Lover of Thorns and Holy Gods

  Silhara eyed it with interest, circling slowly to view both sides as it floated just above the ground. He returned to Ballard, the shadows thrown by the portal’s light hollowing out his thin face. His mouth drew down in severe lines. “When you return, make sure your magician not only closes this portal but destroys it. I’ve learned from bitter experience that such things might start benign but turn malignant faster than you can imagine.”

  Ballard inclined his head in acknowledgement. Ambrose had said much the same when he first created the portal. He clasped Silhara’s offered arm. “I thank you for the help and for the ale.”

  “And the Dragon’s Piss?” Silhara’s question held a thread of mocking amusement.

  “That remains to be seen.” If the contents in Ballard’s stomach didn’t stay down, he’d be cursing the sorcerer instead of thanking him.

  Silhara bowed. “Safe journey, and tell your wife...” He hesitated. “Tell Louvaen I will think of her. Often. As will Martise.”

  Ballard returned the bow. “Likewise.”

  He stepped into the portal and had hardly found his footing in his hall before a weight slammed into his chest, almost knocking him off his feet. His queasy stomach cartwheeled against his ribs in protest.

  “You’re late!” Louvaen snarled and proceeded to wrap her arms and legs around him in fine imitation of a strangler ivy.

  He managed to stay upright and not pitch them both into the nearby hearth. His stomach refused to calm down, and panic made sweat break out on his forehead. Louvaen took one whiff and saved him the trouble of peeling her off his body.

  She stepped back and eyed him with a narrow gaze. “Are you cupshot?”

  Ambrose emerged from the kitchens to stand beside her. “Who cares?” He echoed Louvaen’s accusation. “You’re late. It’s nearly noon. Did you get the artifact?”

  Ballard concentrated on staying upright and keeping his stomach out of his throat. He fished the bag containing the ensorcelled stone out of his doublet and presented it with a flourish. “As you requested.”

  He wished he didn’t feel on the verge of turning himself inside out. He’d far more enjoy the spectacular moment when his recalcitrant magician and his termagant of a wife were in perfect accord in their disappointment.

  “It’s a rock,” they said in unison.

  Ballard sighed. “I know it’s a rock, but it’s still the artifact we need.” The warning burn of bile crept up his throat. “If I have to talk anymore or remain standing, I’m going to vomit.”

  They both leapt away as if he’d lobbed fireballs at them. Ambrose snatched the rock out of Ballard’s hand with promises to destroy the portal once he squirreled away the enchanted artifact for later use before abandoning Ballard to his wife’s tender mercies. Wary but determined, Louvaen helped him up the stairs, issuing numerous, particularly gruesome death threats if he so much as hiccupped. They managed to make it to their bedchamber without mishap.

  Ballard collapsed across the bed and rolled to his side. He closed his eyes, hoping the darkness might slow the room’s spinning. Something cold and hard nudged his cheek, and he opened his eyes once more to find a bowl next to his face.

  Louvaen offered him a sympathetic half smile. “In case you can’t hold it down.” She stroked his damp brow and carded his hair, her hand cool on his skin.

  His eyelids fell to half-mast. He reached out and traced her pale features with one finger, outlining the high curve of her cheekbones and the arched bridge of her nose—a memorable face framed by black hair

  Ballard ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and risked a few words. “I think he admired you. He was a strong man of strong blood.” He smiled at Louvaen’s puzzled look. “Countless generations might pass but some traits never fade. Strong blood—and noses—wills out.”

  He fell asleep to his wife’s warning of “if I hear one more remark from you about my nose, I will break yours a second time.”

  Ah, how he adored this woman.

  ~END~

  CROW AWAKENED

  Silhara drew hard on the huqqah’s hose and held in the smoke and the panic until he thought his lungs might burst. His wife was dying; he was sure of it.

  He stood at the window and stared at the fledgling orange grove growing from the ashes of the one destroyed by the god called Corruption. Winter held a firm grip on Neith and all the surrounding plains. The saplings, shrouded in a layer of snow, stood sentinel in regimented lines to the far stone wall that surrounded them. Unlike Silhara, they shivered in the brittle wind that whipped snow flurries into small whirlwinds.

