Child of a Mad God--A Tale of the Coven

by R. A. Salvatore

  And then Talmadge’s jaw dropped open, as he brought forth a breastplate as he had never before imagined! The armor gleamed silver, edged in gold, and had a line of gemstones set across it. Talmadge, who had some experience with Abellican magic, had no doubt that those stones were enchanted.

  “A knight,” he whispered, for he could see no other explanation other than that this strange man was a nobleman of high rank, or had been. The sword and the bow were clues enough, of course, but this … this was magnificent. Even Talmadge, who had never seen a knight of Honce-the-Bear (but had heard of the famed Allhearts) understood that surely few in the world possessed such armor.

  He reached into the pack beside the breastplate and brought forth a small bag. He pulled back the drawstring and gently dumped the contents into his hand.

  Gemstones! Sparkling in the starlight. A beautiful mix, ruby and diamond, zircon and malachite. So many, all varied.

  Hardly able to draw breath, Talmadge eased the stones back into the bag, taking supreme care not to spill any. He quickly repacked the large pack and secured the flap once more, then moved back to his place at the tree, now doubly confused as to what he might do.

  So he did nothing. He just waited.

  And waited.

  He woke up with the sun in his eyes, rising over the mountains before him. He blinked away the sleepiness and tried to recall where he was, and why he was there.

  He jumped to his feet, hopping all about.

  Bryan Marrawee was gone, and all his gear gone with him.

  “Bandits?” Talmadge whispered, terribly afraid, for if bandits had taken the likes of that man, what chance might Talmadge have against them?

  But he calmed before the notion could take root, for there in the dirt by the fire pit, Bryan Marrawee had written him a note.

  I go to greet my ghosts, my new friend Talmadge.

  You should face your own.

  When you fear, charge!

  Talmadge stared at the words for a long while, then closed his eyes and pictured Loch Beag. An image flashed in his thoughts. A leg, severed above the knee.

  He took a deep breath. He hadn’t been back to the loch since departing there with the spring melt after Khotai’s death. He had thought that he would never go there again, but now he just snorted self-deprecatingly, reminding himself that this wasn’t the first time he had held such a belief.

  He thought of Fasach Crann, and, strangely, of Redshanks. Khotai had wanted to trade the pearls with the man. She had pleaded with Talmadge constantly to reconsider. What a fine adventure they could have in collecting the pearls from the tribes, then traveling halfway around the known world to deliver them for Redshanks to his friends in the city on the river—Talmadge couldn’t remember its name.

  Talmadge took another deep breath and held perfectly silent, listening to the roll of the distant river.

  Gradually, a smile came over him, a smile for Khotai and the thick book she had written. Not unlike Bryan Marrawee’s mother, he supposed. And quite like Bryan himself, he was sure. That notion didn’t shame him, but, strangely, urged him.

  “For you, my love,” Talmadge said and decided, as bold a choice as he had ever made.

  He would write those pages Khotai had desired. For her.

  He checked his gear and took up his hand axe, that he could cut some logs and build a raft.

  * * *

  Innevah and Anice both winced when the screams at last died away, only to be replaced by sounds of the poor young girl being beaten and chastised. With Caia screaming at her for being stupid.

  “You dare to not drink the potions?” she roared, and slapped the young girl again.

  “I did … I did,” the uamhas sobbed, her words becoming muddled under a rain of blows. They didn’t hear the young slave cry out anymore, though, as if she had no more tears to give.

  “She did drink the brew,” Anice whispered to Innevah. “I saw her take it and spoke with her long about it. ‘You don’t want to bear an Usgar child!’ I told her. She knew the punishment.”

  Innevah nodded, having no trouble believing Anice’s story. The uamhas were all taught the consequences of getting pregnant, and were given potions from the witches they were told prevented such unfortunate circumstances.

  But those brews weren’t always efficacious, Innevah knew from firsthand experience. Twice in her long years as a slave, she had become pregnant from an Usgar warrior, only to have her pregnancy so violently ended by the cold magic of an Usgar witch.

