of success at last tearingloose, to burst from her heart in searing joy. “Breathe, new spirit. It’s safe for you to join the living.”
The child’s fingers spasmed. His tiny chest shuddered. Small mouth still opened, he sucked in clear air and screeched as lusty a first cry in outrage for expulsion from the dark, wet safety of the womb.
Elaira bundled the squalling infant back into the care of the midwife, then found the nearest chair and let her knees give way. She sat, head bent, her face in her hands, while emotion and relief shuddered through her. The cries of the child grew louder, more energetic. His flesh would be blushing to pink, now, as exertion flushed life through his tissues. Elaira pushed straight, scarcely aware of the commotion which swirled through the outer room, then the blast of changed air as the door opened. Feeling every aching bone, and all the weight of a night without sleep, she looked up.
Then froze, jolted through her whole being as her eyes met and locked with a man’s.
He had black hair, green eyes. A face of lean angles bent toward her, the rage in each tautened muscle burnished by the hot flare of the tallow dips. The rest of him was muffled beneath a caped cloak, tied with cord, and woven in the fine, colored stripes preferred by the herders of Araethura.
Rocked out of balance, Elaira felt a cry lock fast in her throat. For a moment fractured from the slipstream of time, she could not move or think. Then the nuance of observation she was trained to interpret showed her the subtle differences: the fist, clamped in rough wool, with thick fingers too clumsy to strike song from a lyranthe string. This man was larger, coarser in build; not Arithon s’Ffalenn, Prince and Masterbard. The rough-edged male who loomed over her was the husband of this house, and the newborn child’s father.
“Daelion avert!” His fury bored into the enchantress. “What’s her kind doing here!”
“Never mind,” Elaira said quickly. She had expected hostility in some form or other, since Kaid had appeared on her doorstep. “I’ll be on my way directly.” She arose, tipped the filth in the basin into the slop jar beside the birthing stool, then turned her back, stepped over the pile of wadded, bloody towels, to repack her things in her satchel. Her part was done. The child’s danger was past. If the man was illmannered enough to dare set his hand on her, he would regret the presumption.
Like the whine of a whip, the seeress protested. “The fferedon’li will not go just yet. Not until the child’s augury is spoken.” Across theirate glower of the husband, the trembling, diffident anxiety of the mother, the crone arose from her corner, moved, an animate bundle of shawls, to present her appeal last to the midwife. “Tempt no ill luck. There’s a sacrifice owed by this babe. He would have gained no firm foothold in this world at all, if not for the hand of the fferedon’li.”
The husband swore with expressive, fresh venom, his glare still locked on the enchantress.
Comprehension dawned late, like a douse of chill water, or a sudden fall through thin ice. Elaira understood where the brittle, steel tension had sprung from. Her heart leaped at once to deny her own part. “I wish nothing, no tie for my service!” Through the longer, louder wails of the newborn, her voice clashed in rising dissent. “Let the boy’s life hold to its own course, with no interference from me.”
“Ye know better, gifted lady!” the seeress said, tart. “The debt against this young spirit is a fair one, and to refuse his given charge, a sign of ill favor and disrespect.”
The father spun about, his bellow of rebuttal cut short by more withering reprimand. “Foolish man! Were ye raised by a nanny goat? Here’s a strong son ye’ll have, perhaps to beget other living children of your line! Now let the augury say what he’s to grow and become. He may bear your blood. Yet the fate he’ll be asked in