  The Master of Crows ignored the cold bite of winter as it swirled into the open window and battled with the meager heat put out by the lit hearth in his study. The wind whispered and teased, keeping time with the burbling dance of water in the huqqah’s water jar each time Silhara drew in smoke from the mouthpiece, shredding his exhalations to ghostly wisps.

  For now, he was an exile in his own home, sent off to a chamber far from his bedroom where a beautiful prostitute named Anya tended Martise, and a silent Gurn guarded the door against him. He refused to leave at first, lightning sizzling in threatening arcs across his fingertips when a scowling Anya pointed to the door and ordered him to get out. He’d been a hair’s breath away from turning Gurn’s favorite bed partner into a scorch mark on the floor, stopped only by Martise’s gentler request.

  Ashen and hollow-eyed, she huddled in their bed and gave him a wan smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Please, Silhara,” she said in a soft voice. “Pacing and snarling at everyone isn’t helping. Just give me a few moments alone with Anya. You called her here for a reason. Surely you trust her?”

  Silhara had capitulated without further argument. He knelt at their bedside and clasped her hand. Her fingers were icicles in his grip. In the weeks since their return to Neith from a half-life world populated by a demon king and a captive woman, she had faded. It was the most accurate description.

  He kissed her cold palm and twitched the blankets more snuggly around her shoulders before standing to glare at Anya who returned the glare with one of her own. “Why did I even summon you?” he snapped.

  A delicate black eyebrow arched, and Anya’s challenging expression softened. “Because you trust me. And as you said so yourself in your note, a woman would understand the health of another woman far more than a man ever could. Give me a little time. I’m no healer, and if I can’t determine why she’s sick—though I have my suspicions—I’ll tell you to summon one. Until then, go away. You’re doing neither of us any good hovering over her bed like a storm cloud waiting to burst.”

  He’d stomped down the rickety stairs to the first floor and the chilly isolation of his study. Throwing open the window’s shutters and letting in a blast of frigid air had cleared his head a little from the suffocating fear clogging his thoughts. The arcane knowledge in the books and scrolls scattered about the study offered no succor, and he doubted he could focus long enough to remember whatever they might reveal if he read them. He turned, instead, to the familiar comfort of a slow smoke.

  While the scent of matal in his nose blunted the sharp edges of terror, it did nothing to slow his racing thoughts. Whatever sickness was turning Martise into a wraith of a woman, he was powerless to stop it. Spells had no effect, nor did the potions he brewed for her—if she managed to hold them down for more than a second.

  Her own Gift, more a curse than a blessing in his opinion, had deserted her. Normally responsive to his coaxing, it had withdrawn deep inside her, an unyielding knot that refused to answer him now.

  “What is this foul thing that sickens you?” he muttered amidst an exhalation of gauzy smoke. “Why can I not break its grip on you, love?” He balled one hand into a fist and slammed it against one of the shutters. Wooden slats splintered under the blow and clattered to his feet. He hated this sense of helplessness!

  He mentally catalogued the initial signs of its manifestation. Exhaustion first. Not just a bad night?
??s sleep or a day of yawns but bone-deep torpor, as if some invisible parasite slowly sucked the life out of her. Normally a cheery dawn riser, Martise had staggered out of bed each morning, listless and yawning. Both Silhara and Gurn had caught her asleep on her feet numerous times, asleep as she leaned against the bailey wall with the snow drifting around her and the goat she was milking chewing enthusiastically on her skirt hem, asleep at the table while she waited for Gurn to brew tea or serve supper—it didn’t matter where she was or what she did, if she stopped moving, she slept. She even fell asleep on him during a bout of lovemaking, an event he’d at first found crushingly humiliating.

  Sickness followed on the heels of exhaustion. Martise vomited up everything that passed her lips, from buttered bread to warm tea. The sounds of retching grew commonplace, provoked not only by eating food but also smelling it. Pale as milk and growing thinner by the day, the only colors that touched her face were the dark circles under her eyes and the sickly greenish tinge that signaled a frantic scrabble for the bowl Gurn now made sure always remained close by to catch what little she managed to heave up from her shrunken stomach.

