Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The infant? Raes and Aeronu, they cannot mean to harm the infant? Impossible—but to steal him! Aeronu, why have I not thought of it earlier? Raes and Aeronu, Eltrassru and Great Jehandru, help me—strengthen me!

  Breathing as quietly as she could, the priestess began to edge up to a sitting position, readying herself to spring. One did not have such ready command of one’s body in a nightmare. She swallowed carefully. Yes, she would be able to scream if the need came.

  She could see the doorcurtain moving, being pulled aside. The loosely-woven cloth had almost a sheen, like a shadow that was gray-white rather than black. Forcing herself to breathe deeply and quietly, Inmara watched one side of the linen moving inward, slowed by the clay weights along the bottom and by the stealth of the dark arm drawing it back…slowed, also, the priestess dimly understood, by her own suspense.

  The intruder looked into her room. Inmara could see the face, an oval darker than the curtain but lighter than the shadows behind. For a heartbeat their two faces seemed turned towards one another, as the priestess realized the intruder saw she was awake and sitting, rather than asleep and reclining.

  The intruder sprang. Inmara leaped forward to meet the threat—was borne back by greater strength, greater speed and agility—a strong arm around her waist to prevent her falling, a hand over her face to prevent her screaming.

  She heard the swish of the curtain, the helpless clicking of the small clay weights, the padding of the dog’s paws. She tried to open her mouth, to find the attacker’s hand with her teeth. In an instant the hand slipped down and grasped her throat. “Scream and you’re dead,” the intruder whispered.

  It was a horror lived through a second time—the forest outside the holy glade, the baby in Inmara’s arms and a cursed, crazed warrior threatening her with a bloodied sword. Inmara could not scream, could hardly lower her jaw against the pressure squeezing inward and upward.

  Her right elbow was caught in the grip around her waist, but her left arm was still free. She snatched at the intruder’s face.

  The intruder’s hand tightened on her throat, choking her and pushing her head back until her neck seemed about to crack. One leg whipped around behind her, catching her knees between her attacker’s legs like a rope in a pair of tongs. The tongs closed slowly, forcing her knees to buckle beneath her as the intruder, crouching gradually, lowered her to the floor without a sound, with pitifully little struggle. She must not faint. She could do nothing for the moment except cling to consciousness in spite of the hand held so tightly around her throat.

  It could not be Thorn—that miserable, damned warrior had gone alone into the marshlands! Yet who but a warrior could strike so quickly and force so surely? And what warrior but Thorn would dare outrage a priestess?

  Holding Inmara to the floor with legs and one hand, the attacker freed her own other arm from the captive’s waist. The dog approached, whimpering softly. The priestess wondered if he would try to lick her, but the intruder pushed him away, muttering, “Damn you, dog!” Then Inmara felt a blade between her lower ribs and her right breast, pressing so closely that when she breathed she could sense the sharp edge fraying the threads of her nightdress.

  “I don’t want to kill you, nurseling,” whispered the attacker, “but by the gods, if you don’t keep quiet and let me tie you with no bloody fuss, you’re dead!”

  So this stranger thought she was attacking a mere nurse? The hand on Inmara’s throat loosened slightly. She gasped, caught her breath, and spoke in a low compressed voice. “I am no nurse. Warrior, I am Inmara, priestess and Maldron’s eldest wife.”

  The hand on her throat seemed to shake, then tightened again. The knife drew away slightly, then pushed back inward. Was the blade actually through the cloth and into her flesh?

  “I still mean it, Lady!” The attacker was Thorn.

  “Why have you come?”

  “To get my grub, Lady.”

  “Grub?”

  “The brat—the baby.”

  Inmara shuddered, driving her own breast tighter against the knife. Even when Frostflower had stopped naming Thorn as Terndasen’s mother, she had persisted in the claim of a warrior who did not want him.

  Even in her confusion, Inmara remembered the test. “Describe—the child’s birthmark—or marks!”

  “Hellbog! It’s a he-brat. Lady, keep still.”

  “You cannot describe his marks.”

  “Gods, what difference does it make? You want to hear all the bloody details of pushing it out—”

  “You could not have carried him in the time!”

