“Lord, Deonara is truly fond of me, I think. She would not put anyone among my women with ill will to me or my child,” Aliciane said.
“Deonara? No, perhaps not,” Mikhail said, remembering that Deonara had been Lady of Aldaran for twice ten years and shared his hunger for a child to be heir to his estate. She could no longer promise him even the hope of one; she had welcomed the knowledge that he had taken Aliciane, who was one of her own favorites, to his bed and his heart. “But I have enemies who are not of this household, and it is all too easy to plant a spy with laran, who can relay all the doings of my household to someone who wishes me ill. I have kinsmen who would do much to prevent the birth of a living heir to my line. I marvel not that you look pale, my treasure; it is hard to credit wickedness that would harm a little child, yet I have never been sure that Deonara was not victim to someone who killed the children unborn in her womb. It is not hard to do; even a little skill with matrix or laran can break a child’s fragile link to life.”
“Anyone who wished you ill, Mikhail, would know you have promised me that my child will be legitimated, and would turn her evil will to me,” Aliciane soothed. “Yet I have borne this child without illness. You fear needlessly, my dear love.”
“Gods grant you are right! Yet I have enemies who would stop at nothing. Before your child is born, I will call a leronis to probe them; I will have no woman present at your confinement who cannot swear under truthspell that she wishes you well. An evil wish can snap a newborn child’s fight for life.”
“Surely that strength of laran is rare, my dearest lord.”
“Not as rare as I could wish it,” Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, said. “Yet of late I have strange thoughts. I find these gifts a weapon to cut my own hand; I who have used sorcery to hurl fire and chaos upon my enemy, I feel it now that they have strength to hurl them upon me, too. When I was young I felt laran as a gift of the gods; they had appointed me to rule this land, and dowered me with laran to make my rule stronger. But as I grow old I find it a curse, not a gift.”
“You are not so old, my lord, and surely no one now would challenge your rule!”
“No one who dares do so openly, Aliciane. But I am alone among those who hover waiting for me to die childless. I have meaty bones to pick… all gods grant your child is a son, carya.”
Aliciane was trembling. “And if it is not… oh, my dear lord…”
“Why, then, treasure, you must bear me another,” he said gently, “but even if you do not, I shall have a daughter whose dower will be my estate, and who will bring me the strong alliances I need; even a woman-child will make my position that much stronger. And your son shall be foster-brother and paxman, shield in trouble and strong arm. I truly love your son, Aliciane.”
“I know.” How could she have been trapped this way… finding that she loved the man whom, at first, she had simply thought to ensnare with the wiles of her voice and her beauty? Mikhail was kind and honorable, he had courted her when he might have taken her as lawful prey, he had assured her, unasked, that even if she failed to give him a living son, Donal’s future was secure. She felt safe with him, she had come to love him, and now she feared for him, too.
Caught in my own trap!
She said, almost laughing, “I need no such reassurance, my lord. I have never doubted you.”
He smiled, accepting that, the courtesy of a telepath. “But women are fearful at such times, and it is sure now that Deonara will bear me no child, even if I would ask it of her after so many tragedies. Do you know what it is like, Aliciane, to see children you have longed for, desired, love even before they were born, to see them die without drawing breath? I did not love Deonara when we were wed; I had never seen her face, for we were given to one another for family alliances; but we have endured much together, and although it may seem strange to you, child, love can come from shared sorrow as well as shared joy.” His face was somber. “I love you well, carya mea, but it was neither for your beauty nor even for the splendor of your voice that I sought you out. Did you know Deonara was not my first wife?”
“No, my lord.”
“I was wed first when I was a young man; Clariza Leynier bore me two sons and a daughter, all healthy and strong… Hard as it is to lose children at birth, it is harder yet to lose sons and daughter grown almost to manhood and womanhood. And yet I lost them—one after another, as they grew to adolescence. I lost them all three, with the descent of laran; they died in crisis and convulsions, all of them, of that scourge of our people. I myself was ready to die of despair.”