  She feared the latest batch of brew was likely bad, Innevah knew, her hand going to her belly. She moved it away as soon as she was aware of the reflexive movement, not wanting Anice to worry.

  “You should go to her,” Innevah said when at last the beating and the berating died away.

  Anice nodded and crawled out of the small tree-cave.

  Innevah took a deep, steadying breath while watching her go. As soon as she was alone, she moved to the back of her little room and moved aside some branches to let some moonlight and starlight shine in on a particular spot.

  She brushed aside the pine needles, revealing a thick, flat stone. She needed another deep breath, then lifted the front of the stone, revealing a deep hole Innevah had secretly dug. The moonlight brushed the side wall, mostly stone, and just touched the treasure Innevah had caught.

  She watched it coil and slide, a white-furred mountain viper. It was a small one, about as long as Innevah’s forearm and nearly as thick. Innevah had come upon it purely by accident a few days earlier, sunning itself on the rocky ledge behind the pine grove. She should have crushed it with a rock, for these aggressive vipers were quite deadly.

  But she hadn’t. For some reason, Innevah had chosen to catch the thing with a blanket, and had dumped it into her secret hole.

  She hadn’t understood why at the time, at least not consciously, but after hearing the screams of the poor girl down the way, Innevah knew what instincts had guided her actions. She simply couldn’t take it any longer. The years had broken her; the Usgar had battered her. She knew she would soon be killed anyway, because she was into her forties now, and the Usgar warriors preferred the younger slaves for their “visits.” In the end, that was the only reason any of the female uamhas were kept alive, and Innevah was outliving her usefulness.

  Why give them the pleasure? Or the sacrifice to their demon god?

  The woman slowly slipped one hand into the opening. One bite, she knew. It would only take one bite and she would probably be dead before morning, before the Usgar found her. Even if they came upon her before she succumbed, there was nothing the witches could do against the poison of a white-furred viper. Their magic would not defeat this poison.

  She should have done this—thrown herself from a cliff, or something!—years ago, she scolded herself, inching her hand down a bit more. But no, she had stayed alive for a reason. She had even learned to better pleasure the Usgar warriors for a reason.

  Because she had a son, and he was still alive—Aoleyn had assured her that Bahdlahn was well, and that Innevah would see him again when they broke the summer camp and returned to the winter plateau.

  Innevah heard the snake hiss and yanked her hand back. She closed the stone and stepped away, bringing her hand to her mouth in a silent scream.

  Bahdlahn was still alive!

  She desperately wanted to see him again, one time.

  She brushed the pine needles back over her secret cubby, silently chastising herself for even thinking of taking her own life, before she had the chance to say farewell to her beloved son.

  Before she moved back to the tree trunk to fall asleep, though, she put her hand to her belly and remembered again the screams of the poor girl—and, in the quiet of the evening, she could hear the girl softly sobbing.

  Innevah went to the tree, shaking her head determinedly. But she did glance back more than once, considering the bite of a serpent.

  29

  PIERCED

  Aoleyn closed he
r eyes to protect them from flying shards, and brought the heavy stone down hard on the crystalline cylinder, shattering it into a million pieces.

  “Heresy,” she whispered, as if in warning to herself. She called upon the large diamond-flecked crystal near her and brightened the light as she sifted through the dust and shards to find the desired gemstone: a garnet, and a powerful one. The stones she was now collecting were all powerful, for Aoleyn could sense their relative strength by holding the crystals and concentrating on them. She could also use garnet; she had found that the stone allowed her to “see” magic. This one was much stronger than the one she had used to find it, so she was excited about what it would show her in these miraculous crystal caverns.

  She wasn’t about to waste her time with stones of trivial size if she could find larger, more powerful ones!

