* * * * *
"Lean closer, daughter to the Ru'al Harani. Lean closer and tell me what you see in the entrails." Sulios pushed me nearer the altar. I steeled myself, refusing to flinch. The stench was coppery, foul in my throat.
I had seen criminals executed, traitors questioned, flayed alive. Why should this death touch me so deeply?
This was not yet Aldrar's child. Born of a beggar woman, it was frail as a snake's shed skin. The infant lay quiet, its screams long ago tempered to croaking sobs. Even those were gone now, leaving only an occasional tremor of breath in pale flesh and glazed eyes to show that he still lived. Last waking's sacrifice had been mercifully brief. This time Sulios had taken winds to study and poke at the entrails, with the only sounds the hive-drone of chanting priests and the child's moans. The first had been bad, but this second sacrifice....
For my own birth there had been nine such sacrifices. I swallowed, pushed the thought away. Sulios' bony hand pressed hard against my back, waiting, expectant. I knew I must answer him. What to say when I could not read the bloody cords?
I pulled from the priest's grasp. "What I have seen is for me to tell the Ru'al Harani alone," I said, voice haughty. "It is your place, Sulios, to speak the prophesy of your god. I would not stand between you and he."
Sulios's yellowed gaze flickered. Scorn? Suspicion? Respect? Then his eyes lidded, reptile-like. He began to prophesy.
Tivarsa would be reared by the mother of her third nenfari. She would be weak and sickly for the first eight turnings, but with care, would survive and grow beautiful. She should be warded by an amulet of firerock and gold. She must not ride the swift cabris, only the plodding nergan, else disaster might ensue. She would be skilled at needlework and interrogation.
I stopped listening. Had any other noticed the male child's final convulsive shudder as he died?
Across the altar, Faru stood, stoic. He held his daughter as he had last waking, that she might hear her future. Most of the nobles were properly solemn in their wilting silks, their eyes averted as much as possible without appearing indecorous. Others watched with a nervous hunger. They were like the vulmice of the Waste, who follow a dying man until his collapse, to tear the still-living flesh from his bones. The priests chanted on. Smoke swirled, cloying with the scent of blood.
Then it was over and I was being herded across the bridge with the others and back into the brutal sunlight. And I was running. Running madly and mindlessly in disregard of propriety or all my instructors had taught me of stealth and caution. My only thought was the longing to be held in Aldrar's arms. To have my hair petted and damp cloths pressed to my forehead and to be told that everything would be put right.
But the woman in the tower chamber did not turn her gaze from the window's arch at my entrance. "Mine?"
"No."
"Next waking then."
Silence again as I shed the ceremonial garb. In my mind I could still hear the chanting priests, the crackling of the altar fire.
"I would have named him Majir. That was the name of his father's father. My guardsman would have wanted it so. His eyes were golden, did you know? The color of the sands where we--"
"Enough! Can you not see that I am powerless to help you?"
And suddenly I found that I had crossed the room. There was a hand-shaped stain spreading redly across Aldrar's face. Where I had slapped her. As I had never before done.
I fled the tower.
For the changing of several winds I walked the bazaar, alone even in the crush of hawkers, beggars and seekers of bargains. I watched urchins playing in the dust with a mangy dog. A woman nursed her babe on a doorstep. She was eating bread-wrapped meat scraps. Grease dribbled onto the infant's head. I observed a peddler trying to sell garish scarves and rancid perfumes to a gaggle of farmers' wives; a drunken caravan driver having his purse strings slashed by a lean, hungry youth.
At last I made my way back to the palace compound, climbed the steps to my tower as the Time-giver's priests sang the prayer for Peaceful Repose. It took only moments to change back into the black ceremonial garments, this time without veil, collar or ring, give Aldrar my instructions and gather what was needed.