Dancer's Rise by Jo Clayton

Author:Jo Clayton [Clayton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magic, Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Women soldiers, Fiction
ISBN: 9780886775674
Publisher: DAW Books
Published: 1993-09-22T23:00:00+00:00

head after those fools let her see the body.” He tilted his head back and watched as jesser glided by far overhead, the colors of a its wing fur lost in the haze that hung over Calanda; after a moment’s gloomy silence, he went on. “She took a dive off the bridge last night, they pulled her body out down by the Papery canal, but some prokkin’ fool was saying just this morning he saw her swimmin’ round the piers with her boy. Other things. Rats in the walls that aren’t rats, or not altogether, they look at you with knowin’ eyes; gets you in the stomach when it hap-pens.

Kids being born weird, not to look at so much, but the way they act, the things they do. They say magic went out of the world after the Son’s War, my feeling is it’s pouring back now in ways that scare the ....” He broke off again, leaning forward, his hands cupped over his knees.

“Look at her,” he said, “the little girl sitting alone by the fountain, the one with the hair that’s like melted copper. Watch her a minute.”

K’vestmilly was slowly getting used to her father’s sudden focusing on something she hadn’t even no-ticed. He had an astounding peripheral awareness and he tended to switch his attention from the person he was talking to or the job he was doing to fasten on some little thing that caught his interest. It made talk-ing to him at once fascinating and intensely irritating.

The child was two at most, a tiny thing, fragile, with huge eyes that seemed almost colorless, all the vigor in her gone into the bright hair that was pulled into two thin braids that framed her face. She sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap; her dress was faded, cut down from a larger one, but it was clean and well-tended, no tears or frayed places. Long coppery lashes fluttered as K’vestmilly stared at her.

K’vestmilly turned her head so she seemed to be watching another child, one pounding two sticks to-gether. A moment later the little girl’s mouth moved,. rounding into a whistler’s pout, though no sound came out. There was a shiver in the dusty leaves of the stunted javory growing beside the fountain; a small modary fluttered down, landed on her shoulder, rubbed its furry blue head against her cheek, and burst into joyful song. The girl looked up, stopped her whis-tling as she saw K’vestmilly watching her again. The faint color fled from her cheeks and she tensed, her body shouting her fear. The modary flung itself off the girl’s shoulder and flew away.

K’vestmilly forced herself to smile, trying to reas-sure the child, then she turned so she was facing her father, her back to the girl. “Poor little one. She’s petrified. Is there anything we can do?”

“My mistake,” he said. “Ignore her. With a little luck she’ll forget; she’s only a baby.”

“But so afraid.”

“That’s her mother’s doing; it’s her mother’s fear.” He wrinkled the beaky nose he’d passed on to her.

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