Janny Wurts
Meiglin all but wished for death on that clear winter morning, when the brothel's madam cupped her face between perfumed hands. Eyes shut, Meiglin endured as the woman assessed her fresh skin and, still considering, fingered the tangles the wind had wound in her lustrous seal-brown hair. The prick of the older woman's nails against her flesh was not another bad dream. Meiglin fought down tears and terror. Only a fool could have clung to belief that she might be allowed to stay innocent. Though her immature breasts had just started to bud, and the hips underneath her tattered skirt were as yet boyishly slim, one of last night's clients had winked at her as she had rushed in, cheeks flushed from an errand.
Today, the madam's shrewd eyes, cold blue, weighed up her assets as merchandise.
"Mistress, wait," Meiglin pleaded. "I'm surely too young."
"Not so young. A man has asked for you, dearie. Time we had Feylie cut you a gown." The powerful woman patted Meiglin's shoulder, not ungently, for all her hard heart. "Lavender, with black lace at the throat. That will bring out the unusual color of your eyes, and forgive the fact you have only promise filling the front of your bodice."
Meiglin jerked free, blazing with shame. Her future had been in plain sight, all along, her prospects no better than the other whores' daughters born comely enough for the house. Tomorrow, she would have cream for her oatmeal, to fill out her coltish frame. She would no longer scrub dishes or wash soiled linen. By the time the new gown had been made to measure, her chapped hands would be soft, and her lips would be painted. She would be presented as the new, virgin jewel, and the clients would do more than wink.
"Come, now," chaffed the madam. "We don't feed any child who's not suited for the business. Nor any grown woman, either. Your mother's aging. She can't fill her bed as once she used to. Put a good face on this, Meiglin." Entwined ropes of pearls clicked over layered silk as the madam crossed the lush carpet. She slapped open her account book and started inscribing the writ for the dress maker. "These are hard times, with the wars and the mayor's exorbitant taxes. It's your earnings, now, girl, will pay for your shelter. Your mother's had her day. You'll now have to make your own way."
Left standing in chilled disarray, her unbound hair tumbled over the unlaced strings of her overdress, Meiglin trembled in shattered desperation. How had she ever dared hope for reprieve? The pilfered hoard of coins she had stashed away in secret could never have bought her escape. No man of decent family would wed a child of fourteen years, or employ one born and raised in a bawdyhouse. Meiglin swallowed back shock and anger. She drew a shaky breath, raised her chin and forced out a winsome smile. "I'll take the note to Feylie's and be measured?"
The madam's icy stare regarded her over the poised tip of the quill. "No, girl. You won't." She sighed in reproach. "Do you take me for an idiot?" A crisp snap of her fingers summoned Quincat.
The side door opened. A heavy tread entered. Meiglin bolted, too late. Quincat's massive hands caught her arms from behind. She had seen the way things went with a girl who fought her fate. Day after day, she would weep and rage behind a barred door, until she became too used and tired to dream, or care about running away.
"Best strip the clothes off that chit right now," the madam instructed her henchman. "There's defiance in her, make no mistake. She'd slip through the eye of a needle, she would, if you leave her the unguarded chance."
Meiglin did not weep. She refused to battle Quincat as he hauled her upstairs. To her worldly eye, the brute seemed to relish her sorry discomfort too much. She ignored the indignity, denied him the piquant satisfaction of a struggle as he did the madam's bidding and confiscated her clothing. Behind the locked door, wrapped up in a stale, musty sheet well used by last night's clients, Meiglin paced in helpless fury. Dread for the future made her sweat and shiver, until her throat felt hardened to glass, that might shatter with screams at a word.
When the soft step approached, and the key finally turned, it was not Quincat come to leer while Feylie's lisping seamstress prodded and mumbled over measurements. The hand at the latch was shaking and frail, fast followed by her mother's breathless whisper.
"Meiglin, hurry! No, girl, no questions! A bawd's life's not for you!" Her mother's touch was clammy with nerves as she bundled her terrified daughter over the threshold. "The door to the pantry's ajar for you, sweetling. There's no choice left. You have to run!"
"Like this?" Meiglin gasped. The sheet fluttered around her bare ankles. The draft cut with cruel chill as she pattered down the back stair. Outside in the alley, heavy snowfall would have rimed the mud into a slurry of glazed ice.
"You daren't stay!" Her mother paused, kicked off velvet slippers, then peeled the sheer, scarlet lace off her shift. "Here's the best I can do for you, child. Have you the courage? You'll need to go as you are."
Meiglin balked, aghast. "What about you? Mother, for this, the madam will—"
"Hush child! That can't matter." Through a rushed and desperate pause, thick with the overpowering musk of cheap scent, her mother hustled Meiglin into her own cast-off garments. The sequined fabric was woefully thin, and the ribbon-laced slippers, too large.
"I'll freeze inside an hour," Meiglin protested, afraid. This bid for escape was no less than stark madness. Why, if a mother cared a straw for her daughter's secure future, had she thought to bear the child of a client?
Her mother arrested her scathing questions; shook her head, to a rustle of curls dulled lusterless from too much henna. "No. Just listen, Meiglin! There are facts you must know, and no time to explain. You are no client's byblow! I was already bearing, do you hear? Married, and only a month from my time when the mayor's rebellion brought our family to ruin. My husband was an old-blood clansman. Egan s'Dieneval. He died at Earle, fighting the Mistwraith at the right hand of his king. I was left a widow, when the mob destroyed Tirans, driven out and hunted as a fugitive. I had no haven to give birth in safety. Not until the madam took me in. Oh, yes, she noticed what my accent could not hide. I had looks enough, then, to cozen her silence. She agreed to ask no questions, even helped to coach my speech. I sold myself in trade. But you were never to be any part of that bargain."
"Clanborn!" Meiglin shuddered, horrified, the last, secure bastion left in her life torn away at one stroke. "You're telling me now, you were clanborn?"
