by Holly Lisle
Danya felt her tail being lifted and bound to the central post of the house.
They could see the head? Interesting. She wondered what it looked like.
“Have her push with the next one,” Shejhan said. “She’s ready.”
And Aykree leaned under the blanket and said, “With the next pain, hold your breath and bear down. It’s time for the baby to come out.”
Well, that was good. She still vaguely recalled that once the baby came out this ordeal would be over. She tried to imagine what that would be like, but she couldn’t. She had been like this forever.
She could form one question coherently, though. “Will it hurt worse?”
“Gathalorra, when you have come this far, pushing feels better than not pushing. You’re ready, and if you let it, your body will take care of you,” the midwife said.
Then the pain slammed into her again, and the blissful haze in which she’d basked ripped away. Once again the world was real and harsh and drenched in red. Aykree said, “Now. Hold your breath and push the baby out. Push. Push!”
She closed her eyes, and tensed her belly, and pushed against the agony of being ripped apart. Things shifted inside of her. The unborn monster moved. She could feel her progress suddenly. She could feel her burden growing less.
“Good! Good! Harder!”
She gasped, took another quick breath, held it, pushed again. She was winning. She was getting rid of the thing.
The pain exploded without warning; ten times—a hundred times—worse than it had been before. She collapsed forward onto her elbows and screamed and flailed and wept, and heard something else begin to wail as well.
She became aware of the midwives shouting at her—yelling above her screaming. “You’re almost done! Gathalorra! Gathalorra! Listen! The head is out. Push again and you’ll be finished!”
The unbearable urge to push was building inside her, unstoppable, inescapable, and all she could feel was mute, anguished astonishment. Again? She had to do that again?
She couldn’t . . . and yet, the next contraction hit, and she did. More pain—pain so terrible it seared and enveloped and overwhelmed. Then, as suddenly as it had overtaken her, it was gone, and the most wonderful feeling of warmth flooded her body. No pain. No pushing. No red haze. She was still alive, while in the background, even the thin, ragged wail ceased.
Silence.
Release.
Shejhan said, “You have a boy-child.” She sounded doubtful.
Danya didn’t care whether she had a dog-child. She was done. Done. She was freed of the thing that had invaded her body. She could hear its cry begin again—fragile, punctuated, but stronger. She wanted them to take the little beast away, but instead they were rolling her onto her back, onto cushions on the floor, and propping her up, and pressing the thing into her arms and against her chest.
She stared at it, and time stopped. The baby moved in her arms, stopped crying, and stared at her gravely. Her baby. Her baby.
Not it. Him.
She stared at him.
The world held its breath, and sounds, only loosely bound by gravity, spun away. In the silence, she stared into her son’s eyes, and he stared into hers. He wriggled, blinked, blinked again.
Not a monster at all.
Not like her. No claws, no scales, no spikes, no teeth.
She felt swallowed tears burning their way down the back of her throat; her vision blurred as her eyes filled with water.
Her son. Her human son.
His bottomless blue eyes regarded her intently; his soft rosebud mouth made a tiny round soundless O. He had five tiny fingers on each hand, five tiny toes on each foot, a soft body with perfect legs and perfect arms. A perfect human baby, and he was hers. The Sabirs had twisted her, they had twisted everything about her, but they had not managed to twist her son.
She gently pressed one scaled, taloned finger into the palm of his hand and his fingers wrapped around it. He held on to her tightly and looked into her soul, and his love, the love she’d fought off and denied throughout her pregnancy, overwhelmed her. He was her gift. He was her reward for all the suffering she had endured. He was wonderful.
She put him to the nipple that protruded from her scaled breast, and he sucked. While he sucked, he looked at her. His free hand clenched and unclenched, but with his other hand, he held on to her finger.
Shejhan said, “He doesn’t have any scales. Or any tail. Or claws. He looks . . . tender. Will he get them later?”
“No.” Danya ran the back of a finger gently over his smooth, damp cheek. “No scales. No claws. No tail.” She looked up. “Can you bring me a blanket for him? Please?”
