The Reading in the Womb

They took her pouch first.

It was done with a sort of embarrassed efficiency, in a stone antechamber at Lanternhold, by two women in gray who would not meet her eyes. They unbuckled her belt. They lifted the little leather bag of ashbloom from her waist, and the fish-bone dagger from her boot, and the gloves from her hands. They unpinned the jet collar and the high stiff band of her gown, and stood back, and drew in their breath at what lay beneath.

The marks had faded. They had gone dull in the fog, like embers under ash. But in the lamplight of the antechamber they stirred, a faint blue shimmer on her wrists and throat, and one of the women crossed herself and the other began, very softly, to pray.

"Do not be afraid," said Ixara. "It does not burn."

"Silence, witch," said the elder, but without conviction.

They put her in a cell.

…

It was not a dungeon. That frightened her more than if it had been.

The room was perhaps ten feet square, whitewashed, scrubbed, as clean as a nun's bedchamber. A cot with a gray blanket stood against one wall. A stool, a pitcher, a basin. A small high window, barred, through which came a single bar of yellow light. A wooden crucifix on the plaster. A crock in the corner, covered with a lid. It smelled of lye and cold stone and very faintly of incense.

She sat on the cot and put her hands on her knees.

Count, she told herself. Count the steps.

Four from the door to the cot. Five from the cot to the window. Three from the window to the wall. It took no time at all. She did it three times, and then she lay down on her side with her knees drawn up and her hand over the small hard curve below her navel, and felt the child stir.

It was awake. It had been awake since the fog. A tiny fierce flickering, no larger than a moth's wing, it beat against the inside of her like a heart against a cage. And along the thread, the long hot line that ran from her womb to the vault across the river, there was a new tension, a strain, like a rope drawn taut over water.

Hush, she whispered. Hush, little one. I am here.

Mama is here.

It was the first time she had called herself that.

…

Crale came at midnight.

He brought a chair. He set it down beside the cot with a small dry scrape, and sat, and arranged his cassock over his knees. In the light of the lantern that a young priest held up, his face was long and gray and tired. He looked, she thought, like a man who has not eaten.

"Miss Merrow. Or whatever your name is. I hope they have treated you gently."

She said nothing.

"I should like to talk," said the Magister. "I find it is better if the subject speaks first. A great deal of misery might be avoided if people would only begin at the beginning." He waved the priest away. The door closed. In the sudden dimness, he laid on the cot between them a small leather bag, a bone knife, a pair of gloves. "These are yours?"

"Yes."

"You make smoke from a flower. The flower is not English." He turned the pouch in his fingers, loosened the string, and bent his head to sniff, and his nostril flared. "It smells of a place I have never seen. I find this extraordinarily interesting. I have spent thirty years in the service of the Lantern, and I have studied every sort of narcotic, every vision-inducing herb of the apothecary and the hedge-witch. I have never encountered this."

"It grows where you will never go."

"That is a very great claim."

"It is not a claim. It is a fact."

"Where?"

She turned her face to the wall.

Crale sighed.

"Let us not begin so. I am not here to hurt you. I will not pretend that the Order has not done terrible things. I have seen them. I have done some of them." He folded his hands. "But I came to this house at twenty-two, a fool full of fire, and I have grown old among men who believed that suffering was a language. I do not. I think pain tells a person nothing but that he is in pain. I should much prefer to be told."

"Told what?"

"What you are."

"I am a priestess of the Ahtelan."

"And the Ahtelan are—?"

"The people of the Great Forest."

"Which is in—?"

She said nothing.

"And the stone." He leaned forward. "The blue one. The Duke's treasure. It was taken from your people, I think. I have a theory, you see, and I should like you to correct it. I think that the Viscount Wynmore, in the course of his scientific travels, came upon an island. I think he found there a sacred object. And I think that you, Miss Merrow, who are not Portuguese, who are not English, who have no business in this country, followed it across the sea to take it back."

She lay very still.