  Anya didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already known. She wasn’t a healer, but she possessed something no healer did: his trust. He’d sent her a note, one he hoped she might be able to read despite the frantic scrawl across parchment punctured by a jabbing quill and splattered with ink. She’d arrived so quickly, he suspected she was still reading his message as she hitched the pony to the small cart she owned.

  Neith’s quiet, a thing he usually treasured and vigilantly guarded against outsiders, pressed down on him now, a heavy yoke that bowed his shoulders. “You cannot die, Martise,” he growled under his breath. “I forbid it.”

  Those gossamer-thin threads of compassion or honor he possessed were strengthened by his soft-spoken, scholarly wife. She made him remember his humanity, seek that better part of himself always vulnerable to the ruthless darkness inherent to his nature. If he lost her...

  A hard shudder rattled every bone in his body, and his teeth chattered until he clenched his jaw tight enough to make his ears ache. He wouldn’t lose her. He had vanquished a god and challenged a demon king. He would defeat whatever tried to take Martise from him now.

  He spun when the study door creaked open. Gurn’s guarded expression didn’t offer any clue as to what Anya might have discovered. He simply motioned to Silhara and stepped out of the way as the mage bolted through the door toward the stairs.

  Anya greeted him at the door with a knowing smirk and kohl-lined eyes filled with laughter. That brought him up short, and he scowled at her, perplexed. “What sickens her?” he said.

  Her smirk intensified as she eased passed him toward the threshold. “In a way, you do.” His eyebrows arched, and Anya laughed. “I’ll let her explain. I’ll return soon with tea.” She closed the door behind her, leaving him and Martise alone in the chamber.

  His wife offered him a beatific smile with lips bled of all color. Silhara’s heart lurched into his throat. She looked as ill now as when he left her to Anya’s care. His face must have revealed some of his thoughts, because she scooted across the bed and patted the space next to her in invitation for him to sit. “I’m not dying, Silhara.”

  The surety in her voice eased his fear a little and only for a moment. He sat on the bed and stretched across her, bracing an arm on either side of her head. Martise’s lips were parchment-dry against his, and he dampened them with a stroke of his tongue. “Of course you aren’t,” he murmured. “I won’t allow it.”

  Her mouth curved into another smile. She pressed a cold hand to his chest, and he straightened away from her. He followed her orders to lift so she could slide the bedcovers down. He protested at first. “What are you doing? Even with the fire going, it’s colder than a crypt in here.”

  Martise hushed him and shoved the covers to her knees, revealing the shift she wore. She captured one of his hands and pressed it to her belly, once flat and now concave from lack of nourishment. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  The simple statement, uttered in a matter-of-fact tone might as well been the edict of a god bellowed from a mountain top. Silhara snatched his hand away and leapt to his feet as if Martise had suddenly burst into flame.

  She chortled as he stood there gawking at her and then at the spot where his hand had rested. “I told Anya you’d react this way.”

  Silhara opened his mouth to reply and closed it again when no words hit his tongue. No thoughts crowded his mind either, only the two words she’d spoken that bounced inside his skull like stones skipped across a lake’s surface. He glanced at her belly, then back to her face.

  The fear bubbling just under the surface transformed into unmitigated terror, unlike any he had known since his childhood when an executioner wrapped a silk scarf around his neck in a lethal embrace and pulled tight.

  “How did this happen?” he asked in a voice hardly above a whisper and forced out between lips pressed so hard against his teeth they tingled.

  Her soft laughter died, replaced by shock and uncertainty. “The way such things usually happen,” she said in a voice reminiscent of someone cautiously approaching a wounded animal and hoping to avoid an attack.

  All the strength bled out of his legs, and his knees wobbled. He shook his head, his gaze frozen on her slight form supine on the bed. It didn’t seem possible, but she’d grown even paler. Her copper eyes were bright with tears. He’d hurt her, cut her to the bone with his response.

