Return of the Guardian-King (23 page)

“She was talking t’ ye again, wasn’t she?” the blacksmith guessed.

“No.” Abramm’s eyes drifted back to the dark shapes on the knoll. “It was more a feeling.” Abruptly he scanned the night sky, fearing the dragon’s return, as beside him Rolland did likewise. But the expanse of starry heavens held nothing unusual.

“A feeling,” Rolland said.

“Maddie’s in danger.”

“Maddie? That your wife’s name?”

“Aye . . .” Another rise of wind whistled around them, making the gate shudder. Inside the barn, the sheep baaed nervously. Abramm wiped at the ice clots stuck to his mustache again. The fear returned like an incoming tide. She was in danger. The boys, too. He needed to go to them. Maybe one of the villagers would be willing to take him south. . . .

“Ye sure she’s not talkin’ t’ ye? ’Cause ye keep fadin’ out on me, like ye’re listenin’ to something else.”

Again, Abramm shook free of the spell, then bent to pick up his tools. “We’d best get on with the feeding.”

But even inside the barn, out of the direct line of sight of his enemies, the sense of being watched remained. And the thoughts of Maddie’s peril kept coming, anxiety thrumming in his belly.

The sheep continued to baa and mill restlessly, after they were fed, and Abramm wasn’t sure whether they sensed his jumpiness or he sensed theirs. He kept hearing things—breathing, a voice—but every time he stopped there was nothing. Only the sounds of the sheep and the rustle of Rolland’s pitching straw onto the floor. He noted, too, that the shadows looked especially dark, appearing to flow from place to place, like pools of pitch-black oil. And overhead, where they were the deepest, he glimpsed the glowing colors of several rhu’ema. Which distressed him even more, since it seemed the rhu’ema only came out to watch when something significant was about to happen.

Whatever it was, it didn’t take place in the sheep barn. But when they stepped outside, though he could no longer see the tanniym, he felt them out there, waiting.

Terstmeet gave him an hour’s respite, but soon after the meeting ended his anxiety returned. And again, it seemed to spread from him to the others. At supper everyone had been cheerful. Now they grew increasingly irritable. Arguments broke out, and the children kept crying—now this one, now that one . . . now the other—their shrill voices grating at Abramm’s nerves. Then, around nine o’clock, Jania shrieked and leaped to her feet, both hands pressed to her swollen belly. And when Abramm saw the rush of water that darkened the carpeting beneath her feet, he went cold with sudden, profound terror.

The women hustled her off to a corner of the room—no one was willing to brave the dark corridors of the monastery tonight—while some of the men rigged a screen using ropes and blankets. But blankets couldn’t block out her gasps and screams of pain, and these affected Abramm even more profoundly than the crying children. For he had heard Maddie’s birth pangs with both Simon and Ian, and could not forget how often—and easily—women died in childbed. It was like that now, his concern as visceral and irrational. As if somehow it were not poor Jania who lay on that bed behind the screen but Maddie herself. He kept seeing her—and Simon, for some reason—swallowed up by a rising tide of blackness.

Finally the intensity of his anxiety was so great he could bear it no longer.

“I’m going to the study,” he told Rolland. The big man stared at him suspiciously.

“Do you think that’s wise, Alaric?” Cedric asked, having overheard. “How do you know what you’ll find there?”

“I’ll find books, Cedric.” Abramm smiled wanly. “I’m not going down to open the gate, if that’s what you fear. But if you want to make sure of it, why don’t you chain the doors leading out of the kitchen and keep the key in here under guard?”

As Abramm reached the door, Rolland was right behind him. “I’ll come with you.”

“What good’s that gonna do?” Trinley growled. “Better ye both just stay here.”

Rolland glanced over his shoulder at the alderman and was about to reply when Jania let loose with another shriek. Abramm flinched so violently he was sure Rolland saw it, even if no one else did. He didn’t wait a moment more.

Rolland caught up with him in the anteroom. “You’re white as a sheet, man. Didn’t you say you have two children?”

“Aye.”

“Did you almost lose her with one of them, then?”