She could see the length and delicacy of her hands—her hands as they had once been—duplicated in his. She could see in the roundness and the slight upward slant of his eyes her own eyes as they had looked the last time she admired herself in a mirror in Galweigh House.
She held him gingerly, afraid that her scaly skin might scratch him, or that she might accidentally injure him with her claws. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. He was more magical than anything she had ever seen or known. How could she have thought she hated him? How could she have wanted to be rid of him?
Some part of her deep inside looked at him with jealousy. He was human, after all, the one thing she wished to be and could never be again. Human.
But the rest of her mind said, He’s mine. My son. My beautiful son.
In the back of her mind, a voice that did not belong to her began to whisper, Danya? Can you still hear me? Are you listening?
Luercas. She hadn’t heard from him since she had gotten too ungainly to make her way across the river to In-kanmerea, the secret House of the Devil Ghosts he’d led her to—the only place where she could talk to him without being overheard by the spirits that would not leave her and her baby alone.
I can hear you. She spoke to him in her mind, not wanting to speak out loud with the midwives watching.
Luercas sounded pleased. You did well, Danya. He’s an excellent infant. Much better than I had expected. He’ll do nicely. Very nicely.
Danya accepted the compliment without comment. She was surprised that she wasn’t happier to hear from the spirit who had saved her life. She hid her mixed feelings as best she could, not wanting to offend him, and said, I’m glad you’re back. I’ve missed you. I was afraid you had abandoned me.
You’re my friend. You’re my window to the world of the living. And I’ve missed you, too, all this time that I couldn’t talk with you. But I won’t abandon you, Danya. I’ll never abandon you.
No. He wouldn’t. He would be with her always. He would take care of her, keep her safe, and eventually help her get her revenge on the Sabirs and the Galweighs, and on the world that had destroyed her. She knew this—knew it with bone-deep certainty. She should be delighted to hear his calm voice speaking into her mind again. She should be.
I know you’re my friend. She stared down at the baby in her arms, the lovely baby that she hadn’t wanted, and blocked out her reservations about Luercas. Isn’t he marvelous?
Luercas said fervently, He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Chapter 30
Ry crouched over the viewing glass Dùghall had fashioned, watching his cousin Crispin moving through Sabir House as if he were the paraglese of it and not a minor Wolf in the hierarchy. He could see that the other Wolves gave Crispin deference—at least to his face—and that their expressions twisted with fear and distaste as he moved past them.
What had happened in the House while he was gone? What could have placed Crispin into a position of authority? Why would any Wolf bend a knee at Crispin’s passing, or press fingers to heart?
Bitter, evil changes had taken place; Ry knew it. But he couldn’t imagine how they could have come to pass. His cousin Crispin had become a Dragon, or was possessed by a Dragon, or was working in tandem with a Dragon—Dùghall hadn’t been able to determine what happened to the host soul wh
en the Mirror of Souls inserted the Dragon soul into the host body. But after Ry had carefully laid out the scene of his own murder in his room, and had left clues blaming Crispin and his brother Anwyn and their crony and cousin Andrew, Crispin should have been disowned, and executed in Punishment Square long before a Dragon had the chance to possess his body.
Dùghall stood behind him. “Have you seen it yet?”
Ry stretched, and felt a dozen points along his spine pop. He looked up at Dùghall, who remained obsessed with the Mirror. The damned Mirror that had betrayed him and his men and Kait, that had drawn his cousins and trouble after them, that had almost gotten all of them killed. He wished he’d refused to let Kait bring the accursed artifact aboard the ship when he rescued her. Or that he’d found a way to throw it into the sea before they ever neared Calimekka. Then they wouldn’t be sitting and staring at little pieces of spelled glass, hoping to find a way to undo whatever bizarre damage the Mirror had done.
“No,” he growled. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
For love of Kait, he had allowed himself to suffer under the thumb of her uncle. Do this, Ry. Have your men do that. Go here. Watch there. And he suffered without protest Dùghall’s unspoken opinion that he and his men were inferior because they were Sabirs. He tolerated the distaste and distrust and dislike.