  She put the garnet near the pile of nearly a dozen gems and minerals she had already collected. Most of her time in the crystal caverns had been spent identifying the various stones encased within the crystals. With each one she recognized as magical and different, Aoleyn sought out the specific properties, then searched until she found one of suitable power to be worthy of her “heresy.”

  For yes, that’s what this was, she knew, and knew, too, that she’d get terribly punished, perhaps even killed, if discovered.

  But this was too beautiful, and so it was a chance Aoleyn was willing to take.

  She knew that she had to be discreet, but there were only so many places to hide the gemstones and she didn’t want to simply bag them. No, she wanted them upon her body, a part of herself through the threading she had learned with the wedstones. Weirdly, Mairen had inadvertently shown Aoleyn a way to do this, instructing the young woman in another, typically mundane task. The tribe made jewelry with pretty, mundane stones, and gold coins, taken from the lakemen.

  They were pretty, and it was not forbidden for the women of Usgar to wear jewelry fashioned of them. And that Mairen had shown her and Gavina, a rival of hers for entrance to the Coven who was at least twenty years Aoleyn’s senior.

  Using a milky-white crystal thick with serpentine, and one ruby-flecked, Mairen had enacted the same fire shield that allowed her to walk out of a bonfire unharmed, then had taken up a golden coin and used the ruby to create a blast of fire all about her, greatly softening the gold. While still using the serpentine shield, Mairen’s hands had then worked fast to fashion the substance into a brooch, and had even set a gemstone in it for good measure.

  Aoleyn had her answer, and thus, she had begun wearing jewelry just a few days previous, and had even shaped a ring in front of Gavina.

  She had already melted that ring again, to remove the worthless gemstone, and down here, she had created one anew, setting it with a magical serpentine and ruby, and molding it around that wedstone wire with just enough sticking out inside the band so that she could puncture her finger and heal the wound around with wire, in effect, piercing the ring to her finger.

  She would never need Mairen’s scepter to create a bonfire, she thought as she felt the pinch of the wire when she had first put it on. Nay, she would be her own scepter! And more! With this new insight, with the gems and minerals instead of the bulky crystals, and with the wedstone binding them to her physical form, Aoleyn believed that she would become a being of pure magic, a woman truly worthy of Usgar!

  What next, she wondered? She thought to go deeper into the caverns to see if she could identify some new types of magical stones, but she dismissed the notion quickly. She had gotten too late a start.

  Besides, there was something else she had to do. Gavina had taken note of the other ring Aoleyn had fashioned, the moonstone and malachite ring that allowed her to fly about the mountainside, free of earthly bonds. She took up the ring now and broke it apart with the heavy rock, retrieving the malachite and the wedstone wire from the broken moonstone band. She had already found another moonstone, a pretty, blue-white ball. It was quite small, but very powerful, Aoleyn knew.

  She had plans for this stone and the malachite, and she didn’t have much time. She put the fine wedstone thread aside and took up a different one she had fashioned with great care. Not just a simple wire, this one itself was ornamental, wire wrapped over wire to form a cascading series of tiny diamond shapes. Four strands of these of varying lengths—the longest as long as Aoleyn’s middle finger, the shortest half that length—flowed out from a circular gray wedstone hub, like the fronds of a willow tree.

  Aoleyn took up her graphite bar and selected four gemstones: the diamond she had just retrieved, the smooth round malachite striped in varying green hues, the new moonstone, and a beautiful purple dolomite. One by one, she put the gemstones to the end of a strand, squeezing them into the diamond-shaped wire mount, then flipping the last link over to squeeze them into the previous diamond-shaped wire, securing them on all sides.

  Not satisfied with that (and shuddering at the thought of losing the moonstone and malachite in the middle of a flight down the mountain), Aoleyn then protected herself with the serpentine in her ring, and created sparks of lightning about the setting with her graphite bar.

  She giggled as each setting softened temporarily, just long enough for her to squeeze it tightly onto the gemstone.

  When she was done, she laid the small earring out on the floor before her, admiring it, and also very afraid of what she would do next, for it was purely her idea and something she had never before heard of.