"Yes." Dimness hid her mother's face. Yet the unmasked force of her pride rang through, in crisp diction nothing like the downtrodden lisp she assumed to cajole madam's clients. "That is your true birthright, and your heritage, Meiglin."
"No inheritance at all," Meiglin whispered, shocked. She had never imagined herself to be on the wrong side of that round of bloodletting conflict. Clanborn were hated, even killed out of hand, since the uprising broke the ancient law of the High Kings. "And you say the madam knows? Dharkaron's mercy on us!"
Where the mayors ruled, their zealot factions bid to match the guilds' pledge to offer bounties. Packs of bloody reivers were now offered a rich purse to cut down the remnants of the clan bloodlines. That volatile fact explained all too well why the madam should force Meiglin to brothel service, so young. There would never be retirement, sewing gowns or washing linen, not for such as her mother.
Meiglin wrestled panic. "Now, more than ever, you're worth silver to them, dead."
"We both are." Her mother seized her hand, tugged her onward without mercy. "Can't you see? That's why you have to run, child!"
The madam had no scruples where her steely eye saw profit. She would peddle Meiglin's maiden assets for as long as eager clients paid to bed her for a premium. Once the novelty paled, the madam would sell out. Mother and child would inevitably be thrown to the swords of the mayor's headhunters.
"Get out of here and live!" Urgent fingers pressed Meiglin across the darkened pantry. "Go! Hurry, child! Egan s'Dieneval. Remember your lineage! Before everything else, that name matters."
Upstairs, Quincat's bellow showed the unlocked bedroom had been discovered.
"Go, Meiglin!" Weeping bitter tears, the doomed mother shoved her daughter through the doorway, into the cutting winter wind. "Leave Durn and never look back."
Meiglin fled.
She lost the slippers straightaway, their sodden cloth sucked off by the muddy slush clogging the street. Since the sheet made her conspicuous, and her narrow, bare prints left a track too easily followed, she snatched the first chance of refuge she found, beneath the loosened tarp of a trade wagon lumbering downhill toward the city gates. Huddled under flapping canvas, bound she knew not where, Meiglin wedged herself between a raw wool bale and a gunny sack of millet, probably hauled to feed the mule teams.
The cold seemed preferable to the butchery that waited if she was overtaken by a bountyman. Meiglin huddled in abject misery, silently cursing the lot that bound her to the mischance of her ancestry. She had no assets, no place to go. Her mother's people were scattered. Their proud history had been reduced to ashes in the turmoil that followed the Mistwraith's invasion, when shouting mobs had rampaged with fire and sword. They had cut down every old blood liegeman they could find, then turned in vengeful fury on their families. The clans' steadfast charge, to stand as liaison between humankind's needs and the world's ancient mysteries, had devolved into persecution and conflict. The hunted survivors hid deep in the wilds. Their armed scouts roved the land like secretive shadows, still defending the ground the old centaur guardians had forbidden to the ways of outsiders. A girl with no more to her name than a bed sheet would die of exposure, searching the hills, if she was not shot down by an arrow for trespass upon proscribed territory.
Despondent and alone, Meiglin suffered the insidious cold. Her blanched hands and aching feet slowly went numb. She slipped at length into somnolent grayness, overcome by a trance state of dreams that hurled her beyond the dimension of ordinary nightmare. The oddity had happened before; but never under the frightening, new knowledge that she sprang from a bloodline that would carry arcane gifts.
The visions came on, too fierce to deny, their brilliance stark and unsettling: of the scouring mists that had invaded through Southgate, and swallowed the fall of clean sunlight. As though past events revisited in review, she watched the rising that unseated the High Kings erupt in slaughter and flames. Then the Mistwraith's dank fog masked the horrors in white. Drifting like flotsam in the coils of the future, Meiglin looked down on a scene by a riverbank, where a gray-haired man wearing the crown colors of Shand lay in gasping extremity. A young man rode up, and leaped off his horse, crying aloud in his anguish. The man, who was mentor, died in his arms. Consumed by fierce grief, the boy reached to take the jeweled circlet from the brow of the corpse.
"Don't!" Meiglin cried.
Though her protest was made in the fabric of dream, the boy started and glanced up. For a stopped second, their eyes met and held, joined in the half world of mystery. He was young: as unmarked by life as newly forged steel, but beautiful in the purity of his unwritten potential.
"Don't." Meiglin whispered. Her beating heart seemed to freeze as she sensed the boy's determined fate. "You will meet your death."
He smiled, brash youth. "I must. What hope can survive if the last of the sunlight is lost to the Mistwraith's conquest?"
Time unfroze. His impetuous fingers closed over the circlet, and the dream narrowed in, vibrant as a shout that should have held power to rock the seat of the world.
Like a stone, Meiglin plummeted. Her awareness swooped toward the stream bank, as though the trapped cry of her mind and will could sever the spun strand of tragedy.
"Don't! You must not!"
Yet the choice had been made. Though Meiglin wept, the doomed prince faded beyond reach.
Fog closed, choking white. Tears of sorrow fell on a country swathed in lead. The boy would die, his brave sacrifice futile. The Mistwraith would seize its fell triumph. Meiglin cupped the drowned world between her two hands, her denial a silent shout wrenched from the dreaming core of her spirit.
Then the vision that gripped her snapped into light. She beheld the face of another old man, this one no king, but a creature mantled in power, with eyes that pierced time with a falcon's intensity, and perception that flayed her worth down to a word.
"S'Dieneval?"
He added a phrase in the Paravian tongue that Meiglin lacked learning to translate. But the mysteries answered. The shackling weight that constricted her chest burst and hurled her back into herself. . . .
Meiglin opened her eyes, choking on hot milk. The round face of a farm wife hovered above, set against a beamed wooden ceiling. Off to her left, a man finished a rambling dialogue in the lazy drawl of the southcoast.
