Moons' Dreaming (Children of the Rock)

by Krause, Marguerite

  “You and my father have discussed me and—” Jeyn’s eyes widened in dismay.

  Feather cut the princess off before she could start a tirade. “The way you and your father discuss me and Chasa.”

  The princess sighed. “Matchmaking. This house is full of matchmaking.”

  “It’s all the Dreamers’ fault,” Feather replied. “Sene says so.”

  “Sene says too much,” Jeyn complained. Her eyes strayed back to the door. She stood. “Wish me luck.”

  * * *

  The servant in the hall told Jeyn that Ivey was bathing. She knocked on the door of his room anyway.

  “Are you dressed?” she called, then turned the knob and entered.

  He stood in front of the copper wash basin, wearing trousers and a towel over his bare shoulders. His hair lay in damp ringlets on top of the towel. “What if I’d said no?”

  She pulled the door closed and smiled at him. “I probably would have come in anyway.” Then she stopped her teasing. “I was worried about you. You’re upset. How can I help?”

  He rubbed idly at his hair with the end of the towel. “I wish you could, Princess.”

  “Sit down,” she instructed. “That’s an order.” He continued to loom over her, water dripping on the carpet between them. She changed to a cajoling smile. “Please?”

  With a faint smile he sat gracefully on the edge of the chair. “There. Is this better?”

  “Much. I didn’t ask my father to keep you… available, you know.”

  “Aye.” His blush covered his entire torso, an intriguing sight for Jeyn. “If you were anyone else—”

  “But I’m a Shaper.”

  “You’re a pretty girl with a concerned father.”

  “Who’s a king.”

  “Who’s a king,” he agreed. “And you’re a Shaper. And Shapers….” He waved the subject away. “I need to travel. It’s part of what I am. I need to know what Palle is doing, and where Pirse is, and there are things going on in Rhenlan—”

  “There are Keepers planning to overthrow their Shaper rulers,” she interrupted him. “My father, my Shaper father, doesn’t see any other course for the Keepers of Rhenlan. All Shapers aren’t greedy and irresponsible, you know.”

  “I know that!” He leaned forward. “I wouldn’t work for your father if I didn’t admire him. That doesn’t trouble me.”

  “Then what does?”

  “You. Me. Us. Dreamers.” He touched her chin with just the tips of his fingers, then quickly put his hand back in his lap. “I never thought I’d care for someone favored by the gods.”

  “It isn’t much of a favor.” Her voice rose. “Yes, the gods selected my family. For all the celebration and awe, what it comes down to is that I’ve got to make Dreamer babies. That scares people away—people I could be close to. I don’t want it to scare you away. Besides, it touches us all, Ivey.”

  He pulled back a little. “It does, I suppose. I haven’t been thinking about the consequences of this prophecy nonsense.”

  She did not want him to go all moody on her again. With a teasing smile, she made a show of examining his bare torso. “You’ve gotten a bit more muscle, but you’re still too thin. That’s because you don’t eat.” At her careful scrutiny he straightened slightly and tossed his hair off of his shoulder. She refused to be distracted. “You haven’t eaten today, have you?”

  “You’re altogether too maternal, lass. No, I didn’t eat.”

  “Because you were too busy working up the courage to yell at a king.”

  “Foolish of me.” He leaned closer to her once more. “Especially when I could have been kissing a princess instead.”

  “You could still kiss the princess,” she suggested softly. When he didn’t move, she reached up, slipped her hand behind his neck, and pulled him toward her. “Do I have to do everything around here?”

  He didn’t answer. He did kiss her.

  * * *

  Pirse tied his horse’s halter rope to the upper rail of the yard fence, well away from Doron’s garden. He tugged self-consciously at the hem of his tunic, which bore stains and inelegantly mended tears, evidence of his summer’s work. He really should have replaced it in Dundas. He would have, if an unexpected guard patrol had not forced him to divert to the west. Still, the diversion had led him here, a couple of ninedays earlier than he usually arrived. Better to come shabby and early to the Fall Festival, than not at all. Or so he hoped Doron would see the matter.