Actually, he shared the distaste and distrust and dislike. He couldn’t give himself too much credit for his tolerance, because he didn’t like Dùghall any better than Dùghall liked him.
But in spite of everything he was doing to win her over, Kait refused to move past the boundaries of polite distance that she’d built between them. They were bound to each other, powerfully and inexplicably; he could sense her trotting through the city at that moment, tracing one of his Family’s servants through Calimekka’s back streets. He was with her as if he rode inside her head. When he was in the same room with her, he could feel her bare skin against his even though a hundred people stood between them. In his bed at night he could taste her lips pressed to his, though she had never kissed him; when he closed his eyes he could feel her dancing naked against his body—dancing beneath the moon. And when he managed to look into her eyes, he knew she felt what he felt, as fully and vividly and inescapably as he did. Yet she wouldn’t come to him. She wouldn’t touch him. She wouldn’t give in to the passion that rode them both. She would not accept Ian’s offers of companionship and she avoided his embraces, but she avoided Ry’s attempts to charm and tempt her, too.
She was as celibate as a novice parnissa; Ry passed her in the morning as she knelt in meditation, practicing the silent, traceless magic her uncle and Hasmal had taught her. While meditating, she became invisible to him behind her shields. When she did, he felt that she was cutting away a part of his soul.
Ry kept staring at the glass while he said nothing, and Dùghall took the hint. He wandered over to see if Jaim, working his shift on the glass linked to the Galweigh woman, had anything to report.
In the viewing glass, Crispin strode toward the center of the Wolves’ domain. He moved purposefully down the corridor that led to the White Hall, between the rows of arches filled with harlequin-patterned stained glass, and at last into the hall itself. He was alone in there. Alone with the incised pattern on the floor, the Trail of Spirits. Alone with the solid gold sacrificial pillar.
And there it was. The gods’ damned Mirror of Souls sat in front of the pillar like an altar before an idol.
Ry suppressed a shudder. He hated going anywhere near the White Hall. At the best of times, the unhappy spirits of the sacrificed dead cried out from the walls for release.
“Here it is,” he said, and instantly Dùghall was across the room and on his knees beside him, peering into the murky glass.
“Which of those things is it?”
Ry had forgotten that Dùghall had never seen the Mirror. He pointed it out from the other artifacts that sat in the hall. “The flower-shaped artifact on the pedestal. The last time I saw it, it had light rising up through the central stem and pooling in the middle of the petals. Now it looks . . . dead.”
Dùghall didn’t breathe for the longest time. He seemed frozen in place, rigid, with his eyes locked on the shifting image. Ry felt a change in the air around him, a sense of leashed power moving through the universe’s currents. Dùghall was doing something with that silent magic of his, but Ry couldn’t begin to guess what. Then, as Crispin left the room, the Mirror disappeared from view, and Dùghall pulled back with a sigh.
“Ah. Clever. Incredibly clever. They did so much with simple spells. . . .” Dùghall rose and started to walk away.
“Wait,” Ry said. The old bastard lived to be enigmatic, but Ry didn’t have the patience to let him. Not after crouching over the viewing glass until his feet went numb and his back muscles burned. “You mean to tell me that by looking at the artifact for just that short time, you can not only tell what it does but how it works? And what spells the Dragons used to power it?”
“To some extent. I can tell the basics. Magical success, at least success gained at the expense of others, leaves tracks. If you had been taught an acceptable form of magic, and had studied it diligently, you could have looked at the success of what the Ancients’ Dragons did to create the artifact, and followed their tracks to the same conclusions.”
Ry rose to his feet, ignoring the blatant insult to his scholarship and his form of magic. He glared down at the old man. “If that were true, Hasmal would have known what the Mirror did. He’s one of your people.”