  With trembling hands, she picked up the wedstone hub and fiddled with the two points of wire sticking out its flat side. The serpentine wouldn’t help her with this part, and she knew it was going to hurt!

  Aoleyn lifted up her shirt and hunched over, lining up the longer wire. She closed her eyes, bit down on her lip to stifle any scream, and pushed it through, piercing her belly button. She resisted calling upon the wedstone then, for she knew the worst was yet to come, as she brought the threaded wire against the other prong, twisted them together and pushed them both into her belly so that the wedstone hub was flat.

  And she shot herself with the lightning, and a thousand fires erupted inside her!

  Aoleyn nearly swooned from the pain, but managed to call upon the wedstone, filling herself with its healing wash—warm waves of magic knit together her skin, closing tight about the wire prongs, securing the belly ring. When the process was completed, it felt as if it was merely an extension of Aoleyn herself.

  She stood up, admiring her work and focusing, concentrating deeply on the stones.

  Yes, she could toughen herself with the dolomite, strengthen her body against blows and make herself immune to pain, poison, or disease. That dangling purple stone gave her health. She could fly and she could float, could create brilliant light or steal all of it away! She could create fireballs, and protect herself from their burn.

  And, most important of all, she was wedded to the wedstone, so Aoleyn could heal any of her wounds. The young woman’s giggle turned into sobs, so proud was she of what she had accomplished here in this cave, of how she had taken the song of Usgar and made it her own in so many varied and beautiful ways.

  And she wasn’t done yet.

  * * *

  Yes, she remembered this pain, like little shocks of fire tearing through her belly, burning and biting.

  It hurt worse than poor Innevah remembered, far worse, but she figured that was mostly because Caia was administering the medicine—how this one took pleasure in hurting the uamhas! And likely, Innevah knew, because the warrior who had claimed her as a wife was here all the time, taking his pleasure with the slave women.

  It was possible that this baby Caia was destroying was her husband’s. Innevah couldn’t be sure, and hardly cared.

  It ended with a bloody rush, and Innevah nearly fainted, overcome by the dramatic shift in her entire being.

  She lay back, panting, trying to find some measure of balance and calm.

  Caia zapped her belly again with that nasty crystal, hard enough to
burn skin, and when Innevah cried out, the Usgar woman slapped her hard across the face.

  “Are you too stupid to drink the brew?” Caia demanded.

  Innevah had heard it all before, when Caia had been issuing her brutal abortion to the poor young girl down the line. Innevah wanted to respond, to tell the idiot Usgar that no uamhas would become pregnant by choice here! That batch of the contraceptive brew had clearly been ineffective.

  The middle-aged woman was too smart to bother, though. Such words would just get her slapped again, and probably shocked again for good measure. It didn’t matter how or why it had happened, not to Caia, certainly.

  So Innevah just rested back and closed her eyes, pretending to faint away.

  Caia slapped her again.

  “Look at you,” the Usgar witch taunted. “Old and drawn, shriveled like a grape left on the vine.” She spat into Innevah’s face. “Why would any even want you, but it’s less now, to be sure, and will grow to nothing. Or might it won’t. Might that you’ll find the gorge this winter, eh? It’s past time for it, don’t you think? We’ll throw you in and let your stupid boy watch! Ha, if he’s even up there. Word’s that he died, that the fossa got him and ate him bits at a time, slowly, so he felt all the pain.”

  “Why would—” Innevah screamed, sitting up, or trying to, until a blast from Caia’s gray graphite stole all of Innevah’s muscle control, threw her back to the floor, and left her jolting and shaking, limbs flying wildly, out of her control.

  Laughing, Caia and the Usgar guards departed.

  When her sensibilities returned, poor Innevah managed to turn her head toward the back of her small pine cave, toward the buried stone lid.

  She should have let the snake take her, she told herself more than once, more than a hundred times, until sleep mercifully overtook her.