Frostflower and Thorn by Phyllis Ann Karr

Author:Phyllis Ann Karr [Karr, Phyllis Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sorceress, warrior, urban fantasy, sword and sorcery, wizard
ISBN: 9781479490028
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2012-08-09T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Maldron was sleeping tonight in Enneald’s bed. He had not spent a night with his second wife since before the afternoon when he and Inmara consecrated their love to Aeronu Goddess of Birth, and, in the turmoil that followed the holy rite, he had received the wound in his shoulder. Night by night, as he retreated to Inmara’s chamber for easing of the pain in his body and spirit, Enneald had grown more impatient; day by day, her words became more spiteful. At last this evening Inmra, struggling with her own need, had begged Maldron to sleep with the younger woman. Enneald had been lonely for six nights; Maldron would displease Jehandru if he stayed away any longer from her. Inmara had the child in her chamber to help bring comfort.

The child was at once comfort, fear, and guilt. Her little Terndasen, for so Inmara had begun to call him in her own mind, might on any day be claimed by his real parents. In the meantime he was an innocent reminder of the price the sorceress had paid for stealing him. Sometimes, especially after the scaffolding and hanging two days ago, Inmara wondered how Maldron was able to look at the infant, to penetrate his wife so gently in the same room with the child. She had thought the night after the hanging, even in her own great need for comfort (coupled as it was with her need to forget the frail, wounded woman awaiting death on the gibbet), that it was strange Maldron had not fled to his younger wife’s alcove to escape the infant, or at least banished little Terndasen to Cradlelap’s care. Yet Inmara knew her husband shared her own longing for the child who seemed sometimes a gift from Aeronu, sometimes a test sent by Great Jehandru to prove their own justice when the real parents were found.

The priestess would let no woman or man claim Terndasen who could not tell her of the small red mole on the knuckle of his left middle finger. Inmara would surely have devised the test herself if Frostflower had not given it to her. But…was it still valid? The sorceress had disappeared.

Oh, it had been pitifully clear that the first tale the guards brought was false. Enneald and her daughter had believed, or pretended to believe, their garbled visions of demons; but Maldron, Inmara, even young Daseron and old Cradlelap had agreen that though Frostflower’s crime merited the strictest mortal judgment, it should not have brought the most feared demons of Hellbog up for her, not when so many sorceri of far greater wickedness had hung undisturbed by the immortals. Also, Ena the unmarried, Maldron’s sister, who had made the demons her particular study, scoffed at the warriors’ descriptions as inaccurate and foolish. Taken separately to the Truth Grove, Cutbone had confessed to beating the sorceress as she hung and then to burying the body in the marshes; but Clist had talked of a wine merchant who gave them drugged liquor and must have taken down the sorceress.

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