" . . . don't know where along the route I picked her up," he ended, apologetic. "Found her huddled in the wagon under the tarps, shivering like a kit fox. If I'd left her, she'd have died of the cold, understand?"
"She's a pretty poppet," murmured the farm wife. Bowl and spoon clutched in her beefy hands, she paused for a moment to admire. "Such beautiful, sad eyes."
"Pretty enough to raise unwholesome trouble!" snapped a gruffer man, country bred, and likely the master of the croft. "And she's not sad enough to cry honest tears. Her sort know too well how to use winsome looks. It's her stock in trade to take advantage."
"She's only a child!" the woman said, shocked.
The crofter stayed adamant. "No child walks the streets clad in nothing but lace. Damn well, we can't harbor a sly, depraved creature. Not one with her habits. She'll have the boys fighting to try her shameless favors, and turn their minds for the worse."
The drover retreated, hands raised in consternation. "My caravan can't keep her, not with the outriders bored enough to dally, and randy as a pack of spring bulls. Turn the tart out on the road as you will, but for pity, at least see her off with a blanket."
Meiglin drew breath between chattering teeth. "I haven't, at least, there wasn't—" She colored, despite the chills that threatened to rattle her bones. "Not yet," she insisted lamely. "That's why I ran away."
"Well, she isn't any stranger to hard work!" snapped the wife. "Did you see? Her poor hands are chapped! T'would take a heart of stone to send a mouse out in this weather, with the wind blowing in another stormfront!"
"I can work," Meiglin whispered. "Sweep floors. Wash laundry. Even cook, a little. Send me on, if you must. Just, please, don't drag me back to Durn."
The farm wife's face softened. "How old are you, child?"
Meiglin told her.
In the blistering explosion of argument that followed, she was granted the chance for employment at a cousin's remote, wayside inn.
"It's honest work, child," the farm wife warned. "The tavern isn't fancy. It was built, with due permission, at the edge of the black desert, where it's hard to keep on decent help. The house draws from a well that's declared sacred ground. The tribefolk who tend the site won't tolerate wanton behavior. Not of any kind. The law of their goddess forbids the practice of whoring as unclean."
The crofter just bludgeoned into submission added his own brutal caution. "Those desertfolk aren't to be trifled with, girl. They can skewer a rat at eighty paces with their darts. Tawbas' inn was raised on the ruined foundation left by the last fool, who thought to let the drovers toss his wenches. We'll send you south with a cloak and decent clothes. But don't beg for pity from my kinsman should you stray. Get yourself caught in the hayloft with the grooms, Tawbas will be quick to turn you out. Then it's the waterfront brothels at Innish, for such as you, and belike an early grave at the fist of some drunken galleyman."
Grateful for the upright chance of reprieve, Meiglin took work for a servant's upkeep in the tavern amid the rolling, dark sands of Sanpashir. She swept floors, made beds, boiled linen and did a drudge's chores in the kitchen through the tempestuous years that Tawbas, in his forthright, southland drawl, took to calling the trouble times.
For the Mistwraith that smothered the lands to the west continued its inexorable invasion. The threat no longer seemed distant, or unreal, as inch by hard-fought inch, the northern kingdoms were lost. When the incursion rolled south and encroached on Melhalla, its creeping menace darkened even casual conversation. The looming possibility of a world lost to sunlight cast a pall of gloom over the future. The silk caravans moving from Atchaz to Innish brought news of the relentless defeats. In desperate increments, despite arcane help, the war-tattered remnants of Athera's defenders lost ground.
"The line's broken at Silvermarsh," a south bound merchant announced, wetting his parched throat with ale. "If we're going to grow lean when the harvest is stunted, I say the mayors did right to expunge the old law. A man can't have a pack of murdering clansmen gainsay his right to hunt game inside the free wilds. The farmers will have to plow up new fields. How else can they feed a family?"
"That's a slippery slope to tread," Tawbas said, arms folded over his polishing rag as he leaned on the edge of the bar. "Old law wasn't written for a Sorcerer's whimsy." Desertfolk insisted there was substance to the claim that the land's bounty increased with the unicorns. If their elders spoke truth, the charge given to the clans was not an arbitrary duty, born of high-handed arrogance. "A good deal worse than mist could blight our human fortune, if the ground the old law kept sacrosanct is given to the axe and the plow."
"Perhaps." The mule drover shrugged. "But a cousin of mine herds sheep out in Vastmark. He's said no Paravians have migrated for years. Spring's come and gone, with no trace of a unicorn's track in the hills. Now, I've heard the uncanny creatures will vanish under the mist. Could be that's a fact, and the clanblood won't admit they've outlived their forefathers' purpose. I say the world's changed, and the mayors should be thanked. They'd do well to exterminate the whole stubborn breed, and open the land for prosperity."
Meiglin filled emptied tankards, quiet as a cat, while the fierce debate swirled around her. The greater trials of town politics were none of her affair. Sun still shone on the sands of Sanpashir. Her ancestry was not known to anyone. She lived each day as it came, unconcerned whether the scourge of the Mistwraith edged farther south, or the ancient magic waned from the countryside. Townborn, town raised, she had no incentive to pursue the arcane obligations of her ancestry. Nor was her parentage safe to disclose. Year after year, the new order waged its feud with ever more murderous ferocity.
Tawbas weathered the turmoil with his usual stoic tolerance, serving all travelers with an even hand, and asking no prying questions. More than once, Meiglin found herself pouring beer for clan survivors who still patrolled the borders of the wilds. They came by night, mantled in dusty, rough clothes, and bearing war-sharpened steel in concealment. They drew water from the well and bartered pelts for supplies in hurried, brisk spoken transactions. As silently they left, hampered in their charge to keep the proscribed lands free of violation.
