Coryn lifted his arms and she came into them. When she talked like this, his life seemed an unfolding miracle. Even the loss of his talent could not negate the soaring joy he felt every time she enfolded him in her sweetness. The nightmares would fade, he told himself.
Taniquel pressed against him. Her belly and breasts had rounded these past few tendays and her skin felt hot, almost velvety, with early pregnancy. Sometimes he thought he felt—or perhaps only remembered—the golden glow deep inside her.
Our daughter, he thought. Our future. They’d decided to name her Felicia, as a token of their own happiness.
EPILOGUE
A ragged man rode into a small town along the Kadarin River, a town where no one inquired of any business past the color of a man’s money. His mule limped, ribs staring out of a dull, dust-choked coat. The man himself was wild-haired and taciturn, his face seamed like worn leather. Even these rough folk who lived on the edge of bandit country looked away quickly, not wanting to meet his eyes.
The man shuffled into the single inn, hunched down at a table, and ordered hot food. It came, a bowl of steaming gray stew with a fist-sized lump of soda bread. He bent over it, staring into its opaque depths as if to read some secret there. The stew, though bland and greasy, warmed his belly. He would live, he repeated to himself. He might be too old to carry out his revenge during his own lifetime, but he was not beyond fathering sons to carry on. And someday, he swore to himself yet again, the Hastur bitch and her issue would pay for what they had done.
The Fall of Neskaya Page 49
