With a sigh, the blonde twisted in her cocoon of soft, worn blankets. So much had happened in such a short time. There had been no chance to imagine what it all meant, no opportunity for anything except a desperate scramble for her life. She'd had no time to even wonder about the child she would bear.
Elzin tried to count back on a crude mental calendar, to remember. It was all too confusing. There had been so many; the memories were a blurred pageant of men and bittersweet, mean wine. She could do no more than guess as to the father.
Drowsily, she smiled. The child was hers; what else mattered? For the first time, she felt protective of the new life growing within her, and curious. How soon would it begin to stir? Would she feel its small heart beat independent of her own? This boy or girl, what would it look like; would it have her blond hair, her blue eyes? A name, she thought, it would need a name… something musical… something sweet… She softly mused through candidate after candidate, until at last dreams found her, the name pressed between her lips.
o0o
Elzin nibbled on one last sliver of tangy, golden cheese as she left the inn. If only Caldan would let her wait until noon every day before they had to travel! With the sun already high, she wouldn't have to shiver inside half a dozen coats.
Just as she need shiver no longer over Beksann's discovery.
'I swear to you by Telriss, I'll never tell a soul!' Her maidservant had actually dropped onto her knees to say it.
'Remember, then, that what is sworn by Telriss is a sacred vow,' she had answered. Beksann, wholly ignorant that Elzin merely parroted words she had once heard from an itinerant priestess, had seemed mightily impressed by the Saire's lofty mandate.
Elzin waited for the councilor to help her mount; she spied him talking with the captain of her guard. The sorceress had, as usual, gotten aboard her mare unassisted.
A man slipped around the corner of the inn and ran toward her, only to be blocked by two of her elite.
"What does he want?" asked Elzin.
"Only to thank you, Great Lady!" shouted the stocky blond past the black-cloaked guards. "It was my field where you played. My Lord Val Torska told me that it was you who sent the gold. This means everything to my family," he held aloft the small purse, and the Saire smiled in return.
Elzin brushed past her elite. "Tell me about your family while I wait. There's still a little time, I think." She felt, rather than saw, Castandra's reproachful glare before the sorceress cantered her mare away. The odd girl had taken a fancy to capes with hoods lately. Elzin wondered if she was embarrassed over the change in the color of her hair. If it was still changed. She had tried to catch a glimpse of it as Castandra ate, but even then the sorceress did not remove her hood. Instead, she picked at her food as if it were spiders and gravel. No wonder she was as flat-chested as any boy!
The Saire shrugged after the girl, then turned her smile on the farmer. "Do you have any children?" she asked.
"My wife carries her third already," he answered proudly. "Two sons--"
A horse's squeal caused Elzin to whip her head around just in time to see Beksann topple backward from her plunging mount. The old nurse's cry of alarm cut abruptly short as she hit the mire of the stable yard.
Elzin raced to her handmaid's side, but Count Val Torska and two of the guards already knelt beside Beksann, Caldan with one hand laid protectively over her abdomen.
"No! She must not be moved," he warned the guards. "If her back is broken, you will do her further harm."
Beksann uttered a little gasp of pain, then seemed to try to rise. Suddenly her eyes widened and began to bulge as she sucked in her breath, deeper and deeper, her face red and contorted, lips stretched grotesquely over her few remaining teeth. Elzin instinctively covered her ears for the piercing scream, but instead, the protruding eyes rolled backward and the air left Beksann's lungs in a long, phlegmy rattle. A hollow thorn, its tip dark with blood, fell unnoticed in the well-churned muck.
Elzin pushed past her guards to kneel at her handmaid's side. Too late. She averted her eyes, feeling she should say something, do something. Surely, Caldan would know what it could be. He always knew what needed to be done. She tried to ask, but no words choked past her constricted throat.
Caldan shut the corpse's eyes shut and led Elzin aside.
"Cry, Great Lady," he urged. "Go on. What greater honor could old Beksann ask for than to be heralded into the afterlife by the tears of a Saire?"
o0o
It was an accident.
