The Queen's Truth Read online

  “He win. He kill you,” said the captain.

  “What of the others?” Kav waved to the rest of the field. Would he be expected to kill nine men today, when he had never killed one in his life? He was no soldier. He had come to run, but what did he know of the Rours? He did not even know enough to speak in their language.

  “They not danger,” said Kav’s captain. “They not dead.”

  But Kav still could not imagine his hand working the scythe over the head of the man who was nearly his friend.

  In the end, the captain did it for him. Oh, it was Kav’s hand first on the handle of the scythe, but it was the captain’s hand on top of his that used the strength to swing the blade. And in a way, Kav was grateful for the help. At least this way, Turo died quickly.

  Kav was spattered with blood, and the captain with him.

  But the captain stared at it with a fascination that repulsed Kav.

  The deeds were done, but he understood nothing, not even himself. Did he wish he had lost? Did he wish he were dead?

  He did not.

  It was after, in the cool of the evening, as the light changed in the city and there was a strange red afterglow around the second statue, that the captain took Kav back to the gate and showed him the scythe.

  He motioned and acted out and used the rudimentary Rourian that Kav knew to tell the rest of the story. The Rours honored those who were near equals in battle, but they did not make slaves of them, nor accept surrender from these. It was too dangerous to do so. An enemy held so close could not be trusted not to try again, and this time, to win.

  A race was only a battle played out in a different way, for all to see. Kav had been bound by the laws of the Rours to kill those who were most likely to challenge him in future races. The others did not matter. They could live.

  So it would be for every race that Kav ever ran. He would be obligated to kill the one closest to him at the end of the race. Or to be killed if he did not win.

  He could choose never to race again, the captain made clear. Just as clear was the fact that the captain only saw value in Kav’s life if he risked it with each race. And celebrated his life by killing those who were a threat to it.

  BLOOD-GIFT

  The white-haired woman stumbled into the Blood-Gift at dawn, sweat-drenched and panting. Why she had come the long trail over the still snowy mountains no one knew, but the size of her belly made her immediate peril clear. When the strains came, her face tightened with pain. When they left, she slept the ragged, shallow-breathed sleep of the near-dead.

  Teza was called for her. Teza the midwife who had years ago slit open a dying mother’s spasming womb to save the babe within and found that no woman wanted her at their birthing again. Teza who had in her youth been tried by six different men, in tribute to a beauty that was still not gone. Teza, still curved as a young woman who had had no children, as Teza had not.

  “Bring me blankets,” she demanded at first sight of the laboring woman. “And water, cold and hot.”

  She heard no movement behind her and turned, hands on slender hips and golden eyes ablaze. They caught on Finas, whose land the woman had fallen on. Finas, the man with seven children, two birthed by Teza in her early years, and the last born mind-crushed from a slow passage to life. A slow passage Teza was sure she could have hurried, if she had been given the chance rather than Aeria, the dunce of an apprentice she had taken ten years before.

  “I’ll use my knife, then,” Teza said, twisting it out of its pouch at her side. “To show her mercy.”

  Finas stared, but did not move.

  “You wish them all to die, then? Because they are not of our Gift?”

  “She is not of any Gift,” said Finas. It was a delaying tactic; Finas was not yet sure if the woman and her fruit should live or die. He was waiting for a sign from others to tell him his course.

  “I’ll bring blankets,” offered Kar, newly married. His wife was not yet big of belly, but he must already have been thinking of the day when she would be in the same position as the white-haired woman before him.

  “I’ll send a son for water,” The voice was Finas’s elder brother Tome. He had five grown sons, all delivered hale by Teza’s hands, and that meant much to him.

  “Thank you,” Teza said softly, the courtesy coming awkwardly to her mouth. She was not used to living closely among others.

  She felt rather than saw Finas leaving, along with any others remaining. Their interest in the woman had waned. And a birthing was not a pretty work to watch. Or so she had heard from complaining voices.

  As for Teza, she thought the moment a touch of the one-eyed God, as like as she would ever get to the prophet’s Mind-Gift. But it was also true that since she had never been through the pain herself, it might be easier for her to glorify than another woman.

  Teza knelt down beside the woman and felt her burning forehead. If not for the pale coloring, she might have thought the woman of the Fire-Gift, practicing her art in childbirth to ensure her children would take after her easily.

  But Finas had been right. She was not of the Seven Gifts. And who knew what sort of child she would bear here?

  Teza palpated the woman’s stomach when it went soft again. Head down there. That was good. Perhaps the only reason she was having difficulty was that she had pressed herself too hard to finish her journey. Perhaps the child would slide out of her now, without too much Work.

  But as Teza continued her examination, she found another head, by the legs of the first, under the mother’s ribs. Twins, then, and the second was breech. Perhaps Teza could turn it later. It would be excruciating for the mother. But only if she were still conscious to feel the pain. Only if she survived the first.

  And if she did not, then what? What would be done with twins born without a Gift? Would they be returned to the White Kingdom? Teza suspected not. Those of the Blood-Gift were not known for their daring, and such journeys were dangerous. Likely they would say there was no hope of finding kin for the children anyway. And someone would have to be found to raise them. Someone who had no children of her own. Someone--like me.

