releasing her to drop to the ravaged wooden floor, where she almost lost her balance, the figure staggered back, as if in horror.
Sudden vehemence flooded Sandalath, and the voice that came from her was not her own. ‘This child, Draconus, has taken the best of you. This child is made pure. All the love you harboured, that you so callously hoarded, and meted out with such reluctance – it now resides in this babe, given to a mother too broken to love her back.
‘Oh, Draconus, how do you like me now?
‘Tell this to Mother Dark, when next you see her. She is neither the first nor the last, but nothing you covet and nothing you need will be found in her arms. I have wounded you, Draconus. Will she be content with what’s left of you? I doubt it.
‘My fire lives on, but it is a lonely flame. May you kiss the same cold lips. May you yearn for what you can never have, and find no warmth in this or any other world.
‘Your soldiers burned me! In hate, they hurt me! All of your careless games, Draconus, now return to you! Come back to this Finnest, see what I have done!’
Sandalath felt the presence flee her. The tiny girl in her arms, dripping with birth fluids, was plucking at her sodden blouse, hungry for what the cloth hid.
Revulsion rippled through her, but some instinct made her yield to the babe’s need. She fumbled at the clasps, pulled her blouse apart, and let the girl suckle.
Draconus was gone – she didn’t recall seeing him leave – and now, impossibly, the morning sun was pushing through the warped slats of the shutters. She could smell bitter, acrid smoke.
As the child drank eagerly, she staggered, body aching, over to the window, reaching out to tug back the shutters.
The smouldering ruin of the house surrounded the tower, the fire-cracked stones heaped up around the base. Flames had caught the barracks, but there the fire had but scorched one corner, where the stones had sunk down into a pit now filled with frozen meltwater. From beyond the outer wall, in the direction of the training field, a dozen or more columns of white smoke rose straight up, the only motion in this frozen daybreak.
She listened to the child’s deep breaths even as the mouth drew on the nipple. Already the babe felt heavier, bulkier. Its skin was onyx, its black hair fine and long. The eyes were large and strangely elongated, luminous as they stared upward, past Sandalath’s face, seemingly focused on the empty morning sky. Something in that small, round face reminded Sandalath of her mother.
You’ll get what you need, but nothing more.
Turning about, she set out for the stairs.
* * *
Ivis sat huddled in blankets as close to the stone-ringed cookfire as he could manage, yet still shivers trembled through him.