  The scent of chicken and sweet basil greeted him as he stepped into the house. The sight of the familiar room and its furnishings, the one place in all Dherrica that he could think of as home, combined with the appetizing aroma of supper to bring a heart-felt smile to his face. He said a cheery, “Guess who?” then stopped.

  Voice, expression, thought itself froze as his clever, beautiful, strong-willed dyer-woman turned away from the steaming pot to face him. Her face glowed with more than the heat of the fire. The severity of its lines was gone, softened, a subtle shift in proportion of flesh over bone. Her eyes were bright with good health and flashing anger. Pirse hardly noticed her fury. What caught and rooted him stupidly in place was the high, rounded, unmistakable bulge that distorted the once-smooth lines of her blouse. She threw the wooden spoon she held in her hand at him, and he didn’t even try to duck.

  “You lying, conceited, vowless excuse for a man! Guess now, is it? Well, I’ve no time for your foolishness, and less time for your fantasies. Get out!”

  Pirse reeled back a step from the verbal assault. “Doron, what are you saying? What happened?” He couldn’t take his eyes off her belly. “What have you done? With whom?”

  He closed his eyes with pain. Fool, to have come to think of this place as his home. “Or will you tell me it’s no business of mine?”

  “You were there. Or will you pretend that more recent companions overshadow any memory of yourself in my bed?”

  The lie hurt more than the thought that she’d taken another lover. “I can’t have fathered that child!”

  “Not only a liar but a coward as well.” She rested a protective, possessive hand on her expanded abdomen. “Calling her impossible doesn’t still her kicking. Deny her if you will. Your words mean nothing. They never have.”

  “Shapers and Keepers aren’t fertile together.” He backed to the door, his fists balled against the desperate, possessive anger that threatened to overpower him.

  “That would only be relevant,” she snapped, “if one of us were a Shaper.”

  He heard the conviction of her words. The full implication of her fury left him gaping at her. The pain in her voice and face touched his heart. Doron would not lie. Of that one fact, at least, he could be sure. “Of course I’m a Shaper. I’m Pirse, son of Dea, who was daughter of—”

  “This proves otherwise, doesn’t it? Now leave me alone.”

  “Doron.” He pushed his fingers through his hair, searching frantically for inspiration. Could she be a Shaper? Some daughter of a lost family? As precious as Shaper bloodlines had become since the plague, it was highly unlikely. Not to mention unattractive, considering how she despised Shapers as a group. “There must be an explanation!”

  “Not from your lips. I’ll not believe another word you say. You, with your fine sword and dragon ears. Where is the real prince, I wonder? In hiding in the wild somewhere, is my guess, and you his messenger. You carry the dragon ears into Dundas because he can’t risk the road. Or do you find his camp and steal them while his back is turned? You tell us the Dreamers need dragon ears for their magic and medicine. Is that just another piece of clever misdirection? Or are the dragon ears real enough, but you merely pretend to serve the prince, then sell the ears to the highest bidder instead? What would he say if he knew you used his name to win yourself willing bed partners the length of the country?”

  “It’s not true! Doron, you’re the only one. And you didn’t sleep with me because you thought me a prince.”

  “The only fool,
” she replied bitterly, “to fall for your stories. Aye, I believed you.” Her proud chin lifted. “Well, fool or no, this is my house. You’re not welcome here.” She turned her back on him and resumed her work at the hearth.

  He stood rooted where he was, staring at her, his heart sinking. Whatever he said now, she wouldn’t believe him. Everything that had grown between them, the shared experiences, the friendship—aye, and the love—was ruined. But how? How?

  His horse nickered inquisitively when Pirse wandered outside to stand at its head. He absently patted the warm neck, then untied the animal and led it out onto the road. Turning right, they proceeded uphill for a quarter mile until they came to a gate in the stone fence of a pasture, empty and silent. The sun disappeared behind the next range of mountains. Pirse loosened the animal’s saddle girth and left it to graze. A short distance up the hill, he sat down, shifting a bit from side to side until he was as comfortable as the rocky soil would allow.