  And so Teza thought of them as hers even then, though she chided herself that she should not steal from another woman, not even a woman of the White Kingdom, not even a woman who breathed death in shallow, hissing breaths. Teza worked as hard to save the white woman’s life as she had ever worked before. There must be no suspicion that she had caused the death, or even hastened it. Not if the children were truly to be hers.

  Teza lifted the woman’s linen shift and massaged the hole for the first of the twins to come through, softening it with oil, and widening it with the stretch of her fingers. Then she closed her eyes and used her Gift to search through the pain-wracked woman’s blood, through the womb to the membranes still pulsing on the wall of the great room of life. Two membranes, so they were not twins of the same face. The first was a girl, the second a boy.

  Was it possible? Among the Seven Gifts, Teza had never known of a woman who could carry both male and female. A man might give them to her in his seed, but a woman’s blood seemed to cling to one or the other. Teza had felt women in the early weeks of pregnancy with both, but she had never in any of the Gifts found a woman who had carried both for nine months and delivered them safely.

  But it must be different in the White Kingdom. Who knew, really, when no one had ever been there and there were only the few traders who came to the Circle with their tales that could be neither proved nor disproved?

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked close to her ear. It was a rumbling sound, like thunder that shook the earth.

  Teza knew who it was before she turned. She would have known him beside her if he had not said a word. His scent was as unique as the elderflower that Teza used to cut her patient’s pain. If she were of the Weave-Gift, she knew she could have made him clothing of any design without ever sizing him. If she were of the Stone-Gift, she could have made a statue of him without ever opening her eyes
.

  “Davoren,” she said.

  And though she did not need to look, still she did it. Davoren, tall and slender as Teza remembered he had been in his youth, but no longer as handsome. His face had been burned in the fire that had killed his three daughters. He had been the last of the six who had tried for Teza, and afterwards he had vowed in his grief for her never to try in the Blood-Gift again. The woman who bore his three daughters had been of the Fire-Gift, and the fire which killed them part of their apprenticeship to her.

  “Good noon, Teza,” he said. And then again, the offer of assistance.

  “Tome is already fetching water, and Kar fresh blankets. I do not know that there is much else to do for her.” She reached for the woman’s brow, to wipe the hair from her eyes.

  “I can do that,” said Davoren.

  Teza hesitated.

  “What use a man’s hands if he does not wear them out?”

  Teza sighed. Davoren and his homilies. Why was it that she loved them so? But she yielded nonetheless, waited for their hands to touch. Davoren was too careful for that, of course. He moved into her place like a sapling into its grandfather’s shoes. Near, but not touching. Not the same.

  “Thank you,” said Teza. Not grudgingly this time, but wistfully. Then she waited for the next contraction to begin, to count out its length. Was the woman in the shift already? Or had she not yet reached even that?

  Ten moments, then the stomach contracted, hard and tight. Teza counted thirty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred. Then at last the top of the hill began to soften. No more than ten more seconds rest, and the process began again.

  “Will she live?” asked Davoren. He could see into her Blood, but he did not know midwifery. He did not know what was right—and what was wrong.

  Teza looked around, but there were no others about.

  “She is already dead,” she whispered truth. “I fear the journey killed her leagues back. It is only the lives within her that keeps her breathing.”

  Davoren seemed to measure the woman’s stomach with his eyes. “A boy and a girl,” he said. “I have heard of such things among the great houses of the White Kingdom.”

  “They may die, as well,” said Teza. But it was herself she reminded, not him. It would hurt too much if she lost them.

  “She wakes.”

  Teza shook herself and looked into the woman’s pinkish eyes, blinking with panic and pain. “You are safe,” she said. There was no sign that the woman understood.

  “Dua bit lachar,” Davoren repeated, in the rough language of the White Kingdom.

  “Sholo, sholo,” moaned the woman. “Taralactar.” Then her eyes closed once more.

  But Teza saw her push with the next contraction, so she had not gone entirely back to the world of Inbetween.

  “What did she say?” Teza asked Davoren. She had not known he could speak the language of the Kingdom.

  Davoren shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I thought you—”

  “I learned a few words, in my youth. From a group of traders that came to offer their ‘coin’ in exchange for a Water-Gifted one.”

  “They are water-poor in the White Kingdom,” said Teza.

  “Yes, but they found no Water-Gifted to leave the Circle.”

  “No.” It seemed impossible to Teza, as well. Even she, who had been excluded from so much of the Blood-Gift, would not think of leaving the Circle.

  “I think she said something about the children. About holding them.” Davoren’s good eye squinted in thought. The other, lifeless and glazed did nothing. Its lid was puckered, so that it seemed in constant consideration.

  “Well, I will do my best, then,” said Teza. “Though I had hoped she would stay unknowing until they were born. It will be more difficult to her to hang onto life through the pain.”

  “I will hold her hand,” said Davoren. “She can squeeze it if she needs strength.”

  Had he done that for his wife during her travails? Teza wondered. That had been one woman whose births she had refused to participate in. Teza had hated Ulaxi, Davoren’s wife.