  He wanted to apologize, to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness, but the words were frozen on his tongue. One thought circled endlessly in his mind: this shouldn’t have happened.

  The blessing of magic bestowed on the Gifted didn’t come without a price. Most mages, male and female, did not sire or conceive children. The Gift didn’t run in a bloodline, a natural precautionary measure that seemed to insure no one family bred for power and hoarded it to themselves. The Gift was an arbitrary thing, manifesting in generations where no Gifted had ever been born or in generations where several were. Silhara and his maternal uncle possessed it; his mother had not, nor had his Kurman father. Martise was Gifted, but to her knowledge, none of her siblings and neither of parents had the Gift.

  A child born of a Gifted father or mother was unique. One born to parents who were both Gifted was exceedingly rare. Such knowledge made the brewing of potions that killed a man’s seed or closed a woman’s womb to it an unnecessary thing for him and his wife, or so he’d thought. He’d been wrong, horribly, frightfully wrong.

  Everything he’d done to protect her from corrupt gods to meddlesome priests and imprisoned demon kings had been for naught. He had become the thing most deadly to her.

  He spoke past the invisible scarf tightening around his throat. “Women die in childbirth.” His voice, already a damaged rasp, scraped the words across the space between them. “Often.”

  While the tears still shimmered in her eyes, Martise’s forlorn expression cleared. She held out her hand. “Come back to me,” she said. He grasped her fingers and let her pull him down to the bed once more. He dragged the blankets over her body, shielding her from the cold. She laid the back of his hand against her cool cheek. “Silhara, people die from many things. Often. And many more women live through childbirth than die from it. Ours would be a sparsely peopled world were that not so.” She offered him a reassuring smile. “You’ve seen yourself the many large families that abound. Those women bore several children without mishap.”

  “You aren’t just some nameless woman. You’re Martise; you’re my wife.” You are the reason I greet the day. He held that last behind his teeth and tried, for her sake, to choke back his fear.

  “And I will be the healthy, doting mother of your child.” Her eyes lightened from copper to amber, and she grinned. “I will be happy for both of us until you adjust to the idea and rid yourself of the certainty of my untimely end.”

  Silhara scowled. “This isn??
?t funny, Martise.” He glanced at the place where the blankets covered her torso. Behind her smooth skin and delicate navel lurked not a child created from the passionate devotion between a man and his wife but a threat.

  Martise squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry to tease, but I cannot fear what I consider wonderful news.”

  She didn’t say it, but Silhara heard the unspoken plea in her voice. Be happy with me. He couldn’t, not yet, not while gripped in the throes of dread over a possible future without her.

  The door opened and Anya swanned in, bearing a tray with a teapot and single cup. The scent of mint filled the room. Gurn followed behind her, carrying a bottle of Dragon’s Piss. He hadn’t bothered with the niceties of a goblet.

  The houri placed the tray on a nearby table and poured tea into the cup. She passed it to Martise. “This should calm your stomach. As Silhara knows, mint is good for belly sickness.” She turned her gaze to Silhara. “Gurn knows you well. He said you’d need something a lot stronger than tea when Martise gave you the news. By the look of you at this moment, he was right.”

  Silhara gratefully accepted the bottle Gurn handed to him, uncorked it and took a healthy swig. The drink smoked its way down his throat to settle in his gut, a pool of liquid fire. It did a fine job of clearing his head of the fear threatening to choke him.

  “Are you certain she’s with child?”

  Anya nodded. “Absolutely. Had you another woman in the house, one who had borne a child herself, you would have known sooner. She bears all the signs of increasing, except for that wasted belly. You can remedy that with bland food she can keep down. And make sure she drinks enough. Tea, water. Always with mint until the sickness fades.”

  Part of him understood and was grateful that what plagued Martise plagued all women. It could have been worse, infinitely so. There were wasting illnesses with no name and no cure. She didn’t suffer one of those at least. He just had to hope and pray (now there was a thought that brought him up short) she would survive childbirth.