Saluez made a lost, lonely sound. She was not truly there, had not truly heard.
Lutha held her, whispering, “They’re gone, Saluez. The things are gone. Snark knew what to do.”
“Sad,” murmured Saluez. “No baby. So sad.”
“No baby, but a miracle,” said Snark. “Feel your face, Saluez. Feel your face!” She took Saluez’s hand and thrust it almost roughly against her cheek, the one that had been riven so the teeth showed through. “It’s healed, Saluez.”
“It’s a miracle,” said Lutha. “Weaving Woman did it.”
“… not,” breathed Saluez. “Leely….”
“He’s safe,” said Lutha. “He’s fine.”
“Has to be fine,” Saluez whispered. “Nothing else for him….”
Then she shuddered and was gone again, her breast moving gently, her face calm.
“Now that’s normal sleep,” said Snark, wiping her face again. There were bloody streaks on both cheeks. “And she needs it.”
Behind them the lashed box rocked and rustled.
“What do we do with them?” Lutha asked.
“Drown ’em,” said Snark. “I’ll do it.”
“Drown what?” asked Jiacare from among the stones. He came into the entrance, water still beaded on his skin, his hair streaming down his back.
Snark went to him and they muttered together, his voice rising angrily. Lutha went to the stove to heat more water. She was filthy. She smelled to herself like a tidal flat. She resolved to wash her hair, at least, while she kept an eye on Saluez.
The ex-king came to fetch the lashed box, his face hard and furious. He started to speak to Lutha, then merely shook his head, making a gesture of frustration. Lutha gulped, getting hold of herself. Jiacare felt as she herself did. As Snark did. Angry at …what? The songfathers? Much good would that do Saluez. At the Kachis, the Ularians, the whatevers? Much good would that do anybody!
She poured water over her head, surprised that it didn’t go up in steam, then set about soaping and rinsing, interrupting the task whenever Saluez made a sound or changed position. She was stripping the water from her hair when Leelson arrived.
“Leelson …”
“Snark told me,” he muttered as he knelt beside Saluez and closed his eyes. After a long moment he said, “She’s not grieving.”
“I think she knew,” Lutha replied, combing her wet hair with her fingers. “A secret like that can’t be kept. No doubt there were whispers, even on Dinadh. I think she knew, but she didn’t admit it to herself. I’m so thankful Snark was here.”
“She says you were bitten.”
“It’s really only a scratch.” A scratch that burned like fire. She rummaged among the odds and ends, looking for a comb, finding one at the bottom of a personal kit.
“Jiacare and Snark went to drown the things.”
She grunted angrily. Good for them!
He drummed his fingers, a little rat-a-tat to accompany thought. “Do you have any explanation for what happened?”
“To Saluez?”
“No. Snark explained that. I mean with Leely. How he is capable of …doing what he’s done?”
So here they were at last, at the subject of her revelation, at the answer that had come to her, finally, when it was too late to solve anything between her and Leelson!
She put down the comb, folded her hands in her lap, took a deep breath, found a knob of stone over Leelson’s left shoulder, and fixed her eyes on it intently. She would not be bellicose. She would be calm.
“You used to talk to me about your great-great-grand-pop. You told me he was the biochemist to end all bio-chemists, a genius, a savant, a polymath. We both know he went off to investigate the Ularians and ended up on Dinadh. We can assume he saw Kachis on Dinadh, and they raised certain questions in his mind. There was an analyzer among his equipment at Cochim-Mahn. Just as Snark has fed pieces of the shaggies into her analyzer, Bernesohn no doubt fed pieces of Kachis into his. Then Tospia visited him. She went home pregnant. One hundred years later, precisely when he is needed, a boy of Bernesohn’s lineage, your son Leely, turns up with this trait deadly to the Ularians….”
She paused, shifting her eyes to his face. He had gone rigid, eyes staring at nothing, in that moment resembling Limia, feature for feature, his expression of rejection and repudiation exactly like hers. Limia and her damned Fastigat lineage! Limia grieving over Leelson’s posterity! Oh, by the Great Gauphin, Lutha prayed, let me live long enough to tell her!
She couldn’t keep the anger from her voice. “What part of that do you find hard to understand?”
“Impossible!” he growled, very red in the face. “That’s impossible. Ridiculous!”
Well, well. In all the time they had been together, she had never seen Leelson truly dismayed until now. How marvelous!
“How would you know?” she cried, boiling with five years’ fury. “You’re only an ordinary Fastigat. Bernesohn was out of your class, or so you’ve told me.”
“But none of the family … not my father, not his father, and not me, certainly …”
“So? Somehow Bernesohn arranged this talent to lie low for a few generations. Until it was needed!”
“I don’t know how he’d do that.”
A new speaker heard from! Snark, leaning against a pillar at the entrance of the chamber, where she’d obviously been listening for some time. “They force-fed me a pretty fair technical education, and I don’t know a way this could happen all at once, out of nothing.”
“Maybe the trait emerges only if the taste of Rottens is in the air,” Lutha muttered.
“Then I’d have it,” said Leelson. “I’ve tasted Rottens.”
These were mere quibbles. “I don’t know how Bernesohn did it, but I’m damned sure it’s not coincidence. It happened because he’s your son!”
“Dananana,” caroled Leely, waving his hands and plucking at his trousers. “Dananana.”
Oh, marvelous anticlimax! “I need to take him out,” Lutha said furiously. “Is it safe to go out?”
Snark shrugged, her go-to-hell shrug, but her eyes were wary.