It could not have been prevented, could not have been foreseen. Elzin had reassured herself a hundred times these past few days, but somehow, still, Beksann's death weighed on her as heavily as Shelvann's.
Had she not been Chosen, neither would have died. Had she not left Sheldwinn, Beksann would still live.
Let me see that smile, Dearest. How often have I told you all this worry isn't healthful?
That’s what Beksann would have said. At the sight of Elzin riding, head down, in gloomy silence, she would have had her assistant, Kezwann, scour the countryside in search of some delicious treat.
Elzin sighed. She'd miss being spoiled. At that moment, a leg brushed her own, and she looked up from her horse's withers as her youngest elite, Jenir, pressed a cool, dewy bundle into her hands. "Don't be sad, Great Lady," he said, then dropped quickly back into position.
Symbol of renewal, snowdrop blossoms, the fragrant, pale pink harbingers of spring. Smiling behind her bouquet, Elzin favored her former lover with a friendly wink. Then she gently tapped Tutor with her heels, as Caldan had instructed, and the chestnut moved into an easy canter.
o0o
Following Elzin's lead, the entire party increased its pace. At last, Castandra allowed her shameful hood to fall. Why not? The hand-shaped bruise on her right cheek had faded, and it felt good to leave behind their uninvited entourage, the lowland rustics of the foothills, with their barking, scratching, hollow-flanked dogs.
The sorceress checked her mount so that the mare's long gait would not distance her from the main body of the well-guarded group. She had been foolish to run off unescorted to search for her father. He had enemies everywhere, many of whom would jump at the chance to take her hostage and use her as a weapon against him. Of course he struck her; she deserved no less. She was hardly some untutored dolt who failed to understand the risks. The sorceress sniffed derisively. No, she was hardly Elzin.
With the Saire more accustomed to her mount and the days quickly warming, the group made better time. Thus far they had used the Merchant Road paralleling the Sheldwinn River, named for the capital city where the river emptied into the Bay of Benevolence. The Sheldwinn began its long journey south high in the peaks of southern Tarska, to bisect the wide bulk of Lhant.
In another week, mountains would replace the foothills through which they now passed. Castandra doubted they would continue on the main road for that long, however. The winter had not only been unusually cold, but dry as well. The roads, typically ribbons of quagmire at this time of year, were muddy, but passable, and each day their group encountered more and more people. On foot, on horseback, in carts pulled by everything from goats to oxen, the merchants and travelers began to move, like the sap in the wakening trees. Each had to be watched by the guards; who knew what bent back might belong to an assassin? Even a passing sedan chair's filmy curtains could conceal a potential attacker.
The Great Lady did nothing to make the task easier for her elite. She constantly called out to the common folk on the road, or asked for them to be allowed to walk beside her. Castandra waited for her father to rebuke his silly charge, yet so far he had indulged the Saire as often as he might without overtaxing the patience of the guards.
"Gods, she is witless," the sorceress complained that evening to the twins as she ran fingers and combs through her brace's pelts, in search of any parasites that might have abandoned their mongrel homes in favor of finer lodgings.
"Worse than," added Tacha. "She h
as all the balance of a turnip. Her poor horse."
"Still, she seems harmless enough--" said Miska.
"--for what she is," her twin concluded.
"You mean, I assume," said Castandra frostily, "when she is merely being a Saire, and not a snow lion?"
Both girls had the good grace to look appropriately chagrined.
"Anyway, Grandfather said we're to be well out of hearing anymore when she plays," said Miska.
"That sits well with me," averred Tacha.
"I should be so fortunate," Castandra said as she scrutinized the back of Talisman's left ear. "Flute or not, it's her recklessness that makes her dangerous. She is abominable. I wish that she would disappear and never return."
Chapter Nine
The handmaid of the Saireflute
stands keeper of the gate
betwixt the mortal and the magic,
between the worlds of chance and fate.