Here, the blood price that hounded them was still a whispered threat. The tavern was bound under the desert tribes' law. Townsmen shunned the cruel sun and the desolate wastes. They also feared the dartmen, who were ever quick to anger, if a caravan strayed from the trade road.
Anonymously hidden as each season turned, Meiglin grew into striking beauty. Her skin tanned under Sanpashir's harsh sun, rich contrast to her violet eyes and her glossy, seal-brown hair. Wisely, she kept such attributes masked. She wore shapeless clothes and a linen head cloth when she served beer in the taproom. Her vivid smile hidden, she worked honestly and well, slapping off the smitten groping of the drovers, and refusing the tipsy blandishments of the merchants who tried to bedazzle her with their flashy rings. She tended the hens and cracked corn for the mule teams, grateful to stay safely in obscurity.
Yet as time passed, the fey talent born into her heritage refused to keep nondescript silence. Meiglin tossed, sleepless, through each windy spring, as if her blood knew when the centaur guardians escorted the dwindled herds of unicorns through the patterns of their seasonal migration. Her gifts stayed unschooled. No wise one lay at hand to guide the stirrings of her instinct. She had sighted dreams and visions, and not just during hallows, when the ancient rites were danced at the well to raise up the fire of the mysteries. Since she made no complaint, no one troubled to take notice when she arose, hollow-eyed in the morning. She drew water, dawn and dusk, from the mud-brick well, warned by a prickle of prescient gooseflesh when the secretive dartmen watched her out of the shadows.
Their surveillance was so light, they left only tracks, swiftly erased by the winds. Meiglin held no fear of their furtive presence. She had always been diligent, heeding the sanctions that granted Tawbas his right to maintain the tavern. She was never tempted to venture outside after midnight, when the tribefolk gathered to honor their goddess under the change of the moon. Content in her place, she masked her unease when the old women appeared, arrived without sound at her back.
Always, she bowed with her head turned, respectful. Their kind considered a stare rank impertinence. At first, Meiglin brashly offered them help, refilling their goatskin flasks. They smiled, veils lifted, their refusal soft spoken. "Anshlien'ya," they called her, the archaic word for dawn. The nuance of their dialect was lost upon Meiglin. She smiled back and never realized the idiom meant hope.
Always, she presumed the phrase was a blessing, spoken in casual courtesy. A Sorcerer, perhaps, might have told her the truth, that Sanpashir's tribes revered silence. They never addressed anyone, unless their words were of vital importance.
The tavern kept Meiglin too busy for curiosity. As the only respite within two days' ride, the taproom served all comers. Sacred ground demanded that none be turned away. Meiglin poured beer and baked waybread for the travelers. She listened, entranced, to more than one conversation held in the lilted cadence of the old Paravian language. Where such speakers went, and on what obscure business, she was too prudent to ask. She knew nothing of the tongue used for centuries by her forebears, which was a clear blessing. The next hour, like as not, she could be serving a rowdy band of headhunters, seeking trophy scalps for their saddle cloths. Such men rode through increasingly often, as the mayors grew fat from their conquest.
Two trappers who boasted they had poached for game within the free wilds claimed the boldest of the killers had no mercy. "They'll ride down bearing women, even children." Armed parties now scoured deep into the hills to claim the reward for murdered clansmen.
"Greedy fools, every one of them," snapped a merchant dining at the next trestle. "One encounter with the old races, they're sure to go mad."
When the trappers scoffed, the fellow spoke of his grand-uncle. "He camped under a standing stone once, when the unicorns ran under moonlight. Turned him witless in a day. His wife had to spoon feed the wretch till he died, and change his breeches each time he pissed himself. You ask me, the world's mysteries are best left alone. Let the clanborn skulk as they will in the wilds. It's a miserable life their kind lead, anyway, with their witch blood bred to stand uncanny powers, and that curse on the seed of their children."
"I don't fear madness," the trapper declared. His burly companion shrugged also. "The sunchildren are gone out of Selkwood, as well as the centaurs who warded the forest. What cause is left for the clans to gainsay our right to hunt as we wish? We'll pay tax for their head price until they back down, and leave us the run of the country."
For as spring came round again, the rumors agreed. Under the Mistwraith's encroaching shadow, the ancient mysteries appeared to be fading. Paravian presence was increasingly scarce. Town bounties were taking their reiving toll, with the headhunters unafraid to ride out in force, and no centaur guardians to challenge their trespass.
For the first time, in Sanpashir, clan presence was suppressed. The scouts ceased treating with the inn for provisions. They seldom ventured into the open, even to draw from the well. One star-strewn nightfall, on a trip to haul water, Meiglin encountered a red-haired scout wearing a traditional clan braid. The dusk bolstered her courage. For the first time, curiosity overcame her better sense. She ventured to ask after the name that was all her mother had left her.
"He was a friend of my parents," she explained, stumbling over the lie as the scout turned a piercing glance upon her.
"Egan Teir's'Dieneval, caithdein e'an?" the clan woman inquired with raised eyebrows. She continued, still speaking in fluent Paravian.
Meiglin forced an awkward smile into a silence of hanging expectancy. "I never studied the ancient tongue," she confessed at self-conscious length.
"No?" The scout shrugged, not offended. "Townborn were you, yes? Or of an outbred clan descent, but too timid to try initiation?" Disinclined to linger for a tiresome explanation, the woman capped her brimming flask. "Then the name and the history of s'Dieneval are no proper business for your ears, I should think."
"Are there kinfolk?" Meiglin pressed.
The scout paused. Her hands hovered forbiddingly close to her weapons, and her weathered features turned grim. "None alive," she admitted, impatient. "If your parents weren't told, the last child of that lineage was slaughtered by the mob that savaged Tirans."
"I didn't know. I'm sorry." Meiglin bent to the task of filling her bucket yoke, then trudged the worn path to the tavern. No kin remained living. The knowledge reassured her. Surely no harm would come if the bloodline she carried was abandoned to nameless obscurity.