“No. It was a hard birth, but they both came out of it fine. This is . . . I told you earlier I feared for her, and now it seems somehow it’s her in there.” He paused, frowning. “Or maybe not there, but somewhere else. Where I can’t do a thing to help her.”

“You couldn’t do anything anyway, friend. Except pray.” He paused, frowning. “Did you send her off to Chesedh with child, then?”

“No. Of course not. I—” His voice died as panic washed over him again.
Oh, my Lord Eidon . . . I didn’t, did I?
That last night with her, though—and the four nights previous to it—could certainly have had such a result. How would he ever have known? Yes, the tanniym had told him she was with child, but he’d refused to believe that and had concentrated on not thinking about it at all. Now he counted back in his mind and realized with a growing horror that it was very close to nine months since they’d been together.

“Plagues!” he whispered. “It
is
possible. . . . But how could I know anything about her from here?” He knew the answer before he’d finished his sentence. The mysterious link that had always connected them, even before they’d become man and wife. It was a link through which he’d felt nothing for years now. Not since they’d been on the Gull Islands when she’d been kidnapped by the Esurhites. And been in danger.

His head swam. His stomach churned. For a moment he thought he might pass out.

Rolland clapped his shoulder. “Ye can’t, friend,” he said in answer to Abramm’s question. “So ye must give her over to Eidon, as ye have been all along.” He gripped Abramm’s upper arm, leading him toward the hallway. “Come on. It’ll be easier out of earshot.”

Abramm let himself be walked into the corridor and on to the study, which was deserted, Laud having gone to bed. Memorizing Old Tongue verb forms was not sufficiently distracting, however, and though Rolland was soon snoring in the hearth chair, Abramm could not follow his example. Every time he dozed off, a dark tide of terror rolled in to jerk him awake. Finally, as he snapped upright in the chair yet again, heart pounding in his throat, he heard a cry he could have sworn was Maddie’s.

It had him out of the chair and across the room to the door before he caught himself. Where was he going? Back to the common room? The cry was certainly Jania’s, and it didn’t sound as if she’d had her baby yet. And since first deliveries were often lengthy, she might be crying out for hours yet.

He went back to his desk and his verbs. Moments later a vision of Maddie choking in darkness blotted out sight of his books and papers. When it vanished, he found himself standing in the hallway outside the study. Colored ribbons of light coiled near the ceiling, and a small blond boy stood directly ahead of him.

He frowned in disbelief. “Simon?”

The lad turned, his blue eyes widening as they fixed upon Abramm. “Papa?” Simon shook his head. “You can’t be here. You’re dead.”

“No. I’m just stuck in the mountains waiting for the snow to melt.” Abramm crouched down to look his son in the eye.

Simon nodded gravely, then said, “Grandpapa had blackness in him. It spilled on Mama and me.”

“Blackness?”

But Simon was shrinking, pulling off into the distance until he was swallowed by the darkness at the hallway’s end. The hairs on the back of Abramm’s neck stood up. It must have been a dream. . . .

I need to wake up. . . . Blackness spilled on Mama?

He was walking again, trying to figure out what it could mean, even as he argued with himself that it meant nothing. Grandpapa had blackness in him? Hadrich was a Terstan. He could not have blackness in him. Unless it was spawn spore. He would have been in battle. He could have been injured.

I have to get to them. I have to—

He stopped dead, chilled to realize he stood in front of the outer gate, his hand on the bar. The wind rushed strongly outside, blustering and blowing against the walls, whistling across the crenellations of the wallwalk overhead, rattling the gate beneath his hands. He jerked them away and staggered backward. “Pox!”

The need to go to his family pressed at him insistently. The observation that they weren’t out there and this was a ploy to get him to open the gate changed nothing. He could even sense the tanniym waiting for him outside, yet some irrational part of him remained convinced that all he had to do was throw back that bar and wrench open the gate, and there his loved ones would be.

“No!” he cried, taking another step back. “You know it’s a lie!”