--Inscribed upon a wall at the Keep of the Virgins
The overcast morning skies were cheerless, not unlike some of her company. Honestly, thought the exasperated Saire, Castandra had to be the single most rigid human being in existence. Elzin squinted hard at the sorceress's back, in an attempt to discern the presence of the constipated old woman she was so certain must reside within the girl. But no matter how hard she looked, Elzin saw nothing unusual, just the same unfriendly back ahead and to the left of her.
Although she had given up wearing hoods, Lady Val Torska never commented on her surprising change of hair color. Elzin thought Castandra could at least say whether she liked it or not.
All attempts to engage the sorceress in interesting conversation proved futile. The girl did not seem to appreciate the castle gossip that Elzin's friends had always found so amusing. She had not even so much as snickered at Elzin's very favorite story about the Queen's bowl of porridge, which had been clapped to the head of the unfortunate First Chair of the Council of Lords when he failed to remember to wish Her Majesty well in honor of the anniversary of the beheading of the wife to the cousin of the godfather of Prince Heratinn--one of the Queen's favorite personal holidays. Hulgmal had never forgiven the woman for saying that the infant prince looked "as strapping as a common babe," and even after the Queen had ordered the woman decapitated, she had kept the head around for days. It was rumored that every now and then she would glare at it and say, "That will teach you to compare a true prince to a common brat!"
It was unnerving, thought Elzin, to have everything from her most serious statements to her smallest jokes answered only with a grave, "Yes, Great Lady." Well, maybe not unnerving, she decided, but definitely boring. It wasn't just Castandra either. All of the members of the party seemed to regard her as if her next bowel movement might be of historic significance.
At least Caldan treated her differently. Without his conversation, she might be tempted to run away and leave all of them behind. Not that she believed for a moment that a lone, pregnant woman toting a magical flute could remain inconspicuous for long.
Thank the goddess that Saire, the Flute's day, had come. For days scores of people had followed her, and all through the night and morning, scores more had straggled in from the hills. The elite kept her an island in a sea of waving, shouting people, but at her insistence, Superior Gage selected some in ones and twos to walk beside her horse. They brought her gifts, asked her blessing, and spoke to her with such guileless adoration that she almost felt embarrassed. A farmer offered his grassy hill for her Playing, and the mayor of the prosperous farming town nearby begged her to spend the night. She could not refuse; she only hoped the Flute would be as good to them as they had been to her.
"Look! That must be the place," said Elzin. "Where did all those other people come from? I thought we had half of Lhant here already."
Shagril Gage frowned at the crowd awaiting them on the hill ahead. "Great Lady, look at the clouds. It will storm here any minute. Better to wait until we reach town, where you can play from somewhere sheltered."
Elzin grimaced as the sky growled an underscore to the superior's words. Rain was all well and good, provided one was under a warm roof--or, better yet, a warm man. She smiled coquettishly at Caldan, who was helping her elite maintain order.
He did not smile back. "I guess you're right," she sighed, disappointed that her attention had not been returned by the count – since he was preoccupied, as always, by looking out for her best interests. "Oh, curses," she grumbled under her breath, remembering her purpose. "My best interests."
"I beg your pardon, Great Lady?"
"Nothing. It's just, why, what else have I come for, if not to play before the crowd? To the hill, Superior Gage, and let the storm be damned."
A credit to his uniform, Shagril did not so much as sigh as the Saire kicked her gelding into a trot.
o0o
The guards deployed and the crowd somewhat subdued, Elzin opened her scarlet case. Secure within its velvet folds, the Saireflute glistened--invitingly, she used to think. But that wasn't what she thought now. Instead, she thought of snake scales and of a beetle's brittle carapace--of coiling, crawling, nasty things that glittered and then bit.
Like last time.
She remembered rage and hate and hunger.
It was the necklace, she told herself. It happened because I played while I wore the necklace. That had to be it. When she told Caldan about it, he had said she must surely be right. To be safe, she had left the coin and chain behind, stuffed deep in Tutor's saddlepacks.