  “Frostflower sorcered him out of me, damn it! She used to be able to do that, before you damn—Look, don’t talk. I don’t want to kill you, Lady.”

  Thorn began to work the priestess across the floor, sliding her slowly, in little half-cushioned jerking movements. What was she doing? Ah, moving closer to the bed. Inmara lay limp, offering no resistance, hardly even feeling the tiles through her thin robe.

  Thorn spoke truth. Frostflower’s insistence… Frostflower’s statement about growing her dog with sorcery, which Inmara had suspected from the first to be a hint about the child, though she had quickly smothered the suspicion.… Her small Terndasen was the son of this brutish woman, and Thorn—not Inmara—held mother’s right over him.

  “I can still choke you, Lady.” The warrior took her knife from Inmara’s rib and twisted around to reach for the sheet and begin pulling it off the bed.

  Thorn does not deserve mother’s right—Thorn has forfeited mother’s right! He is mine now—I deserve him—he is mine and I will keep him, I will not let her bind me and take him, this warrior who deserves death and Hell twenty times over! I can keep him now and keep him without fear of his true parents.…

  But how could a priestess, who had never needed or learned to fight with her body even in sport, overpower a trained warrior who would not recognize the sacredness of a farmer’s person?

  One farmer could not, but many farmers—Maldron, acting with Daseron, Varin, Lilm, Enneald with her long fingernails, even young Wendrina, and Erithi who runs and climbs like a boy—they can circle her. Let this warrior claim mother’s right when she is hanging from the gibbet with every limb broken and her own stone-filled entrails stuffed down her throat, as is less than she deserves for bruising and threatening a priestess!

  The room beside Inmara’s to the south was the study alcove, empty of sleepers, used in the day for reading and sewing. Young Erithi had taken the room to the north for the very reason that Terndasen’s loudest wails never woke her. The noises of scuffling and whispering alone were not likely to bring help.

  Inmara had waited unresisting very long now. Thorn seemed busy with the sheet. The priestess suddenly opened her mouth wide and tightened her throat for a scream—

  The warrior’s hand shoved her jaws closed. Her teeth smashed together, her head struck against the floor, her breath stopped completely. Dazed, her lungs stagnating, she began to struggle unthinkingly until Thorn loosened her grip to allow the passage of air.

  “Don’t try that again, Lady!”

  The priestess lay quiet, her throat, teeth, and skull aching, a taste of blood in her mouth. She could hardly believe that the impact of her head on the floor, or even of her teeth striking together, had not wakened the baby; but the only sounds were Thorn’s harsh breathing above her and the dog’s thin whine somewhere near.

  Even if Inmara could wake the others—even if Maldron, Enneald, Kalda, and Lilm had not been on the other side of the hall—Thorn could still murder her like a common tradeswoman before help came.

  Jehandru forgive me, what is it to me that Thorn should meet my husband’s justice, if I am no longer alive?

  “Why do you wish him now, warrior?”

  At Inmara’s words, Thorn began to squeeze her throat once more. But the priestess hurried on, whispering desperately through the pressure and the thick fluid rising towards her mouth. “What do you want with him now?”


  Thorn’s fingers faltered—only a little, but they did not close off Inmara’s breathing this time. The swordswoman jerked at the sheet.

  “Answer me, warrior!” Inmara tried to summon all her priestlihood, to whisper the command as if priestlihood were still a weapon this warrior would respect. “I am a priestess! By Great Jehandru, answer me! Why have you come?”

  “Azkor’s claws, Lady, I gave him to Frostflower!”

  “The sorceress is dead! What will you—”

  “Hellstink, keep quiet!”

  The warrior finally succeeded in pulling the sheet from the bed. “Sit up and don’t scream.” Still kneeling on Inmara’s legs, Thorn took her hand from the priestess’ throat and began to twist the sheet.

  Inmara did not scream, but neither did she sit. What was a warrior, to command a priestess? “You did not care for him when the sorceress lived. Why do you want him now she is dead?”

  Thorn pulled her halfway up and threw the twisted sheet ropelike around her shoulders, pulling it tightly in a large knot.

