LITMIR.BIZ

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the enchantress applied herself to the crisis of the moment. She slapped grease in the roan’s last hoof, straightened up, and wiped her hands on a scrap of old burlap.

      “Out, you.” She gave a suggestive tug at the roan’s headstall, too pressed to delay for the saddle. “We’ve a hard night ahead. You’re going to have to do a generous bit more than shamble.”

      Another gust screamed past the corner of the shed. Gossamer veils of snow unraveled from the lip of the drifts. The eddy streamed Elaira’s hair across her eyes. She clawed back the tangles, impatient. “Come, boy.” A swift touch adjusted the hang of her satchel. “You’ll need to show me where to go.” She raised her wet boot in quest of a foothold in the buried logs of the woodpile, vaulted astride the roan’s back, then extended her arm to haul the herder child up before her.

      He was shaking through his furs, mostly from fear since he shrank as her arms clasped around him.

      Elaira sucked in a breath musked with wool and the rancid tang of goat. “Which way?”

      The tilt of Kaid’s chin said north. Elaira faced the gelding around into the teeth of the wind. Its cold pierced her clothes like honed steel. The stars overhead were like flecks of chipped ice, and moonlight sheared the hillcrests in razor-cut brilliance against the streaming, knotted shadows sliced by trees.

      “Hup!” Elaira cried. She gathered the roan’s reins and thumped him with her heels. The gelding shook his mane, grunted back as she drummed another thud against his ribs. His steaming warmth penetrated the damp layers of her leggings, and a breathy snort smoked from his nostrils. Too lazy to show displeasure beyond a flick of his tail, he roused into a short-strided walk.

      Elaira shook her cuffs down to muffle her exposed hands. “How long did it take you to reach me?”

      “I left our steading before nightfall. Snow fell too thick to know the time.” The boy clenched his jaw to still chattering teeth.

      Questions remained, over details the midwife might have shared that would tell how far the aunt’s labor had progressed. Yet as the gelding breasted through chest-high drifts, or plowed a crumpled trail across the pristine vales carved trackless by the scouring winds, Elaira held her silence. Nothing but hurry could improve the babe’s threatened chances. If she failed to arrive at the steading before the moment of birth, the infant might already be lost. Rather than pass her distress to the boy, she reined alongside a thin stand of alder and picked off a branch for use as a switch to force the placid gelding to trot.

      The night engulfed her in its landscape of silver and black. Amid the wind-tortured swirls of dry snow, the horse underneath her seemed all that moved in the world. If hare ventured out to gnaw bark and dry grasses, or if owls flew hunting mice, she saw no sign of anything alive. The tattered plumes of the gelding’s breath embroidered hoarfrost on her patched leggings. His hooves stitched the hillcrests to avoid the soft drifts, and the boy sent as guide lolled against her shoulder and slept. Where the ground was swept bare, she flicked the gelding to a canter, the glassy chink of snapped ice compacted under the thud of his passage. The gentle, rolling downlands stretched ahead and behind, sere under unrumpled snow, the rippled ink of oak copse and the grayed trunks of alders snagged through by tinseled skeins of moonlight. Over marshes herringboned in storm-trampled cattails, and past the treacherous, inky wells of sinkpools, Elaira forged ahead in relentless urgency.

      The fugitive hours were her enemy. The sensitivity of her talent let her feel them, slipping inexorably by as sand would sieve through a net. She drew rein at the crest of a dale, confronted below by the steep flanks of a gully, and the snake black outlines of iced-over current. Araethura’s downs were famed for such, obstructions to any traveler unfamiliar with the lay of the valleys. Elaira cursed, remiss with herself. She ought to have wakened the boy sooner to ask guidance, for the narrow, swift-flowing streams which fed the River Arwent ran in treacherous, deep beds, too wide to jump over in snowy footing, and unsafe to attempt a crossing without a known ford. The same had been true of Daon Ramon, long ago, before the diversion of the mighty Severnir’s flood by Etarran townsmen had rendered that golden land barren.