Flanked behind and on both sides by her guard, the Saire walked slowly to the hill's crest. She tried to carry herself erect, with the dignified poise she had seen in others, like the old Saire, Caldan, and even that snotty Castandra, but she knew what a poor imitation she did. Still, the crowd did not seem to mind. Their cheers warmed her; she smiled at them and tried to guess their number, but failed. She only knew that there were more than had appeared at the inn a week ago, on the day she had heard Beksann call her Day of Changing.
If something had gone wrong then, why not now? Although she had put aside the necklace, she was no longer confident all would be well. The slender, silver instrument felt as cold as the leaden skies; her hands as they held it trembled.
The crowd watched. They had grown silent to await from her a word of greeting or a nod and then the music, followed by a miracle or two. Elzin opened her mouth to speak, but she could think of nothing to say. The wind gusted and the first drops of rain began to fall. In the silence, Elzin could hear them strike the grassy hill. She could hear her own heartbeat pounding like the hooves of horses. But still she could think of nothing to say, and she could not bring her hands to raise the Saireflute to her lips. Her eyes swept the front row of the crowd: Superior Gage, one hand to ready on the hilt of his sheathed sword; Castandra, looking uneasy and annoyed; and finally, Caldan.
He smiled. He looked so confident, so proud. Proud of her. For years no one had looked at her with pride. For years she had convinced herself she didn't care.
Her own smile was guilelessly shy."Welcome," she told her audience simply. "I am happy to share with you the gift of the Flute."
She began to play at once, with the rhythmic slapping of fat raindrops as her only accompaniment. The rain, however, was short-lived, for in a few moments, a sunbeam centered on the playing Saire, and where its light reached her, no rain fell. The circle of light widened, growing larger and larger, until at last it encompassed the entire crowd. Outside the circle the sky darkened and rain hammered ever harder, but within rose the smell of spring, of fertile, freshly turned earth, and eager, green plants. The Saireflute's melody mimicked the famed songbirds of Lhant's rich lowlands, and the air warmed with the sun.
From the Saireflute colors began to tumble, bright as girls' ribbons at a fairseller's stall. But these colors lived. They fluttered in a brilliant swirl around the Saire and then drifted out above the watchers in a dazzling, ever-growing cloud. No common butterflies, these had wings withou
t markings, each insect a solid, vivid hue.
"Kaleidoscope," murmured Castandra.
"What?"
"You gave me one, Father, when I was a child."
"I remember."
"Do you see? There is a pattern."
The Saireflute no longer trilled like a bird, but sang with a beauty all its own. On and on Elzin played, tirelessly, longer than ever before. So long that the children present gathered, with silent yawns, to arrange themselves into gently snoring heaps upon the grass. Beyond the circle of sun the rain ceased. The clouds broke apart and moved on. No longer did the listeners stand set apart by sunlight; only the rain-soaked grass marked the boundary of the protective circle.
The song slowed. As if buoyed up only by the Saireflute's music, the butterflies fluttered groundward until, like a madwoman's quilt, they blanketed the hill, slowly fanning their wings as they clung to the blades of grass. The breeze freshened, but the insects rode their rippling perches, rode them and changed, until the grassy hill became as heaped with flowers as a princess's bridal bed.
Her audience bowed and Elzin bowed, casually plucking a saffron bloom. So many--an ocean of petals--and their fragrance--oh, so lovely! She leaned back, bloom to her nose, drinking in the exotic perfume. With a giggle she overbalanced and sat down with a bump. Why, it was all so funny, she couldn't help but laugh.
o0o
Castandra gaped. About her, everyone chortled and giggled and she--she felt so odd. Her stomach fluttered and she hiccoughed back the erupting laugh. Beside her, a noblewoman sank to her knees, shaking with mirth. When her simpering husband took hold of her wrists, she pulled him down on top of her. He slipped his hand into the top of her blouse while she pressed a crimson flower to his nose. Castandra looked away.
The Night Holds the Moon Page 10