His voice rang in the darkness, the sound giving strength to the words so he was able to force himself to turn away and stride back up the tunnel. He exited into the gate yard and stopped, his way blocked by a semicircle of five men. He recognized their leader at once.

“Trinley?” he grated. “What the plague are you all doing down here?”

“We’d ask the same o’ you, Alaric,” Trinley said. “Didn’t ye tell us ye’d be in the study?”

A kelistar bloomed into the blackness, its clear light casting weird shadows up Oake’s bearded face.

“I was in the study,” said Abramm. Red, green, and blue ribbons of light undulated in the shadows around them, watching avidly.

“But now ye’re down here, opening the gate.”

“I didn’t open the gate.”

Trinley’s brows, drawn down angrily, blazed in the kelistar’s light. “Go back and close it, Alaric.”

“I didn’t open it.”

“Fine, then, we’ll go and see.”

Turning, Abramm strode quickly back down the tunnel to the small gate, the others on his heels. Several strides away he stopped and conjured a star of his own. Its white light washed over the rough wooden portal, shivering and rattling against hinges and bar. “There. It’s closed. Satisfied now?”

But Trinley only scowled the more. “Ye knew we were here, didn’t ye?

That’s why ye turned away.”

Abramm sighed wearily. “I think we should all go back to the common room.”

“You lead,” said Trinley.

Abramm returned them quickly to the Great Hall, but he’d barely entered the flagstone anteroom outside it when another of Jania’s shrieks stopped him in his tracks. Her deep, rasping gasps grated like metal on slate. “I think I’ll go up to my cell.”

Trinley laughed outright. “I think ye won’t.”

“Lock me in, if it’ll make you feel better. I can’t go in there.”

“Ye’d rather be locked in yer cell this night than be in there with the rest of us?” Trinley’s voice was both incredulous and disapproving.

“With Jania still screaming like that?” Abramm nodded. “Aye.”

Trinley exchanged glances with his companions. “Fine, then.”

He sent Cedric to find chains and a lock while the rest of them escorted Abramm to his cell at the top of the stair. He entered it freely and shut the door behind him, the others muttering nervously among themselves outside. How it was poxed odd that Alaric would ask to be chained up in his own cell, that he’d want to be in the cell at all, and that he’d ever chosen to sleep up here in the first place. What was wrong with him, anyway? And did anyone notice how he’d recognized Trinley right off when they were standing in deep darkness?

Cedric’s arrival with the lock and chain ended the gossip. As soon as the door was secured, they trooped back down the stairs, leaving Abramm to the wind and the tanniym’s howling and the dark fear beating at his soul. For a time he paced restlessly, repeatedly confessing his fears and failure to trust, and seeking Eidon’s help to overcome his weaknesses. When that did not work, and the visions of darkness sweeping wife and son away rose up to catch him, too, he dropped to his knees beside the cot and plunged himself into Eidon’s Light, beseeching him to deliver his loved ones from whatever it was that held them.

The birth pangs were the most savage Maddie had ever known, as if some giant hand squeezed and pulled at her until she thought her insides would be torn out. How was it she always forgot this? It was the third time and yet was every bit as awful as it had ever been. Worse now, with the spore that had come out of her father, dark and virulently bitter, coursing through her veins. It had gone at once for the child in her womb, and she’d had no time to start a purge, instantly forming the light into a shield around the baby to keep out the dark. A shield inside her own body, not outside, something she’d never done before. Something that in the best of times would have taken all her concentration, yet here she was holding it together by a thread. The upheaval of her body as the contractions grew more and more powerful broke into her thoughts time and again, terror waiting at each interval to seize her. She heard Simon screaming somewhere, terrified and in pain, but she could not go to him, for she could not leave the little girl in her womb lest the darkness take her.

She had thought at first that the shield would be enough. Once stabilized she would let the Light flow out to purge her own body. But this spore was different. Mindful. It shrank back, waiting. Then attacked when she faltered. And too often the pain was so intense it commanded all her attention. Coils of light undulated in the shadows around her, and she sensed other beings watching avidly, hoping for her death. Hoping for the child’s death.