“He’s one of my people in that he was raised a Falcon by his father, who is also a Falcon.” Dùghall crossed his arms over his chest and smiled. “But Hasmal was anything but a diligent student. He learned what his father taught him because it was expected of him, and because he was a dutiful son. But one does not get inspired scholarship from dutiful sons. Inspired scholarship only comes from passion.”
Ry waited for him to say something else, but the old man would play his games. “What?” Ry snapped at last.
Dùghall chuckled, apparently surprised by the annoyance in Ry’s voice. He shook his head, and Ry felt the unbearable urge to Shift and rip the old goat’s throat out with his teeth. He didn’t—as much out of healthy fear for the old man’s magical ability as out of love for Kait.
At last Dùghall answered him. “Though to the untrained eye the Mirror of Souls doesn’t appear to be doing anything at the moment, it’s feeding off the life forces of most of the people in this city in order to run itself. I won’t be party to bringing another such evil into the world. But I believe I see a way to create a small reverse of the Mirror—something strong enough to reverse the Mirror’s spell one person at a time.”
Ry rolled his eyes. “One person at a time. That would be useful. Then we could track down all of the hundreds—or perhaps thousands—of Dragons hiding inside the bodies of the city’s citizens . . . and do you know how many people paid parnissal taxes as citizens of Calimekka last year? More than a million. Do you have any idea how easily a hundred people, or a thousand people, or five thousand people, could hide within that crowd? So we could track them down one at a time, and revert them. If they don’t destroy us first. They were the greatest wizards of their age, after all. I imagine they’re dangerous, don’t you think?”
“Certainly. But we wouldn’t have to track down all of them. We’d only need to get one. One in a high position, with access to the true Mirror, and one who, rid of the Dragon who possesses him and restored to his original state, would be sympathetic to us. Who could let us into Sabir House and assist in creating a diversion that would let us get the Mirror away from the Dragons. The Mirror is feeding the Dragons now. If we could shut it off or reverse it, they would be ripped from the bodies they’ve inhabited and thrown back into the void.”
“And that would end the threat of Dragons to Calimekka and the world, and leave the road open for you and the rest of the Falcons to bring in your Reborn god and set him up,
right? But aren’t you being terribly optimistic? From what I’ve heard from Kait and Hasmal, the prophecies foretell a war to come between the Dragons and your Falcons before this issue can be resolved.”
Dùghall grinned up at him and shrugged. “The wording of the prophecies is subject to interpretation. Perhaps our interpretations have been wrong, and the battle, such as it will be, will only happen between a few powerful adversaries, and not between great armies. If we’ve been wrong all these years, I won’t complain. Conquering the Dragons before they can strike will only bring Solander to his throne that much sooner, and the world will become a paradise that much faster. I’ll do what I can to hasten the start of paradise.”
Ry turned away from him, shaking his head. All of them—Dùghall, Hasmal, and even Kait—were irrational on the subject of their Reborn. “You risk your life in the hopes of bringing a nonsensical legend to life. You’re a fool, Dùghall.”
“You want to see how much of a fool I am?” Dùghall rested a hand lightly on Ry’s shoulder, and turned him around so that they were face-to-face. “The Reborn is not a god. And he’s not a legend. He’s been born—he was born this morning, and I felt him come into the world and draw breath. It was the greatest joy I have ever known. He grows stronger with every breath he takes. Would you like to meet him?”
Ry laughed out loud. Meet the Reborn? What trickery did the old man have planned to convince him that the Reborn was real? Better yet, how did Dùghall think he would benefit from winning Ry over? Had he been planning to convert Ry to the Falcons’ silly religion all along?
Perhaps Dùghall had decided there weren’t enough Falcons to rule the world. Maybe he’d discovered what a powerful wizard Ry was and decided he needed him as an ally in his own right, not a reluctant ally helping the Falcon cause to stay close to Kait.
He looked at the old man and thought, What chicanery have you planned for me, eh? Well, I like a good magic trick as well as the next, and seeing yours will tell me more about you than you can guess. You want me to “meet” your great hero? By all means, entertain me.