"Girl, you're mistaken."
Meiglin started in fierce surprise. An ancient desertman barred her way, his erect, scarecrow figure shrouded in layers of sun-faded robes. His eyes were obsidian, and his face, crinkled leather, and his approach had been eerily soundless. To further her upset, the yoke buckets swung at her jolted stop, and slopped water into the sand.
"Forgive," she murmured, appalled and afraid. The way of the tribes held such waste as a desecration. "Old one, I meant no wrong in your eyes."
"My eyes saw no wrong," the old man stated. The staccato emphasis of his native dialect came measured, and carefully dignified. "A wrong can be forgiven and righted. Yet the waste of a birth gift is not the same." His regard showed reproach. "Daughter," he chided, "Shroud a light in a blanket, it must start a fire. Your dreams will draw notice. Think carefully what you'll do when your talent fully awakens."
Meiglin edged back in denial. "My dreams are just nightmares."
"Ah. And are they, in fact?" The old man did not move aside. He bent down, scooped up the dollop of damp sand and cupped it between seamed brown fingers. "Water speaks truth, child. Here, perhaps, a thorn bush might sprout, that could not have grown but for carelessness. Yet for want of this moisture, somewhere else, another useful plant withers. A seed bears no harvest, and a child, perhaps, starves for the lack of its sustenance. That death in turn may become the one thing that brings on the ruin of a tribe. Worse than that, maybe, if the lost child's destiny was fated. The waste of that life might perhaps come to open the rift that unravels the world."
"Riddles." Meiglin sighed with cautious respect. "I don't understand a word of them."
"You will." The elder restored the damp earth with calm reverence. "Now, like spilled water, your bounty could fall anywhere. When what you are can no longer be masked, you will sprout the seed of its making. But then, heed me, daughter. The crop will be sown, and the choices you have will be few."
Meiglin returned to her duties, distressed. If her bloodline was fated, whom could she ask? Casual questions had become much too dangerous, with the least breath of gossip concerning the clans pursued by the mayors' informants.
Nor could she ponder the desertman's warning. Already the taproom was packed to the rafters with three caravans southbound from Atchaz. Merchants jammed the upstairs, two to a bed, with their dusty assemblage of muleteers and armed outriders grown boisterous with strong beer and boredom. The press and the noise forced the late courier bound for Innish to snatch supper in the inn's kitchen.
Meiglin overheard his ill news, while scouring the stacks of used crockery.
"Oh, you'll see business, come summer," the lean fellow told Tawbas, who had seized respite from the uproarious singing to sit smoking his squat pipe at the trestle. "More than you wish for, no doubt."
The innkeeper grunted. "Prosperity's no bad thing to wish for. But in summer? No civilized man boils his brains in Sanpashir. Not unless he's clanborn, and hunted, or a madman driven by devils."
"Devils indeed," the courier confided. Over the course of his hurried meal, he broke his shattering ill news. The defenders holding the Mistwraith in check had finally broken, at Spire. "Oh yes, there were deaths, a right tragic toll of them." He went on, though Tawbas' complaisant disposition was unlikely to mourn for the fallen. "Shand's liegemen foundered while fording the Ettin, which raged in the throes of spring flood. The High King was lost, and the next heir as well. The survivors are calling the new muster at Firstmark, and trying against hope to regroup. And of course, the Fellowship Sorcerers have summoned the next crown successor from Alland."
"That one better travel more guarded than bullion," Tawbas ventured across a strained pause. His cantankerous pipe had put itself out. Provoked by more than his usual irritation, he fussed over the steps to relight it. "The outpost at Ganish has turned for the mayors. Surely you knew? Best if you don't speak so freely of king's heirs. Desert law rules the road through these wastes, but fanatics still persecute clanblood. I can't risk my inn to vigilante justice. More than one man's had his business burned down for sympathy toward the wrong faction."
"That's why I can't stay," the courier confessed, and the discussion devolved into cut-throat haggling over the cost of a remount.
Meiglin scrubbed pots, chilled by dread thoughts. The sorrow seemed inevitable, that the sun shining over Sanpashir's bleak sands could be lost before summer solstice. If defenses at Firstmark could not be restored, the scourge that had swallowed the rest of the continent might strike through and drown all the world. The last patch of open sky would be gone. Even the southern reaches of Shand would become choked under fog that no Sorcerer's resource might lift.
That night, Meiglin dreamed. Blank billows of mist closed with strangling force, until she choked under a featureless shroud that muffled the landscape in white. Sunless, the greening earth languished. Crops failed, dusted with blight. Animals birthed stillborn offspring. On land and sea, the vigor of life waned away, until the weal of the world was left desolate.
"No!" Meiglin's cry raised a spurt of bright flame, a denouncement that sheared the dank quiet. When the cruel fog tightened its grip in response, she shouted again, and a third time sealed her denial. Horror for all of the land's spoiled grace drove her to desperate resistance. She would not give way, or let go of hope, though the whisper of fate insisted the end held no opening for salvation.
"Words carry power, child," a solemn voice answered, rolling thunder across the sere landscape. "Particularly words that are spoken three times, with heart and mind matched in conviction. Such fire as that creates binding magic."
"Who are you?" Meiglin snapped, too wounded to be cowed by the warning spun through her dream.
"I speak with the voice of the Fellowship Sorcerers, whose will shaped the line of your ancestry. S'Dieneval bears the power of prophecy. Beware how you wish, child. The mysteries are dwindled, not vanished from the world. They still tend the living heart of the earth. The last centaur guardian stands watch in Atainia. He will gather the thread of your steadfast desire. Through his hands, and the inherited ties to your bloodline, you could be claimed as the vessel to enact a far greater charge than you realize."
"I don't care!" The passion that moved Meiglin was already raised, and blazed beyond hope of quenching. "Three times spoken, or thrice three hundred, I won't endure a world plunged into darkness."