  He had never been taught how to meditate. Not formally. Still, even in Dherrica some stories trickled down. Pirse felt around the stubbly grass until he came up with a pebble. He held it in his hand, a flat-sided chunk of basalt, an ordinary gray rock. How did the saying go in Sitrine? Rock and pool. Unchangeable stone, yielding water. He tried to imagine the stone resting in a pool of still water instead of his palm. He imagined himself as still as water, strong as stone. Yet rock could also be brittle, fragile, and water a force against which no one could prevail. Rock and pool. Pirse concentrated on the basic symbols of life, in the hope that there was something instinctively calming in the imagery.

  He made himself as impervious as the rock, as motionless as the surface of water in the still evening air, and tried to juggle his confusion and pain into sense within the still place made by the calming exercise. Somehow, something which he had taken for a fact was not. But which thing? He didn’t doubt Doron. What else was there? He couldn’t doubt his own identity. He was a Shaper. The flaw had to lie in the truncated education he had received regarding the stories of the Children of the Rock. Perhaps it was his memory, his inadequate Shaper’s memory, that was at fault. His mother had forbidden many of the traditional stories at the same time she’d banished Morb from the court. He had thought, in the rebellion of adolescence, that it was because they embarrassed the family. His mother had told him it was because the stories were nonsense, outdated fantasies that she refused to restore when she’d become queen.

  The court of Sitrine, where he had trained as a youth, was full of tales, but he had listened to his mother’s advice to ignore everything but the practicalities of monster-slaying. She had wanted her heir to believe in nothing more than the right of Shapers to rule Keepers. Magic and religion and Dreamers’ tales held no interest for Dea.

  Magic was not a mere product of imagination. It was real. Perhaps not in Bronle, but he’d seen it often enough in the wilds beyond the capital city, in the monsters he slew. He still shuddered at the memory of its touch on the one occasion he’d needed a Greenmother’s healing. The magic users, the Dreamers, were real, too. Banished from the Dherrican court, scoffed at in Rhenlan, still, a few of them survived. Their existence, their peculiar gifts, demanded explanation, explanations faithfully repeated century after century, from one edge of the world to the other.

  How could inaccuracy have crept in? Dreamers came from specific, god-chosen Shaper and Keeper unions. The present generation of Dreamers was to have been produced by the Shapers and Keepers of his mother’s generation. The gods were, according to all the stories, extremely precise in their dealings with the Children of the Rock.

  So why was Doron pregnant?

  His concentration broke when someone placed a large, warm hand on the top of his head. Pirse’s eyes flew open. A scent of iris drifted down around him, alien aroma in the late summer air. Before him, the first stars had come out in the east. To his right loomed a figure in a heavy black robe. A woman’s voice said, “This had better be important, boy.”

  Pirse ducked uncomfortably away from the hand and got stiffly to his feet, still clutching the stone. “Greenmother Savyea? What are you doing here?”

  She clicked her teeth with her tongue in disapproval. “Why do you pray to the gods if you don’t expect an answer?”

  “Pray to….” He stared at her in confusion while she tapped an impatient foot in the dry grass. “Are you saying I called you here?”

  “I said nothing of the kind. I said the gods sent me. That doesn’t happen very often.” She studied him from head to toe. “You look healthy enough. What were you praying for?”

  Nearby, his horse could be heard munching at the grass. The windows of houses in Juniper Ridge were sparks of glowing yellow sprinkled down the mountainside. “Understanding. I was searching for understanding, I suppose. A reason.”

  “For what, boy?”

  “I’ve fathered a child. I think. I must have.”

  Her blank expression shifted at once to bright happiness. “That’s wonderful! When is the exciting day?”

  “Day?”

  “When the child will be born. You do remember the approximate date of conception, I trust?”

  “But the mother is a Keeper!” He gestured back toward the village. “Doron.”

  “Of course she is.” Savyea patted him fondly once more, this time on the shoulder. “You seem confused. Perhaps I’d better have a word with her. Why don’t you join us?” With that she vanished, leaving another burst of spring scent behind her. The warmth of her hand on his shoulder lingered for a few heartbeats after the hand had gone.