  “I can feel the head,” said Teza. The mouth of the womb was fully opened, but the head had not yet passed through.

  “I am glad you are with her, Teza. The two would die with any other,” said Davoren solemnly.

  Teza stored his words in her heart, to hear again later. For now, she could not spare even the strength to understand them. She held open the mouth of the womb as another contraction came upon the woman.

  She pushed. Her lower teeth grasped her upper lip and Teza saw it beginning to bleed.

  “Get her a piece of wood,” she told Davoren with a quick breath. “She needs something to bite on.”

  But Davoren could not reach any wood. The woman would not let go of his hand, and the wood was out of his reach—and Teza’s. Where were the others who had gone away? Why did it take them so long to return.

  At last the blankets arrived, and the water soon after, with Tome’s bumbling eldest son. Took after his uncle rather than his father, that one, thought Teza. But she grabbed it and sprinkled the ground between the woman’s legs, then laid the blanket on top of her.

  “Sholo,” muttered the woman.

  “Calm, calm,” said Davoren in the language of the Gifted.

  Teza felt the woman’s breath become more difficult. The girl’s passage downward had been halted by the boy’s outstretched hand.

  “I’m going to have to pull the first one out,” Teza said to Davoren. “You must hold her down.” It would be terrible, for something must break. Whether it would be the first child, the second, or the woman herself, Teza did not know.

  “I will hold her,” Davoren promised.

  Teza hesitated a moment longer. Was Davoren strong enough to hold her alone? Or should she ask Tome’s son? Or Kar? No. Better one man she could trust than three she could not.

  Teza put her hand into the canal of life. The head was slippery with blood and sack-water. If only the woman could push an inch more, she could get a handle on it.

  The woman pushed. Teza’s hands found the right position.

  “Now,” said Teza, to warn Davoren. Then she yanked hard. She both heard and felt the boy’s arm break.

  The woman screamed, her back twisting into the air until Davoren forced it back to the ground.

  But Teza had the girl’s head out of the woman now. Her legs were splattered with blood, the babe’s and her own. She began chanting to herself in words so soft and mumbled Teza did not think she could understand if they were in her own tongue. When the pangs came, she ignored them.

  It was up to Teza to work with them now. Another tug, and she pulled out the shoulders of the girl. Behind them, in a rush like water falling down a mountain, came the rest of the body.

  “Elin,” said the woman.

  Not bothering to cut the cord, Teza handed the infant up to her. The little girl was surprisingly alert, considering her rough passage. And she was not crying, either, with the surprise of air in her lungs. She nuzzled around her mother’s breasts for milk. But the mother had something else in mind, and lifted her with trembling arms above her chest.

  “Davoren—”

  “I will watch her,” said Davoren.

  The woman looked the girl intently in the eye, and Teza could feel the power drain from her as she used a Gift that Teza had never seen before. That it was a Gift Teza knew from the feel of the air around her, as though Blood had been pushed through a new vein. As though a bubbling geyser of hot Water had risen in the place of the woman’s heart. As though she had become Wood twisted with sudden violent need. As though she had found a piece of Stone demanding form before her. As though she had created a new dye for her Weaving in birthing this child.

  These were the metaphors Teza thought in because they were the Gifts she knew. And Teza knew all the Gifts of Seven. Blood, Fire, Water, Stone, Wood, and Weave were the six. The seventh, the Mind, Teza knew less well, but she had
been present once when the old prophet, the old Mind-Gifted Kord, had made his judgment on her father Bunnik. And the newer prophet Jham had come several times since then.

  It had never occurred to her that there might be more Gifts than these, that the Red-Father might have favored the children of other lands with their due. But it must be, for the white-haired woman’s Gift did not truly fit the pattern of any of the Seven. Teza wondered what she called it, and how many others there were like her, all unknown in the Circle?

  The woman’s arms dropped to her sides; the girl fell to the woman’s chest with a dull, low sound.

  “She is going,” said Davoren. “I feel it in her pulse.”

  Teza thought of the boy still trapped inside her.

  “Gone,” said Davoren quietly. He picked the mewling infant up in his own arms, for the woman no longer needed his attention. “She is healthy. And beautiful as her mother.”

  Teza thought he meant the dead woman, but then he raised the girl to her, and she saw the truth in his eyes. It was joy and pain at once, to know that Davoren had seen how she fit with this child, even as she had.

  “The boy,” she said, her hands still between the woman’s legs. She had thought to make herself give it up, but she could not. Having once thought he was hers, she could not let him die without a fight. No more than she could have given up a child that had truly been of her womb.

  “The boy cannot be saved except with the knife,” said Davoren. “And you have been forbidden the knife in birthing, you know that.”

  It had never been done before, and so it had not been forbidden the first time Teza had tried it. Now she did not have the excuse of innovation to protect her. She would be judged by the prophet himself if she disobeyed the law, judged and banished from her home Gift. But with the boy, she could not care.

  “Turn away,” she said to Davoren. She did not want him to be blamed for her daring.

  “The eyes are meant to see,” said Davoren softly. “The ears to hear.”