“My brother Caryl died so,” Aliciane whispered.
“I know; yet he was the only one of your line, and your father had many sons and daughters. You yourself told me that your laran did not descend at adolescence, playing havoc with mind and body, but that you grew slowly into it from babyhood, as with many of the Rockraven folk. And I can see that this is dominant in your line, for Donal is barely ten years old, and though I do not think his laran is full developed yet, still he has much of it, and he at least is not like to die on the threshold. I knew that for your children, at least, I need not fear. Deonara, too, came from a bloodline with early onset of laran, but none of the children she bore me lived long enough for us to know whether they had laran or no.”
Aliciane’s face twisted in dismay and he laid his arm tenderly about her shoulders. “What is it, my dear one?”
“All my life I have felt revulsion for this—to breed men like cattle!”
“Man is the only animal that thinks not to improve his race,” Mikhail said fiercely. “We control weather, build castles and highways with the strength of our laran, explore greater and greater gifts of the mind—should we not seek to better ourselves as well as our world and our surroundings?” Then his face softened. “But I understand that a woman as young as you thinks not in terms of generations, centuries; while one is yet young, you think only of self and children, but at my age it is natural to think in terms of all those who will come after us when we and our children are many centuries gone. But such things are not for you unless you wish to think of them; think of your child, love, and how soon we will hold her in our arms.”
Aliciane shrank, whispering, “You know, then, that it is a daughter I am to bear you—you are not angry?”
“I told you I would not be angry; if I am distressed it is only that you did not trust me enough to tell me this when first you knew,” Mikhail said, but the words were so gentle they were hardly a reproof. “Come, Aliciane, forget your fears; if you give me no son, at least you have given me a sturdy foster-son, and your daughter will be a powerful strength in bringing me a son-in-law. And our daughter will have laran.”
Aliciane smiled and returned his kiss; but she was still taut with apprehension as she heard the distant crackle of the unprecedented summer thunder, which seemed to come and go in time with the waves of her fear. Can it be that Donal is afraid of what this child will mean to him? she wondered, and wished passionately that she had the precognitive gift, the laran of the Aldaran clan, so that she might know that all would be well.
* * *
CHAPTER TWO
« ^ »
Here is the traitor!”
Aliciane trembled at the anger in Lord Aldaran’s voice as he strode wrathfully into her chamber, thrusting a woman ahead of him with his two hands. Behind him the leronis, his household sorceress, bearing the matrix or blue starstone which somehow amplified the powers of her laran, tiptoed; a fragile pale-haired woman, her pallid features drawn with terror of the storm she had unleashed.
“Mayra,” Aliciane said in dismay, “I thought you my friend, and friend to Lady Deonara. What has befallen that you are my enemy and my child’s?”
Mayra—she was one of Deonara’s robing-women, a sturdy middle-aged dame—stood frightened but defiant between Lord Aldaran’s hard hands. “No, I know nothing of what that sorceress-bitch has said of me; is she jealous of my place here, having no useful work but to meddle with the
minds of her betters?”
“It will not serve you to put ill names on me,” said the leronis Margali. “I asked all these women but one question, and that under the truthspell, so that I would hear in my mind if they lied. Is your loyalty to Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, or to the vai domna, his lady Deonara? And if they said me no, or said yes with a doubt or a denial in their thoughts, I asked only, again under truthspell, if their loyalty were to husband or father or home-lord. From this one alone I got no honest answer, but only the knowledge that she was concealing all. And so I told Lord Aldaran that if there was a traitor among his women it could be only she.”
Mikhail let the woman go and turned her around to face him, not ungently. He said, “It is true that you have been long in my service, Mayra; Deonara treats you with the kindness of a foster-sister. Is it me you wish evil, or my lady?”
“My lady has been kind to me; I am angered to see her set aside for another,” said Mayra, her voice shaking. The leronis behind her said, in passionless tone, “No, Lord Aldaran, there she speaks no truth, either; she holds no love for you nor for your lady.”