  “I love him, warrior! Leave him with me and I will tell no one you have escaped the marshlands.”

  The warrior thrust a corner of sheet into the priestess’ mouth. Inmara spat it out easily while Thorn tried to bind her wrists; but the warrior’s silence gave her a new and different alarm.

  “Thorn! She is alive?”

  “How the Hellstink would she be alive? Wasn’t she almost dead when you hung her up on your demon-damned gibbet?”

  Thorn was fumbling in the near-darkness, and sheets had never been woven for binding wrists. Inmara thought she could pull her hands apart—even, if she were quick enough, catch the swordswoman’s hair or ears or throat now, while both Thorn’s hands were occupied with the cloth. Instead, she sat meekly. The struggle had not gone out of her spirit, but it had turned inward upon herself…and Inmara was weary. Weary not of fighting Thorn—if there had been nothing left but her emotion toward this warrior, she now thought she could have fought on, savagely and hopelessly, waking the hall and insuring Thorn’s capture with her own death. Aye, her body was only beginning to feel the stir of bloodlust; her aches and bruises were lending her a fierce energy, awakening her limbs to thirst for battle, crumbling the ancient difference between priestess and warrior. It was the struggle within her own conscience that left Inmara weary.

  She had been beaten down, pinioned helpless and unable to move; but she had not been stripped and raped. All the pains Thorn had caused Inmara were very slight compared with the tortures Maldron had so delicately inflicted on the sorceress. Inmara had been shamed, humiliated, desecrated—suffered as it was unheard-of a priestess should suffer—but she had been violated only in darkness and quiet. She had not, like Frostflower, been chained naked to the wheel in the full light of day, raised on a scaffold, her suffering and shame exposed to a crowd of gaping commoners who jeered as they watched the burning sword laid twice across her skin…and all this they had done, Maldron and his family, to an innocent woman, a woman who could not save herself with the truth, could not manufacture a lie.

  Thorn was indeed the child’s mother, and did not deserve him; but Frostflower still lived. The swordswoman’s words and manner confirmed it more surely than if she had spoken it forthright.

  “Thorn!” whispered the priestess. “If you would be her friend, do not take her the child!”

  “Damn sheet,” muttered the warrior.

  “If she is captured with him again, it will be death!”

  “And if you catch her without him, you’ll just bathe her in perfume and send her home in a nice silk robe?”

  “Listen to me, warrior! We are not searching for her—but if you take the child, then we must search, we must disembowel.”

  Thorn lifted Inmara’s bulkily-bound hands to her face, pushed the knot into her mouth, and tied the ends of the sheet behind her head. Then she lifted her, laid her on the bed, and tied something around her ankles.

  “Lady,” said Thorn, speaking in a voice more quiet than a whisper, “I’ll give her a quick death myself before I let you gut her and hang her up again. But if you keep that damn brat away from her, you’re killing her slowly just as sure as if you stoned her.”

  The warrior moved away from the bed. Inmara could see little. Her hands, tied up against her face, blocked half her vision. Her breath gathered warm, thick, and moist on her thumbs and the cloth pushing against her nostrils. Still, Thorn had tied her clumsily. A warrior should be ashamed to tie anyone so clumsily. Did they not bind criminals for questioning and for execution?

  I am still a priestess, thought Inmara. She did not dare bind me well—she is still at least a little in awe of my holiness. Then came the more humbling thought: she worked in haste and with a sheet of polished linen.

  Meanwhile, as she thought these things, Inmara was quietly and desperately pulling, twisting, sliding the smooth cloth out of her mouth. For a few moments she feared Thorn had bound her more securely than she had thought at first. But once the knot was out of her mouth and the sheet pulled from the back of her head to around her neck, she was able to stretch her arms apart a little and twist her right hand down out of its loop. The rest of the network fell apart almost at once. The sheet remained around her neck like a battered cloak, but her hands and arms were free.

  Thorn was standing above the cradle, apparently looking down at Terndasen by the dim light of the votive candle. Amazing that all their struggles, all their whispers and mutterings, had not wakened the child. Raes and Aeronu! If he should be dead—quietly as young babes sometimes died in their sleep—Why was Thorn studying him so…intently?