No more thunder rolled. The wise voice kept its counsel. Meiglin came softly awake in the garret that held her servant's pallet. No light burned but stars. Beyond the dusty panes of the casement, the night hung in suspended stillness. Meiglin drew in a shaken breath, thick with scent of parched sand, a heat brittle and dry as the scalded air over the coals of a forge fire. No breezes stirred. The earth seemed gripped in hush, the eerie hesitation in time that only occurred when the desert tribes' women held rites at the dark of the moon. Meiglin lay wakeful. Folded into that fabric of silence, she let its deep peace bring her ease. Unschooled as she was, she sensed nothing amiss. Nor did she know to look for the errant, sown seed to bear fruit as the moon swelled into full phase.
That day, when it came, began without fanfare. Meiglin fed the hens and raked out the stables. She kneaded the bread, then shouldered the unending task of washing and hanging out bed linens. Noon saw her gathering in the dry sheets, then serving tables in the close shade of the inn's shuttered taproom. Evening came on. The casements were latched back. A pall seemed to smear the northern horizon, perhaps the first harbinger of the dread mist. Tawbas lingered outside while the afterglow faded, afraid he had seen the last sunrise.
"Dust storm," said the outrider who jingled in after dark. "Just that and no more, though the sky you enjoy here abides on its last, borrowed time." The company at his heels was quite large, arrived as the inn usually closed for the night. The hour that had looked to be slow was made busy, with the trestles crowded to capacity. Meiglin poured beer, washed spoons and filled plates, too engrossed to care if the riders seemed closemouthed, with the odd man among them speaking low-voiced Paravian, or calling for food with the snap of clan accents.
"They're king's men," said Tawbas, too uneasy to smoke in the lull, when the taproom finally emptied. Under reddened light, as the cook banked the fires, he divulged perhaps more than was wise. "It's the crowned heir of Shand, riding to battle the Mistwraith, and not wanting to draw undue notice. He'll take water and provisions and leave before dawn, and not fare by way of the trade road."
"Ah, then they did come cross country?" said the cook, seated at last with her aching feet propped on the settle.
Tawbas nodded. "From the forest of Alland." Which explained why his inn had been visited unawares. No traffic moved between Atchaz and Innish, that the fast-riding couriers did not mark beforehand. "Meiglin," he added, "before you retire, please take the rind of leftover cheese and some bread and ale for the horse master's groom in the stable."
Meiglin fetched out the victuals. Willing to spare the exhausted cook, though too worn to retie her loose hair, she carried the tray through the open, back door, into the moon-washed yard.
The groom her errand charged her to find was not asleep in the hayloft. He had been at the well, stripped down for washing, when the rites of the tribes had displaced him. Lacking a towel, he had lingered outside for the winds to scour him dry. His soaked hair hung in an uncombed tangle. The soiled clothes he had intended to rinse still trailed from nonchalant fingers. He was gazing over the moon-flooded sands, too enthralled by the peace of the open sky to notice he had an observer. There, Meiglin beheld his naked form, bewitched herself by his beauty.
He was clanborn, to judge by the length of his hair, crimped in ripples from their custom of braiding. A creature just barely grown into his manhood, with his broadened shoulders sculpted with muscle, and his hips still boyishly slender. Meiglin froze between steps, the breath caught in her throat. Despite the shocked blush flaming her cheeks, she was unable to stop herself staring.
The inadvertent chink of a tankard betrayed her. The boy turned, all male, his features unveiled by the moonlight. Meiglin cried out with stunned recognition. Dreams had shown her that face, as well as the fate that must darken the course of the future.
"Don't go!" she blurted.
"You've seen me," he accused, as startled as she to discover himself under scrutiny. "You shouldn't. The Fellowship Sorcerers cast a glamour."
Meiglin's reply was unwontedly tart. "You're a bit hard to miss, are you not, in plain sight? And no groom as well, despite your claim to the contrary."
His eyebrows went up. "Then you know who I am?" He glanced, chagrinned, at the clothes in his fingers, too proud to retreat in embarrassment. "The glamour concealed me from everyone else. Are you warded, or just uncommonly fey?"
"I don't carry an amulet." Meiglin lingered, bereft of good sense, just as uselessly unable to recover the courtesy to turn away from the sight of him. His blue eyes held the same brash glint she recalled, touched silver under the moon.
"Don't go," she repeated. "I beg of you, don't. No good will come of your sacrifice."
His attentive gaze sharpened, as though, just that moment, he saw her for what she was. He strode forward. Breeches and shirt dropped from his heedless fingers, with only the tray's width between them. "If you're prophet enough to know who I am, then you'll see why I must go forward."
Meiglin shook her head. "I know nothing," she blurted, "except for your death, should you choose this road's bitter turning."
He regarded her, torn though by his anguish. "I can't go into exile through Westgate! Oh, the other kings' heirs went tamely enough. The Sorcerers were adamant that each royal bloodline should be secured in safety. Yet was I not born, except to stand guard for the soil under my feet? What life could I live, forsaking this ground, and fleeing the charge of my heritage? I am not going to run. This is my place! My crown oath of protection shall not be forsworn while the Mistwraith claims final triumph."
"Don't go," Meiglin begged, wide awake to the peril of words that were spoken thrice over. Yet the same stubborn hope that held him in denial kept her rooted until that fateful third time, he refused.
She dropped the tray. It fell with a crash of smashed crockery at her feet. Before she could bend, or exclaim in dismay, she found herself swept headlong into his arms.
"You'll cut yourself," he murmured in startled distress.
She opened her mouth, intending to chide. His concern was not worth foolish gallantry. Instead, she found herself meeting his kiss. Then his fingers captured the rich fall of her hair. He laid claim to her, there, while the moon shone down upon their twined forms and knotted a binding enchantment. He had silken, clean skin and a stag's rugged strength. The impetuous vitality behind his aware touch left Meiglin no breath for refusal. The spontaneous alchemy wrought by his embrace awoke her untapped, woman's passion.
