anything? Besides, she was already well used. You will have a grandchild to play with and let us be plain: I don’t mean tossing on one knee. How are they, by the way? Our wretched spawn?’
‘If they had a fourth sister she would be called Venom,’ Draconus replied. ‘As it is, alas, they have no need for a fourth sister.’
‘Three memories of pain. That is all I have of them. Will you visit his mother, then?’
‘No.’
‘You and I, Draconus, we are cruel in love. I wager Mother Dark is yet to discover that.’
‘We shall not make love tonight, Olar Ethil.’
She laughed harshly against the sting of those words. ‘A relief, Draconus. Three pains are enough for me.’
‘Old Man says… the next village.’
‘And then?’
He sighed. ‘I shall send the others back and ride on to the Tower of Hate.’
‘Your son?’
‘He shall ride with me. I believe his tutor left him with gifts for the Lord of Hate.’
‘They will be ill received, I predict. Does the boy return to Kharkanas with you?’
‘He cannot, and the means with which I shall hasten that journey are for me and Calaras and none other.’
‘Then he knows nothing.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Draconus, must all your seeds be errant? Left to grow wild, for ever untamed? Our daughters will be the death of you — you keep them too close, smothered by your neglect. It is no wonder they are venomous.’
‘Perhaps,’ he admitted. ‘I have no answer to my children. All of myself that I see in them is but cause for concern, and I am left wondering why parents give to their children so freely their flaws, yet not their virtues.’
She shrugged. ‘We are all misers with what we believe we have earned, Draconus.’
He reached to her and rested his hand upon her shoulder, and that touch sent a tremble through her. ‘You wear your weight well, Olar Ethil.’
‘If you mean my fat then I call you a liar.’
‘I did not mean your fat.’
After a moment she shook her head. ‘I think not. We are no wiser, Draconus. We fall into the same traps, over and over again. For all that I am fed by my Dog-Runners, I do not understand them; and for all that I nurtured Burn, at my own breast, still I underestimated her. I fear it is that fated disregard that will see the end of me some day.’
‘Will you not see your own death?’
‘I choose not to. Best it come in an instant, unexpected and so not feared. To live in dread of dying is to not live at all. Pray that I am running on my last day, fleet as a hare, my heart filled with fire.’
‘So I shall pray, Olar Ethil. For you.’
‘What of your death, Draconus? You were always one for planning, no matter how many times those plans failed you.’
‘I will,’ he replied, ‘die many deaths.’
‘You have seen them?’
‘No. I have no need for that.’
She looked out upon the water of the spring. Night made it black. Caladan Brood’s sculpture of the Thel Akai still lifted a tormented face to the sky, and would do so for ever. It was aptly named Surrender, and he had forced that sentiment upon the stone itself, refusing all subtlety. She feared Caladan Brood for his honesty and despised him for his talent.
‘I see his mother in his face,’ she said after a time. ‘In his eyes.’
‘Yes.’
‘That must be hard for you.’
‘Yes.’
She pushed her hand into her belly, feeling the skin split, and then the sudden heat of blood and the steady beat of her heart — almost within reach. Instead, her hands closed about the baked clay form of a figurine. She pulled it out. She crouched to wash it clean and then straightened and offered it to Draconus. ‘For your son.’
‘Olar Ethil, he is not yours to protect.’
‘Even so.’
After a moment he nodded and took it from her.
Draconus then squeezed her shoulder and began walking away.
She brushed fingers across her belly but the wound had closed once more. ‘I forgot to ask, what name did you give him?’
Draconus paused and glanced back at her. When he told her, she made a startled sound, and then began laughing.
Arathan slept fitfully, haunted by dreams of the corpses of children floating on a pool of black water. He saw ropes coming from their bellies, as if each one had been tied to something, but those ropes were severed, the ends hacked and shredded. Staring upon this scene, he felt a sudden certainty — in the way of dreams — that the spring, far beneath the surface, spilled out not water but these drowned babies, and the flow was endless.
When he walked out upon them he felt their soft bodies give under his weight, and with each step he grew somehow heavier, until, with a sound like breaking ice, he plunged through Only to awaken, slick with sweat, his chest aching from a breath held overlong against imaginary pressures.
He sat up to see that it was still night. His father was standing near the horses under the strange trees, and it seemed that he stared eastward — into the village or perhaps beyond it. For all Arathan knew, Draconus might be looking upon Kharkanas itself, and the Citadel, and a woman hidden in darkness seated on a throne.
Throne of Night. He settled back into his blanket and stared up at the stars overhead. Their twisted pattern made him think of fevers, when nothing was right with the world and the wrongness was terrifying — tormenting a small boy who was already filled with confused visions of icy cold water and shards of ice and who cried out for a mother who never came and never answered.
He had been that boy once. But even questions had a way of going away, eventually, when no answers were possible. He thought of the gift he would bring to the Lord of Hate, and knew it to be paltry, useless enough to be an insult. But he had nothing else to give.
Raskan believed that Olar Ethil was Arathan’s mother, but he knew that she was not. He had no reason for his certainty; still he did not question it. If anything, the witch reminded him of Malice, when she was younger and fatter — in the days when the girl first walked and was in the habit of wandering everywhere, smiling and singing since she did not yet know the meaning of the name she had been given. Something in their faces, young and old, seemed to be the same.
Bootsteps sounded and he tilted his head to find his father standing over him. After a moment Draconus sank into a crouch. He was holding in his hands a clay figurine, a thing that seemed to cry out sex, in an excess of sensuality that struck Arathan as grotesque. One of the witch’s gifts.
‘For you,’ Draconus said.
Arathan wanted to refuse it. Instead he sat up and took it from his father’s hands.
‘It will be light soon,’ Draconus went on. ‘Today I send back Rint, Feren and Raskan.’
‘Back?’
‘You and I shall ride on, Arathan.’
‘We leave them behind?’
‘They are no longer needed.’
And somewhere ahead, you will leave me behind, too. No longer needed. ‘Father,’ he said, hands clutching the figurine, ‘don’t hurt her.’
‘Hurt who?’
‘Feren,’ he whispered. And the child she carries. My child.
He could see his father’s frown, and how it slowly twisted into a scowl. It was, he realized, never too dark to