      Elaira gave Kaid’s shoulder a shake before the cold let her thoughts stray further. He said as she roused him, “No need to cross over. Our steading’s beyond that stand of alders.”

      Shadows obscured the building’s outline, a patched, oblate pattern where drifts had silted over the mosaic outline of roof shakes against the vale beyond. From some hidden byre, the bleat of confined goats breathed in snatched fragments between gusts. Elaira shook up the tired roan, pressed his laboring step downslope. The pricked gleam of stars came and went as the alders closed around her, branches wind racked against the zenith. Two hours until dawn, her tuned awareness told her. That time of night when death was most apt to be welcomed by a body and spirit in distress.

      She slid off the gelding’s back, left the reins to the boy, to dismount as he could and see it stabled. She wasted more seconds, fumbling to close the iron latch of an unfamiliar gate. Finally arrived in the sheltered space between hay byre and cottage, she thought for a second she heard the pained groans of a woman. Whether the sound was born of labor, or grief, or just a last, cruel trick of the wind, the weight of the moment crushed hope.

      Stiff, stumbling across the rutted yard, Elaira tripped the door latch and shouldered her way across the threshold into the cottage of Kaid’s aunt. Darkness swallowed her. Cut off from the clean bite of winter, the closed-in smells of lavender and birch coals and the ingrained musk of grease left from simmering a thick mutton stew made the air seem stagnant and dead.

      Then, muffled through board walls, the midwife’s voice arose in terse encouragement, “Bear ye down, dearie. The time’s come upon us, and naught can help now by delay.”

      A brittle, third voice made shrill with the quaver of old age remarked, “Let the babe come. The fferedon’li’s here at last.” The chosen term was a bygone word for healer, corrupted from the Paravian phrase which meant ‘bringer of light.’

      Elaira moved on, tense and sharply uneasy, unsure she merited the confidence and trust implied by the use of the ancient title. The room she crossed seemed too still, too close, its eaves sealed tight against the weather, as if the vast, rolling moorlands of Araethura were an adversary worthy of a barricade. The cottage held its carven chairs and furnishings the way a miser might grasp a hoard of coins. A close-fisted family, Elaira sensed through observation; not the sort to ask outsiders for favors. The trained perception of her gift allowed her to pass their cherished clutter without tripping, to avoid the spinning wheel and stool jutted between the wool press and a tub of drawn water arrayed on the flagstones by the hearth. Boards creaked beneath her hurried tread. This steading was prosperous, to have glazed and shuttered windows, and better than a packed earthen floor. Her next step fell softened by a throw rug. The byre and fenced pastures should have prepared her for comforts. Those Araethurian herdsmen less well off let their stock graze at large on the moors.

      A paneled door creaked open. Raw, orange light spilled out in a swathe to guide her through to the cottage’s back room, a walled-off chamber beneath the beams of the loft, where a row of younger children peered down, their expressions all dread and curiosity. Elaira caught another flurried gesture to avert spells before she gained her refuge in the bedchamber.

      A tallow dip in a crockery bowl rinsed the broad shoulders of the midwife, a middle-aged matron of competent presence, sleeves rolled back over rawboned wrists where she knelt to administer to Kaid’s aunt. The woman she attended was small as a deer, dark haired and wrung limp, far beyond fear or caring whether an enchantress or a demon had entered. She crouched on the birthing stool, her face lined with sweat, a plait wisped into tangles draped over the wet shine of her collarbones. Her feet were bare. The rest of her torso was swathed in a crushed mass of down quilts, her shift of undyed linen rucked into bunches above her thighs.

      As though sensitive to censure, the midwife said, “It’s hot enough she is, but the husband insisted.” Past a sound of disgust through her nose, she added, “Matter of her modesty, he claims. It’s all foolishness. No wisdom in it, but the man wasn’t born in these downs who isn’t bullheaded useless over the propriety of his wife.”

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