“She lies!” Mayra’s voice rose to a half-shriek. “She lies—I wish you no ill save what you have brought on yourself, lord, by taking the bitch of Rockraven to your bed. It is she who has put a spell on your manhood, that bitch-viper!”
“Silence!” Lord Aldaran quivered as if he would strike the woman, but the word was enough; everyone within range was smitten dumb, and Aliciane trembled. Only once before had she heard Mikhail use what was called, in the language of laran, the command-voice. There were not many who could summon enough control over their laran to use it; it was not an inborn gift, but one that required both talent and skilled training. And when, in that voice, Mikhail, Lord Aldaran, commanded silence, none within earshot could form an audible word.
The silence in the room was so extreme that Aliciane could hear the smallest of sounds: some small insect clicking in the woodwork of the paneling, the frightened breathing of the women, the far-off crackle of thunder. It seems, she thought, that all through this summer we have had thunder, more than I can remember in any year before… What nonsense to have in my thoughts now, when I stand before a woman who might have meant my death, had she attended my childbed.. ..
Mikhail glanced at her, where she stood trembling and propping herself upright by the arm of a chair. Then he said to the leronis, “Attend the lady Aliciane, help her to sit, or to lie down on her bed if she feels better so…” and Aliciane felt Margali’s strong hands supporting her, easing her into the chair. She shook with anger, hating the physical weakness she could not control.
This child saps my strength as never Donal did… Why am I so weakened? Is it that woman’s evil will, wicked spells … ? Margali laid her hands on Aliciane’s forehead and she felt soothing calm radiating out from them. She tried to relax under them, to breathe evenly, to calm the frantic restlessness she could sense in the movements of her child within her body. Poor little one… she is afraid, too, and no wonder….
“You—” Lord Aldaran’s voice commanded, “Mayra, tell me why you bear me ill will, or would seek to harm the lady Aliciane or her child!”
“Tell you!”
“You will, you know,” Mikhail of Aldaran said. “You will tell us more than you ever believed you would say, whether you do so of your free will and painlessly, or whether it is dragged from you shrieking! I have no love for torturing womenfolk, Mayra, but I will not harbor a scorpion-ant within my chamber, either! Save us this struggle.” But Mayra faced hun, silent and defiant, and Mikhail shrugged faintly, a tautness Aliciane knew—and would not have dared defy— settling down over his face. He said, “On your own head, Mayra. Margali, bring your starstone—no. Better still, send for kirizani.”
Aliciane trembled, though Mikhail was showing mercy in his own way. Kirizani was one of half a dozen drugs distilled from the plant resins of kireseth flowers, whose pollen brought madness when the Ghost-wind blew in the hills; kirizani was that part of the resin which lowered the barriers against telepathic contact, laying the mind bare to anyone who would probe within it. It was better than torture, and yet… She quailed, looking at the raging purpose on Mikhail’s face, at the smiling defiance of the woman Mayra. They all stood silent while the kirizani was brought, a pale liquid in a vial of transparent crystal.
Mikhail uncapped it and said quietly, “Will you take it without protest, Mayra, or shall the women hold you and pour it down your throat like a horse being dosed?”
Mayra’s face flushed; she spit at him. “You think you can make me speak with your sorcery and drugs, Lord Mikhail? Ha—I defy you! You need no evil will of mine—enough lurks already in your house and in the womb of your bitch-mistress there! A day will come when you pray you had died childless—and there will be no other! You will take no other to your bed, no more than you have done while the bitch of Rockraven grew heavy with her witch-daughter! My work is done, vai dom!” She flung the respectful term at him like a taunt. “I need no more time! From this day you will father neither daughter nor son—your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree! And you will cry out and pray—”
“Silence that evil banshee!” Mikhail said, and Margali, starting upright from the fainting Aliciane, raised her jeweled matrix, but the woman spit again, laughed hysterically, gasped, and crumpled to the floor. In the stunned silence Margali went to her, laid a perfunctory hand to her breast.