  Pirse half ran, half slid down the road to Doron’s house. Pebbles dislodged by his boots clattered ahead of him and continued down into the village after he’d left the road to vault the fence into Doron’s yard. This time he did not hesitate at the door. He strode in and went directly to Savyea. “I’m not confused. It was Spring Festival. That doesn’t make it possible.”

  Doron stood resolutely in front of the Greenmother through his tumultuous entrance. “It seems that, like everything else, this is Palle’s fault.”

  He took a quick gulp of air. “Palle?”

  “Just listen.”

  Savyea remained unperturbed. “As I was saying, Aage’s prophecy is not widely known among Keepers. Or anyone else in Dherrica, I suppose. Your mother never told you, did she? Or allowed Sene to speak of it?”

  “Aage?” Pirse echoed. “Mother? Sene?”

  “Shh.” Doron nudged him forcibly with her elbow. She was angry still, but it no longer seemed directed at him. That was an improvement, even if he remained as confused as ever. He kept still and listened.

  “The gods spoke to Aage nearly twenty years ago. At that time your uncle was hardly the only one at fault. If his father—your grandfather, boy—had been more insistent, perhaps things might have been different. But Farren was directing the last stages of the hunt for the fire bears. That, and the ravages of the plague and the fighting with the horse people, distracted him. Hion had already inherited the throne in Rhenlan and decreed that Shapers who owed allegiance to him were exempt from the old vows. When Dea’s Keeper betrothed died in the hunt, and Palle’s met her mysterious accident, the king their father did nothing, despite Morb’s protests. Morb was court wizard in Bronle in those days,” Savyea added for Doron’s benefit. “He tried again after Farren died and Dea became Queen. She was more interested in producing an heir, and so married your father. After you were born, Morb suggested it was still not too late for Dea to find a proper Keeper husband.”

  “Persistent wizard,” Doron muttered, not without approval.

  “I’ve heard some of this,” Pirse said. “That argument was the final straw that got Morb banished.”

  “Personally, I was rather relieved when Aage learned that we could stop bothering with the present rulers and wait for their children to produce the next generation of Dreamers. I think it was the hardship of the plague more than anything else which distorted the priorities of Hion
and Dea and their peers. You children—you, Pirse, and Chasa and Jeyn and Vray and a half dozen near cousins, I believe—are more level-headed. And there are still enough Shapers to reproduce another generation of Shapers without your aid.” Savyea adjusted her robe with a complacent smile. “Healthy Dreamer babies. With the gods’ blessings we might hope for several from each couple—and of course you’ll have the gods’ blessings, since they were rather insistent that your families be the ones to give us more Dreamers.”

  Doron’s eyes narrowed. “Several?”

  “Couples?” Pirse wanted to know. “Just what guarantee is there that my generation is going to be any more cooperative than my mother’s was?”

  Savyea looked meaningfully at Doron’s abdomen. Pirse felt himself blush up to the ears, and Doron laughed.

  “The power of the gods bends as it will,” Savyea continued, and looked again at Doron. “All any of us, Dreamer or Shaper or Keeper, can do is respond as we are able. You’re all old enough now. You’ll be making lots of babies before we know it.”

  Pirse was still puzzled, but not especially alarmed, when the black-robed Dreamer disappeared in a whiff of cherry blossoms. He gingerly stepped up to Doron. “Do you understand any of this?”

  “Aye.” Doron heaved a gusty sigh and leaned back against the table. “Make babies. It really is all Greenmothers ever talk about. First it was several. Now it’s lots. I haven’t even had the one yet.”

  “I really didn’t know,” Pirse said quietly.

  “That’s why I blame Palle. Farren may have banished Morb, but your uncle’s the one who suggested that Dea restrict the teachings of the Redmothers. Were you listening to Savyea? She as much as said that Palle wasn’t content with refusing to wed a Keeper. He arranged to eliminate the possibility altogether.”

  Pirse frowned. “That is what she implied, isn’t it?”