  Inmara bent to her ankles. They were tied only with the hem of her own night-dress, pulled up at the edges and twisted crudely into strands. It was a moment’s work to undo the knot—less firmly tied, and she could have kicked free.

  The infant started crying—a hoarse, healthy, beautiful wail. But Inmara’s relief shattered when she saw Thorn had picked him up.

  The warrior turned and saw that Inmara had freed herself. For a moment they stared at each other in the shadows, the swordswoman holding the infant clumsily and confusedly, the priestess poised ready to spring from the bed, while the child wailed loudly. Somewhere, in the deeper shadows, the dog was wagging his tail against something.

  She cares nothing for the babe, thought Inmara. If I move, she will throw him to the floor. “I could have screamed long ago,” the priestess said in a low voice. It sounded like a promise, but it was not—and even if Inmara had stated that she would not scream, a priestess owed no faith to a warrior.

  “What’s the bloody difference now?”

  “Do you think the babe never cries in the night? He will bring no one, if you continue speaking softly.” Inmara rose and crossed the room, holding out her arms.

  Thorn looked at her suspiciously, then shifted the infant into one arm and drew her dagger. Inmara jumped forward. The warrior held up the blade, pointed at her. The priestess stopped, horrified but wary, watching for Thorn’s next move.

  Slowly the warrior edged close enough to allow Inmara to take the child. As soon as she had him secure in her arms, the priestess backed away.

  “Go now,” she said. “I will tell no one that either you or she is still alive.” It rankled to permit the warrior’s escape; but, if caught and questioned, Thorn might lead them despite themselves to Frostflower. Moreover, if Inmara were to scream now, the warrior might yet stab both the babe and herself.

  “Lady,” said Thorn, “if Frostflower didn’t need that brat, do you think I’d be here risking my guts?”

  Frostflower was not completely innocent. She had used sorcery to bring the child to birth. Even that much guilt merited death. But Inmara was aware of what happened to babes who came unwanted into the wombs of creatures like Thorn. Was it justice to kill a woman for saving a child, by whatever means?

  “The longer you remain,” said Inmara, “the more likely you are to be caught.”

 
; “I gave him to you so you could bounce him back to sleep, Lady. I’m going to take him with me, or stay and kill half a score of you, priests or not.”

  “Silence your blaspheming tongue!” Deliberately turning her back on the warrior, Inmara walked to the bed and sat. She would open her bodice and try again to suckle him. Frostflower had told her she could, perhaps, do it…and old Cradlelap had agreed it was possible. Indeed, today the priestess had thought, for a while, her milk was about to come.

  Thorn followed her. She would not open her bodice with the swordswoman looking on.

  “Get him back to sleep,” said Thorn, “or I’ll take him squalling.”

  Inmara glanced from the knife to the warrior’s face. The priestess was in control of herself once more. She could not have conquered Thorn by struggling; her weapons were pride, dignity, and the detachment that would enable her, now, to scream when she chose, even knowing that the next moment she would feel a blade in some organ. “Who are you, a creature who should have been sterile, a mother with no love for your own son, to judge which of two natural women should mother this child?”

  “Damn it, Lady, the bloody thing came out of my guts!”

  A little more, thought Inmara, and I will cause her to shout instead of whispering. “Perhaps he came out of your body, but he brought no piece of your heart out with him.”

  The warrior shrugged, almost helplessly. “Gods, I don’t understand it. If you don’t understand it, how the Hell can I get it across to you? But you’ll go on living without the damn grub, Lady, and Frostflower won’t.”

  Why did she not remain angry? Inmara closed her eyes. How can I fight her when she pleads? But Frostflower was not completely guiltless—Inmara clung to that thought—and Frostflower merited death for sorcering the baby.

  Sorcered! My little Terndasen…sorcered! No, it does not matter, I love him as dearly—Aeronu! I have held him, nursed him, tried to suckle him these four days—I know there is no difference, sorcered babes are not monsters, they are as sweet and as messy as natural babes.… Did it make any difference to me when I but suspected?