“Lord Aldaran, she is dead! She must have been spelled to die on questioning.”
The man stared in dismay at the lifeless body of the woman, unanswered questions unspoken on his lips. He said, “Now we shall never know what she has done, or how, or who was the enemy who sent her here to us. I would take my oath Deonara knows nothing of it.” But the words held a question, and Margali laid her hand on the blue jewel and said quietly, “On my life, Lord Aldaran, the Lady Deonara has no ill will to Lady Aliciane’s child; this she has told me often, that she is glad for you and for Aliciane, and I know when I am hearing truth.”
Mikhail nodded, but Aliciane saw the lines around his mouth deepen. If Deonara, jealous of Lord Aldaran’s favor, had wished Aliciane some harm, that at least would have been understandable. But who, she wondered, knowing little of the feuds and power struggles of Aldaran, could wish evil to a man so good as Mikhail? Who could hate him so much as to plant a spy among his wife’s waiting-women, to do evil to the child of a barragana, to cast, perhaps, laran-powered curses on his manhood?
“Take her away,” Aldaran said at last, his voice not entirely steady. “Hang her body from the castle heights for kyorebni to pick; she has earned no faithful servant’s burial rites.” He waited, impassive, while tall guardsmen came and bore away Mayra’s dead body, to be stripped and hanged for the great birds of prey to peck asunder. Aliciane heard thunder crackling in the distance, then nearer and nearer, and Aldaran came toward her, his voice now softened to tenderness.
“Have no more fear, my treasure; she is gone and her evil will with her. We will live to laugh at her curses, my darling.” He sank into a chair nearby, taking her hand in gentle fingers, but she sensed, through the touch, that he, too, was distressed and even frightened. And she was not strong enough to reassure him; she felt as if she were fainting again. Mayra’s curses rang in her ears, like the reverberating echoes in the canyons around Rockraven when as a child she had shouted into them for the amusement of hearing her own voice come back to her multiplied a thousandfold from all quarters of the wind.
You will father neither daughter nor son… . Your loins will be empty as a winter-killed tree… A day will come when you pray you had died childless… The reverberating remembered sound swelled, overwhelmed her; she lay back in the chair, near to losing consciousness.
“Aliciane, Aliciane—” She felt his strong arms around her, raising her, carrying her to her bed. He laid her down on the pillows, sat beside her, gently stroking her face.
“You must not be frightened
of shadows, Aliciane.”
She said, trembling, the first thing that came into her head. “She cursed your manhood, my lord.”
“I feel not much endangered,” he said with a smile.
“Yet—I myself have seen and wondered… you have taken no other to your bed in these days when I am so heavy, as would have been your custom.”
A faint shadow passed over his face, and at this moment their minds were so close that Aliciane regretted her words; she should not have touched on his own fear. But he said, firmly putting away fear in cheerfulness, “Why, as for that, Aliciane, I am not so young a man that I cannot live woman-less for a few moons. Deonara is not sorry to be free of me, I think; my embraces have never meant more to her than duty, and dying children. And in these days, it seems, except for you, women are not so beautiful as they were when I was young. It has been no hardship to me, to forbear asking what is no pleasure to you to give; but when our child is born and you are well again, you shall see if that fool woman’s words have any evil effect on my manhood. You may yet give me a son, Aliciane, or, if not, at least we shall spend many joyous hours together.”
She said, shaking, “May the Lord of Light grant it, indeed.” He bent and kissed her tenderly, but the touch of his lips again brought them close, with shared fear and, abruptly, shared pain, tearing at her.
He straightened as if shocked, calling to her women. “Attend my lady!”
She clung to his hands. “Mikhail, I am frightened,” she whispered, and picked up his thought, Indeed this is no good omen, that she should go into labor with the sound of that witch’s curses still in her ears… She felt, too, the strong discipline with which he curbed and controlled even the thought, that fear might not spiral, heightened by each mind through which it passed. He said, with gentle command, “You must try to think of our child only, Aliciane, and lend her strength; think of our child only—and of my love.”
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