Pressure mounted in Tahn’s belly: hate, helplessness, confusion, fear. All a madness like panicked wings in his mind. He was supposed to protect her, keep her safe, especially while she carried this child. A child come of rape. But a child she looked forward to. Loved.
Worry and anger rushed inside him. “No!”
His scream filled the small cabin, leaving a deeper silence in its wake. But the babe made no sound. The Bar’dyn only stared. On the stoop and roof, the patter of rain resumed, like the sound of a distant waterfall. Beyond it, Tahn heard the gallop of hooves on the muddy road. More Bar’dyn? His friends?
He couldn’t wait for either. In a shaky motion, he drew his aim on the creature’s head. The Bar’dyn didn’t move. There wasn’t even defiance in its expression.
“I’ll take you and the child. Velle will be pleased.” It nodded at its own words, then raised its blade between them.
Velle? Dead gods, they’ve brought a renderer of the Will with them!
Tahn’s aim floundered from side to side. Weariness. Cold fear.
The Bar’dyn stepped toward him. Tahn’s mind raced, and fastened upon one thought. The hammer. He focused on that mark on the back of his bow hand, visually tracing its lines and feeling it with his mind. A simple, solid thing. He didn’t remember where he’d gotten the scar or brand, but it seemed intentional. And it grounded him. With that moment of reassurance, his hands steadied, and he drew deeper into the pull, bringing his aim on the Bar’dyn’s throat.
“Put the child down.” His voice trembled even as his mouth grew dry.
The Bar’dyn paused, looking down at the bundle it carried. The creature then lifted the babe up, causing the blanket to slip to the floor. Its massive hand curled around the little one’s torso. The infant still glistened from its passage out of Wendra’s body, its skin red and purple in the sallow light of the fire.
“Child came dead, grub.”
Sadness and anger welled again in Tahn. His chest heaved at the thought of Wendra giving birth in the company of this vile thing, having her baby taken at the moment of life into its hands. Was the child dead at birth, or had the Bar’dyn killed it? Tahn glanced again at Wendra. She was pale. Sadness etched her features. He watched her close her eyes against the Bar’dyn’s words.
The rain now pounded the roof. But the sound of heavy footfalls on the road was clear, close, and Tahn abandoned hope of escape. One Bar’dyn, let alone several, might tear him apart, but he intended to send this one to the abyss, for Wendra, for her dead child.
He prepared to fire his bow, allowing time enough to speak the old, familiar words: “I draw with the strength of my arms, but release as the Will allows.”
But he couldn’t shoot.
He struggled to disobey the feeling, but it stretched back into that part of his life he couldn’t remember. He had always spoken the words, always. He didn’t release of his own choice. He always followed the quiet intimations that came after he spoke those words.
Tahn relaxed his aim and the Bar’dyn nodded approval. “Bound to Will,” it said. The words rang like the cracking of timber in the confines of the small home. “But first to watch this one go.” The Bar’dyn turned toward Wendra.
“No!” Tahn screamed again, filling the cabin with denial. Denial of the Bar’dyn.
Denial of his own impotence.
The sound of others came up the steps. Tahn was surrounded. They would all die!
He spared a last look at his sister. “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but it came out in a husk.
Her expression of confusion and hurt and disappointment sank deep inside him.
If he couldn’t kill the creature, he could at least try to prevent it from hurting her.
Before he could move, his friends shot through the door. They got between Tahn and the Bar’dyn. They fought the creature. They filled his home with a clash of wills and swordplay and shouted oaths. Chaos churned around him. And all he could do was watch Wendra curl deeper into her bed. Afraid. Heartsick.
The creature out of the Bourne finally turned and crashed through the cabin’s rear wall, rushing into the dark and the storm with Wendra’s dead child. They did not give chase.
Tahn turned from the hole in the wall and went to Wendra’s side. Blood soaked the coverlet, and cuts in her wrists and hands told of failed attempts to ward off the Bar’dyn. Her cheeks sagged; she looked pale and spent. She lay crying silent tears.
He’d stood twenty feet away with a clear shot at the Bar’dyn and had done nothing. The lives of his sister and her child had hung in the balance, and he’d done nothing. The old words had told him the draw was wrong. He’d followed that feeling over the defense of his sister. Why?
It was an old ache and frustration, believing himself bound to the impressions those words stirred inside him. But never so much as now.
CHAPTER ONE
OLD WORDS
“It is the natural condition of man to strive for certainty. It is also his condition not to find it. Not for long, anyway. Even a star may wander.”
—From Commentary on Categoricals,
a reader for children nominated to
Dimnian cognitive training
TRANQUIL DARKNESS STRETCHED to the horizon. Small hours. Moments of quiet, of peace. Moments when faraway stars seemed as close and familiar as friends. Moments of night before the east would hint of sunrise. Tahn stepped into these small hours. Into the chill night air. He went to spend time with the stars. To imagine dawn. As he always had.
There was a kind of song in it all. A predictable rhythm and melody that might only be heard by one willing to remain quiet and unmoving long enough to note the movement of a star. It could be heard in the phases of the moons. It was