"A heroic purpose," said Crale gently. "I confess I admire it. I admire it very much. But you do see the difficulty. It is a stone. It is a stone, in a glass dome in the cellar of a learned society, and in all the world there is no tribunal that would hold it to be yours. If you had come to me, in the first week, and said, Magister, I have been robbed, I should have been glad to help. It is the Church's business to protect the despoiled."

"The Church's business," said Ixara, to the wall, "is fire."

Silence.

"It was," said Crale at last, "a long time ago."

…

He asked about the child.

She had been waiting for it. She had lain in the dark with her heart going and her mouth dry, composing a dozen answers. When it came she gave none of them. She turned over, slowly, and sat up, and put both her hands over her belly, and looked at him.

"It is mine."

"And the father?"

"He is no concern of yours."

"On the contrary, he is the greatest concern in the world." The Magister's eyes were gentle. "I have had a long talk with Lord Wynmore. He did not know. I regret to say it was I who told him."

She felt her face go still.

"You did what?"

"He had a right to know. A man should know when he has fathered a child." Crale's voice was quite even. "He took it hard. He took it, I think, as a man takes a blow in the dark. He said very little. But he will not sign the deposition, and so I shall be obliged to hold you until Lantern Night. It is the feast of the Church that falls nearest the solstice. It is the proper time for such matters."

"Lantern Night," said Ixara.

"The twenty-first of December. We burn on the shortest day. It is a very old custom." He rose and stood looking down at her, a tall gray stooped figure against the whitewash, and she saw something go across his face and vanish: weariness, or sorrow, or a sort of ghastly tenderness. "You have fifty-one days. I shall visit often. I would be glad if you used them to think."

He took up the pouch, the gloves, the bone dagger.

"I'll keep these," he said. "For safety."

He went out. The bolt shot behind him.

And Ixara sat on the cot in the dark with her hands on her belly, and listened to the footsteps dying away down the passage, and thought, with a dreadful calm: Fifty-one days.

The child will be born in fifty-one days.

They will burn us both.

…

She lay awake until the window turned gray.

She tried the old ways. She tried the breathing, the stilling of the mind, the long descent into the dreaming that the priestesses taught. It did not come. Without the smoke she was blind. She was a woman in a cell with a gray blanket and a crock and no more power than a mouse. Her wrists were bare, her pouch gone, her mother's dagger in a stranger's pocket. The marks pulsed uselessly. The thread to the stone throbbed like a toothache.

I am nothing, she thought. I am nothing without the smoke.

Then, quite clearly, in the middle of the dark, a small voice said:

Mama.

It was not a voice. Not in the way of words. It was a pressure, a warmth, a vibration that rose through her breastbone and hummed against her teeth. It had the shape of a syllable. It had the quality of a bell.

Mama. Look.

She sat up.

"Little one?" she whispered.

Look.

She had never heard of it. In all the long records of the priestesses, in all the songs her mother had sung, no one had spoken of an unborn child that taught. But the Aurelith was a quickening thing. It had made the island live. It had hastened the Gate. And this child was its child, conceived in its shadow, grown in the rhythm of its beat. It was not merely a creature. It was a window.

She lay back on the cot. She put both hands over the spiral. She closed her eyes.

Show me, she said.

…

It was very simple, in the end.

There was no rush of images, no cataract, no hot white wall. It came as a memory comes, softly, from below, like a stone surfacing in a pool. She was lying on her back on a cold floor. She was smelling smoke. Her body was heavy and boneless and entirely at peace. Above her the roof of the shrine arched into darkness, and the great trees murmured in the wind, and the Heart, the Heart, was singing in its niche, lit from within like a lantern.

It was the Blood Moon. It was the last night.

She knew it at once. She had lived it before. She had lain on the dais with the ashbloom in her lungs, and the voices of the dead around her, and she had felt the world go gray, and then black, and then silent.

But there was something she had not seen then. Something she had been too far under to remember.

A step.

