Feast of Souls by C.S. Friedman

Author:C.S. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2016-03-25T12:04:05+00:00

The dwelling that Erda brought her to was a good mile from town, a long hike on a humid day. Kamala shouldered the heaviest burdens from the day’s shopping, as she thought a young boy would offer to do. Her back was sore from the effort (how easily sorcery might have lightened the load!) but she hardly felt the pain for the excitement of what was to come. Was it possible she was about to meet the source of all her power? Or if not hers, then that of some other Magister?

The cabin was a small one, crudely built out of logs from the surrounding forest, with a pen for livestock flanking it on the near side and some kind of cultivated garden at the far end. Erda ushered Kamala inside, into a single living chamber with a stone fireplace dominating its center. The windows were small, better suited to keeping out the winter’s cold than admitting a cool breeze in summer, and the smell of sweat and sickness hung heavy in the still air. It took no sorcery to locate the source. There were several narrow rope beds set into alcoves flanking the room, and on one of them a small figure lay still, swathed in blankets better suited to winter than this humid season.

When in doubt, sweat the sickness out, her mother had once said. It hadn’t worked for Kamala’s brother; she doubted it would work for this patient either.

“That’s her, over there.” Erda put down her basket on a rough-planked table and made some manner of religious sign over her heart, as she indicated a small bed in the farthest alcove. “May the gods ease her suffering.”

Kamala lowered her own bundles to the floor. “How long has she been sick?”

The woman hesitated. “It began in late winter, we think, though the first signs were subtle, so we may mistime it. We thought it a lesser illness, at first. Been a short month now since she took to bed for most of the day, and she’s too weak these days even to rise to use the pot.” Her eyes met Kamala’s and for the first time were not filled with suspicion or even despair, simply with exhaustion. “Please do what you can,” she begged. “I’ve tried all else.”

Kamala nodded and moved toward the bed. She could not see the figure within it until she drew close, and when she did at last, she exhaled sharply in surprise.

It was a child.

She was a tiny girl—so very small!—with hair of that pale shade that never lasts to adulthood, now plastered by the sweat of sickness to her brow. A frail wisp of a girl, ghostlike. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of blue but they stared vacantly into space, lifeless, and she did not acknowledge the presence of others around her by either sound or motion. A tiny doll of a child, porcelain-pale, whose hollow cheeks and deep-shadowed eyes bore witness to some sort of wasting disease.

“Can you help her?” her mother asked, wringing a corner of her apron in her hands.

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