It was a druidess, of course, who led them out of the blinding snow and into the warmth and shadow and dodging light of a nearby cavern. The heat from the fire smarted on Daeghrefn's storm-burned skin. Blinking stupidly in the sudden brightness, he glanced from wall to cavern wall, where cascades of dried lavender and rosemary hung amid comfrey and foxglove, alongside mush-
rooms as gnarled and black as severed hands. Two cats, lean and ancient, wrestled solemnly in a shadowy corner. The place smelled of forest, of the deep glades of Lemish and elf country.
He should have known the woman was a druidess, Daeghrefn told himself. Celebrant of the dead gods and the dead year. Instantly his caution magnified. If druidess she was, there was danger in her. They were never what they seemed, with their woodsense and muttering and their irritating mysteries. He had heard they stole babies. Now there was a thought.
"Why?" asked the druidess L'Indasha Yman, shaking the snow from her robes. She was younger than he expected. Quite lovely, for that matter-auburn-haired and tall and dark-eyed as well. The cave light did not reveal the finer details of her face, and his eyes were too frost- and wind-burned to study her clearly.
He crouched by the fire and extended his hands, regarding the druidess warily. His eyes played over the soft, dark skin of her neck, the purple pendant at her throat that filtered the firelight as stained glass catches the sun. He would not trust beauty such as this. It was entangling, beguiling….
L'Indasha noticed the stormcrow brooch, ice-encrusted, that held the man's cape uncertainly about his throat.
"You are Daeghrefn of Nidus," she noted, drawing a small iron kettle from a shadowy nook in the rocks. "The dayraven. The stormcrow. Your castle is not far from here. Why? Why do you travel on a night such as this? Where did you think you were?"
The woman cried out softly to Abelaard. The boy helped her closer to the fire.
Daeghrefn ignored them, his eyes fixed on the druidess. "You know already who and why and where," he muttered, "and you've augury enough to know more. Why ask?"
L'Indasha glared at him and stalked into the darkness, returning with the kettle brimful of water. "It would take more than augury to sound this foolishness," she said, soothing the man's wife with a soft brush of her hand. "Out in the Khalkists on the worst of winter nights, your wife and small son behind you like a straggling infantry. What could have . .. ?" Like the melting of ice or the settling of ashes, a slow awareness seeped into LTndasha's mind. She tried to hide her face when the truth came to her, but Daeghrefn saw it.
"Ah," she breathed. "You've been cuckolded, haven't-" The druidess glanced down at the woman. The thin cloak had fallen and now revealed the source of the woman's crying. She was about to give birth.
L'Indasha didn't finish the sentence. Daeghrefn lurched up angrily with a clatter of breastplate and greaves.
"It is not your concern, druidess," he growled. He wished for a secret blade, for a sudden lapse of the Oath, and surprised himself with his own edged and ready anger. "Nose into your vegetation and your failed gods if you want," he murmured, his voice deep and menacing. "Pry into the heart of the oak and the phases of the moon, into whatever mysteries and omens you consult when your wits fail you. But keep out of my affairs."
The druidess stared at him darkly.
Brown, he thought absently as the wind outside whistled and eddied. Her eyes are brown …
His wife cried out again in Abelaard's small arms. "Too soon!" she wailed, her long scream rising in pitch and volume until it became deafening, as chilling as the wind in the mountain passes below.
Daeghrefn covered his ears as L'Indasha rushed to attend the woman. And then, as suddenly as it began, the scream cut off. One of the cats yawned in the cave's far corner.
L'Indasha's face was grim. The woman's pulse fluttered
and faded, then surged again as she cried out in agony. Reaching for the kettle, for soothing herbs-for anything-the druidess cast her eyes on the bucket by the mouth of the cave.
The last of the moonlight played almost cruelly over the ice. On the glazed surface of the water, the light took the form of thick stone, the snow like white robes swirling around a distant childbed….
Another child. Another child was being born tonight. It was the other face, the brother to this bastard child. Somewhere, in some warm and nurturing country. But this poor woman lay moaning in an icy cavern, her first son young and helpless, her husband unbalanced and venomous. . . . L'Indasha Yman fought down her anger and bent to the work of the night.
Huma's kin were being born.
Somewhat later, in the uncanny silence, something in the depths of the cavern stirred from its hibernation with a stifled, painful cry. Daeghrefn strained to make out the distant sound as the creature scuttled deeper into the cave, where its cry echoed and redoubled back.
"… and you have all but killed her! The child was not ready. It is turned about wrong and cannot come forth!"
He startled. It was L'Indasha Yman shouting in his ear. | How long had she been there railing at him-some gibberish about the woman, about the child she was bearing? Daeghrefn closed his ears to the wailing, to the druidess's words. He turned toward the mouth of the cave, put his back to his son and the two women, and reckoned out an old impartial calendar.
Too soon. The wretch had said too soon. Yes, it was. He had found her out much too soon. She had thought to fool
him, but-
"I need your help!" the druidess shouted, penetrating his icy wall of silence, her voice colder still.
"Ask your gods," Daeghrefn insisted, his back to her.
The druidess sighed. Daeghrefn seated himself at the cave's entrance. Silent, unmoved by her incessant pleas for help in the lifting and pushing, by the rustle and clamor of Abelaard's clumsy assistance, the knight drew his sword and stared into the wheeling snow. The moonlight broke fitfully through the mountainous clouds, silver on red, and for a moment, he thought he saw the strange black magelight of Nuitari.
An hour passed, or more.
Finally the cry of the infant broke in the stormy air. It was muted, desperate, as though the newborn child had fallen into the depths of the cave.
"You have a son," the haggard druidess announced coldly, holding a swaddled thing toward the fire for warmth.
"I have a son?" Daeghrefn replied sardonically. "That is no news. He followed me to this cavern. He served you bravely, where even a midwife would have faltered."