It came from the east entrance, soft, measured, the step of a man in good boots. A shadow crossed the moonlit floor. She felt it, rather than saw it, as a change in the pressure of the air. It stopped at the edge of the dais. There was a small sound, leather creaking. A breath.

Cedar, said the child. Cold iron.

A man knelt beside her.

She had always known he was there. In the fog of that last hour, she had known. But she had never seen him. She saw him now. The child saw him for her, with the eyes of the Heart, in the slow gold light of the shrine.

He was thinner than she knew him, and unshaven. His hair was tied back with a leather thong, and he wore no wig, no powder, no velvet. He wore a plain dark coat, a sailor's boots, a long cloak, and on his hands a pair of gloves of goatskin. Over the lower half of his face was a mask of black cloth, knotted at the nape. Above it, his gray eyes were enormous.

They were shining.

He is crying, she thought.

He bent over her. He did not touch the Heart. Not yet. He looked at her, at the sleeping priestess in her purple feathers with the smoke curling from her lips, and then, slowly, he put up one gloved hand and pulled the mask down from his face. She had always thought he had worn it to the end. He had not. He had taken it off to look at her, and something in his face broke open. He lifted one gloved hand, and laid it, very lightly, against her cheek.

A touch like a moth.

"Forgive me," said Garrick Wynmore.

It was English. She had not known the words then. She knew them now. They rang in her head like a struck glass. Forgive me. Forgive me. I have no other way.

He was shaking. He bent lower. His lips moved, and she caught the rest, a whisper so faint that the Heart itself might have missed it: "I'll bring it back. I swear it. I swear it on her life."

On her life.

He drew back. His hands went to the niche. He took the Aurelith in his two gloved palms, the way one takes a sleeping bird, and lifted it, and the island fell silent.

She felt it. Even through the years, even through the womb and the dark, she felt the great hush go out over the forest like a pall. The leaves hung still. The wind died. A single note, held for a thousand years, ceased.

And the man knelt there with the stone in his hands and his face wet and his mouth open as if he'd been struck, and she understood that he had not expected it to hurt.

He rose. He set a small heavy chest on the floor at the foot of the dais. He opened the lid. It was full of gold.

"For the grief," he said. His voice was a ruin. "It is not enough. It is never enough."

He looked down at her one last time.

Then he turned and walked out of the shrine into the dark, with the heart of her people in his arms, and did not look back.

…

She opened her eyes.

The cell was gray. The bar of light on the wall had gone from yellow to white. Somewhere far off a bell was tolling the hour. She lay motionless on the cot with her palms flat on her belly and tears running into her ears.

She had known.

That was the cruelty of it. She had known since the hold. She had known when the lantern swung into her face and she saw the gray eyes, the tight mouth, the signet on the glove. She had known on the ship, and in the storm, and in every night in the library when he had turned his head and said something dry and clever and kind. She had told herself that it was a lesser man who stood on the dais, a hireling, a captain's agent. She had told herself it did not matter. She had told herself that she would take his seed and take her stone and go.

She had known, and she had not known. There was a difference. She understood that now.

It was him.

Not a hireling. Not a name. Him. The man who had kissed her on the terrace and wept in her arms on the stair. The man who had said I love you in a porter's room, in the same voice, with the same breaking in it, that he had said forgive me on a mountain. He had knelt over her. He had touched her cheek. He had seen her face, her defenseless sleeping face, and he had taken her people's heart anyway.

And he had been sorry.

That was the thing she could not bear. That was the knife. She could have hated a monster. She could have burned him with a clear heart. But she lay on her back in a whitewashed cell with a child in her belly and the memory of his hand on her face, and the grief rose through her like a tide and she could not tell if it was hers, or his, or the child's, or all three.

He did not do it for gold, she thought. He did it for the girl with the ribbon.

And I have done the same.

The silence in the cell was complete.

She turned her face to the white wall. She whispered it, once, in the old tongue, to the plaster, to the crucifix, to the thin stubborn flame beneath her hands. She said it flatly, without heat, like a woman reading an epitaph.

"He is the thief."