He came to himself first, pulled back in dismay, and attempted a sensible apology. "Forgive me. You're beautiful. It's my bullish nature, charging ahead without manners. Never mind the broken plates. I'll pick up the mess. Go safely inside and forget me."
Meiglin looked into those moon-touched, clear eyes, possessed as though she was dreaming. Before he could loosen his grip, or stand off, she felt the cold wind from the future blow through, and scatter all prudence before it. "I won't go. Not inside. If the moon and the stars are as precious as that, let the Mistwraith not triumph, at least on this night." Whole hearted, she invited his eager heat. Her hands stroked his living, naked flesh, until she felt his response trample reason.
The warm sands of Sanpashir cradled their lovemaking through that night of wild abandon. They lay, oblivious to all but each other, while the desert tribes' women chanted completion, and danced the rites of full moon at the well.
By sunrise, he was gone, and with him, the name that Meiglin had neglected to ask of him. The throbbing, sweet ache of shared pleasure stayed with her, and a memory as rich as fine wine. That was all, so she thought; her gift nothing more than a comfort exchanged before his demise overtook him.
Except her monthly courses delayed, and then, never came. The queasy stomach that distressed her each morning soon raised the cook's ribald comment.
"Better cozen a wealthy merchant, my dear. A fat one who's older, and bedazzled enough to take you on as a mistress. Or else, sure's frost, the minute you're showing, Tawbas is bound to dismiss you. It's tribal law, did you not understand? The sacred ground of the spring cannot be defiled by lewd acts that offend their barbaric goddess."
Meiglin scrubbed pots, too wretched to argue. The child she carried could not be unmade. More than lust had arranged its conception. Nonetheless, the shame scalded. The uncanny power invoked through her dreams had dealt her an unkindly quandary. Now she faced the selfsame ruin that had undone her mother. The well-meant advice of the cook was no option. Meiglin could not bear the lie, to dizzy some gullible merchant with flirting kisses and flattery. The uglier prospect ran her blood cold, that she might be forced to seek haven at Innish, and earn living wage as a harlot. Though her agonized thoughts showed no better alternative, she refused to consider the herbal decoction the whores used to force an abortion. Bound by full knowledge of what she had done, she could not evade the harsh consequence. The child she harbored was a doomed father's legacy, sown under the shadow of prophecy.
Distraught with dread for her reckoning with Tawbas, Meiglin skulked like a ghost. She kept her head down, and finished the day's chores, one wearing week after the next.
When she went to the well, the desertfolk watched her. Their wise eyes surely read the fact she was bearing long before the first bulge strained her waistline. Once, a wizened matriarch grasped at her sleeve and gave warning in broken dialect.
"Dearie, the spirit you carry makes herself heard. She very well could draw the wrong sort of notice, with our world the more sorrowful for it."
Meiglin fled, her buckets abandoned. No voluminous apron or unbelted shift could shelter her for much longer. Once Tawbas noticed, she would be turned out, with no place to go, and no family name to grant her a stay of protection.
Yet before that momentous crisis could break, the unborn child herself attracted the eyes of an outside awareness. A party of three Koriani enchantresses ventured into Sanpashir, cloaked head to foot in their rich purple mantles, and the secrecy of their order. They traveled without escort, and ate in the common room, all to themselves in one corner. Meiglin felt their rapt gaze as she swept and fetched soup. Even through walls, she was made aware of their piercing, unnatural interest. Retreat to the stable failed to shake their spelled touch. These women with their uncanny arts had not visited the tavern by chance.
Meiglin shed tears in a mare's dusty mane, unable to shake looming dread. Power had found her. The gifts of her lineage were too brilliant to mask, and her straits left her desperately vulnerable.
Through the blinding heat of the late afternoon, the elder enchantress drew Tawbas aside and tried to buy Meiglin's service.
By then, Meiglin kneaded fresh dough in the kitchen. She heard the low-voiced exchange nonetheless, caught up in somnolent reverie.
"Your serving girl has fey blood, were you made aware when you took her in?" The senior with the red bands of rank on her sleeves went on to disclose the bald truth. "She dreams with the voice of a prophet."
Tawbas had not known. Nor was he at ease to find he had sheltered a clan foundling with errant talent.
The old woman conferred amid a rustle of silk robes. "We can pay, and quite well, for the privilege of taking the chit into Koriani fosterage."
Plainspoken Tawbas seemed lost for words, but not to the point of grasping the offer dishonestly. "She's not my kin, but only a hireling. In fairness, Meiglin should speak for herself."
Summoned forthwith, and granted the courtesy of a private room for the interview, Meiglin stood under the austere scrutiny of the sisterhood of enchantresses. The women measured her from under their hoods with the covetous interest of vultures.
They wasted no breath. "Your child will be born a mage-gifted girl. Come with us, take an initiate's oath with our order, and you can bear her with honor, in safety."
"And then?" Meiglin asked, uncertain and frightened. "What would become of us, after?"
The enchantresses stirred, as though touched by a breeze. The youngest of them offered answer. "Your daughter would be raised by the order, with all of her gifts given nurture. You are past the age to be trained to our arts, a sad loss, but not beyond salvage. Your life as a dedicate would be well spent in charitable service to humanity."
Meiglin met those unswerving, stony eyes, and found them darkened with secrets. "What aren't you telling me?"
"Initiates cannot be mothers," their senior admitted with arid impatience. "Our vows require us to renounce ties to family. Join us, and you and your child will never want. But your lives, by our custom, must be separate."
Ripped by formless doubt, as inflamed by headstrong will as she had been on the night she lay wanton under the moonlight, Meiglin straightened. "No. Keep your fee. I'll take my chances with Tawbas."
