No Flame But Mine Read Online Free

primitive mirror and gazed into it. ‘Show me her and where she is.’
    Where the oculum, Magikoy master-glass, had failed him, after an hour the ice sheet obeyed.
    It had needed only something simple.
    Almost a year back Thryfe had dreamed of the Lionwolf. The creature was a beautiful and couth young man, a sun god. Yes, a god of the sun, for Thryfe himself saw as much, and in the dream told Vashdran so. This delusion Thryfe had since filed far off in his mind. It was illustrative of illusory things, and irrational. And yet in moments of inspiration it returned to him.
    Now too it had done so. And for a second a golden-red flicker stirred in the ice-glass.
    Only for a second even so. And the picture of Jemhara standing at the centre of a small dark orb had faded. Yet he knew by then where he could find her. The blizzard flagged as he turned due west, towards the coastal junk-heap of Kandexa.
    â€˜No two human female things can make a baby.’
    â€˜Lady mageia, they can, and they did.’
    â€˜It was your crap of a Kelp,’ grated Aglin.
    â€˜Never. He’d lost his interest in me long before, gone off with some other girl. He kindly told me he kept me alive as he might have a use for me after the war was won – and he didn’t want to see me killed after all the joy I’d given him.’
    â€˜Maybe he didn’t,’ said Jemhara.
    â€˜Am I to care? He still kept me fettered too. Except … one evening, as the army drew near the capital Ru Karismi … that was odd. He went off to his other bint, gods help her, and he forgot to chain me up. I pretended the chain was locked tight, of course. I was thinking I might get away. But then, she came by.’
    â€˜She?’ Even the exasperated Aglin had lowered her voice.
    â€˜Well, I’d seen her in the distance. Half the men in the war camp had fucked her. That was sure. Well, they said so, you know what men are like. But they said that Vashdran wanted her as well. Just wanted and went without. He’d ride into a battle without armour, laughing. They said the only time any man saw him tremble was if she was by.’
    â€˜ She .’
    â€˜She drifted over the ground like a black unfrozen leaf. I saw one once, in old Kandexa before. It fell from a richman’s hot-house door. A black leaf off a fig tree. Like that. I had seen her in the distance, the way I’d seen the Lionwolf. At first I thought she painted herself all over to seem so dark. But – it was real.’
    â€˜The Kraag say,’ Jemhara murmured, ‘what is unreal is real.’
    â€˜She was black ,’ said Beebit. She shut her eyes for the fraction of a second. ‘Only not – inside.’
    â€˜The Jafn peoples have a god or hero who was black,’ said the mageia surprisingly. ‘Only the inside of his mouth was red like a man’s. And the balls of his eyes were white – and his teeth.’
    â€˜And she was like that. But inside her – I mean, in there . Like a dark pink rose.’
    Hushed, the women now. This silence was unlike the others.
    Beebit’s daughter-if-she-was seemed unworried by Beebit’s words. She had, the girl, a smooth and almost emotionless face. There was truly a look of something not wholly ordinary about her; even if her hair and eyes had been normal and her skin pale, this look would remain.
    Beebit was remembering, and now she told only a little of it. The black woman was called Chillel, and she came walking quietly through the huge camp, where men turned always to stare at her. Beebit saw her draw nearer and nearer, until she was crossing among the carts. If a man had stepped out and spoken to Chillel of wanting her, she would have gone away with him at once. This was what she did. She had apparently told a kind of parable about herself. She said she was a cup the gods had made and filled. Whoever wanted might drink from the cup. But tonight no man approached her. Their