"He must turn you out," the crone warned, set back and sharply displeased. "Our scryers have already foreseen that future. It's a miserable, short life in the brothels of Innish, and no lot to inflict on a daughter who's sure to inherit the gifts of your bloodline."
"No," Meiglin stated, and then, "no," again, to seal her adamant rejection.
The Koriathain stood. Before they could move, or lock the closed door, Meiglin ducked past, her heart pounding. She would not turn back. The mere thought scared her white. She had experienced such jagged panic before: the same avarice had glittered in the eyes of the madam who had sold out her mother to bountymen.
"Girl!" snapped the cook, as Meiglin bolted through the kitchen. "Are you brainless? Would you spit in contempt at the only chance you'll ever have at salvation?"
"I'll not live in oath-bound confinement!" Meiglin plunged through the side door, clambered over the midden, and fled at reckless speed across the baked earth of the hen yard. She slammed the wicket gate, wrung breathless as the sun blazed down on her uncovered head, and her composure finally shattered.
She stumbled, blindly sobbing, and collided headfirst into the arms of a stranger.
"You've no wish to take vows as a Koriani witch? Truly, my colleagues thought you might not." The old man smelled of wild herbs and wood smoke, as though he had slept in his robes by a fire out in the open. His manner reflected astringent delight as he set her back on her feet. "If you like, we could make that the grounds for a friendly conversation."
Meiglin gasped. Released from a touch of such subtlety, she scarcely felt discomposed, she blotted her eyes, and regarded the being who addressed her with wry invitation.
"That depends on what you want." She raked tumbled hair from her face, unsettled enough to stay wary.
"Have I acted disreputable?" The old man looked chagrinned. "In strict fact, young mistress, your will binds mine. Any words we exchange depend on what you want, lastborn daughter of s'Dieneval."
Struck still, Meiglin stared. "Who are you?" she whispered. But the uncanny reach of his presence spoke for him. Without asking, she knew: this was no desert elder before her, although his brown, crinkled skin and salt hair lent him the same air of earth-chiseled dignity. His clothes were a tinker's, loomed from faded wool, and the lavender-gray mantle rolled on his back seemed to hold his scanty possessions. Nonetheless, he was no feckless wanderer. Meiglin's skin prickled before the awareness that those quiet, pale eyes looked straight through her.
Here stood living power, a force of pent stillness masked over in gentleness that could, if it moved, shift the world.
"You come from the Fellowship," Meiglin said in blanched shock.
The Sorcerer raised amused eyebrows. "Did you expect less?" His eyes surveyed her, thoughtful, their tawny depths mild as sunlight struck through the shallows of a brook. "We are our own emissaries. As you wish, you may call me Ciladis."
Meiglin measured that statement, still taken aback by his unprepossessing appearance. Fellowship Sorcerers had made the first kings, were the power behind the compact that bound the clan forefathers into Paravian service. The blood heritage she had refused to acknowledge could not be evaded before such as he.
Meiglin stood dumbstruck, scarcely able to think.
Still gentle, he broke the silence for her. "Shall I give you the truth that the witches withheld? You will give birth to the child of a prophecy. In sorrow, I must tell you, the choice upholding that burden is great. Already, your unborn daughter is fatherless."
As though the firm ground had dissolved underfoot, Meiglin trembled, the pain a bright arrow struck through her. The name of the boy she had loved had not mattered. One night, he had touched her. Now, all her days, her sorrow must endure, a grief that would never be partnered. "He's lost so soon?"
The Sorcerer's hands caught and steadied her, then guided her unbalanced steps toward the shade. "Last night, he passed over. Your dream did not lie. Beside you, my Fellowship mourns for him."
Meiglin permitted herself to be set down on the stone wall that cut the stiff breeze off the desert. "The Mistwraith will triumph," she whispered, bereft.
The Sorcerer could not change that desolate fact. "Yet even defeat does not mean we are lost. The future could hold a last chance of reprieve, one spark upon which to build hope. The royal lineage of Shand is not ended. Because of your courage, a successor remains. She's the daughter you're carrying, Meiglin."
Hands closed over the swell of her womb, Meiglin found herself desperately shaking.
Ciladis' sure fingers laced over her own. "Here." His clasp affirmed what she had known all along, that this one precious life could become the lynchpin that hung the world's destiny.
"There's more," said the Sorcerer, as though his quizzical gaze tracked her thoughts. "Your child also bears the blood of s'Dieneval, a line that has served at the right hand of kings for more than a thousand years. That's a rather hair-raising legacy. In fact, she's twice endowed with precocious talent, a fix that could drive my six colleagues to fits, and bedevil her future descendents."
His irreverent humor sparked Meiglin to laughter. "You're warning me she'll be a trial to raise?"
Ciladis still chuckled. "Very. Does that knowledge please you? It should. I have come, because as the mother of royalty, you're entitled to ask for my help."
The words, foreordained, ripped through Meiglin like storm. "I would do anything, all that you ask, to deny the Mistwraith its conquest. Under such a binding, this child was conceived. I will name her Dari when she is born. Now tell me the fate that is best for her."
The Sorcerer smiled with forthright relief. "Dari s'Ahelas she must become, if you grant your consent to acknowledge her paternal birthright. Raise her in love, Meiglin. The Fellowship will provide you the means. If, when the time comes, you are still sincere, your daughter must be offered the path her wayward father rejected."
"Exile through Westgate?"
Ciladis nodded. "For safety's sake. If she chooses to go, if she shoulders the weight of her royal heritage, she must make her way in free will."
"She will go," Meiglin whispered. The tears burned her lids and spilled over again, for a love she had held for one moment, and lost. "Had her father done the same, I would never have lain with him, and he would still be alive."
The Sorcerer raised a fingertip to her brow, testing, that light touch all he needed be reassured of her steadfast commitment. "Meiglin," he stated. "Your courage is blessed. Did you know, your true heart may yet forge the path that will hold the light for the future?"