Oceanborne by Katherine Irons

Author:Katherine Irons
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2011-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

“ Shouldn’t we take her to the temple?” Morgan at-Stempted to grasp his wife’s flailing hand, but Rhiannon flinched away from him and screamed.

“No! No!” she cried. “I know what you want. What you all want. You want to murder me.” Her mouth twisted, and her eyes bulged. “I don’t know you!”

“Rhiannon,” Morgan said. “Rhiannon, I’m your husband. I love you. I would never harm you.”

She bared her teeth at him, and bloody foam dripped from the corners of her mouth. “You can’t trick me! I have no husband!” She wrested a hand from the grip of a young priestess and attempted to claw Morgan with her fingernails.

Athena shook her head and waved Morgan away from the bed. “She’s still bleeding. If we try to move her, she could lose the child.”

“What’s wrong with her?” he demanded. “She’s never been like this. She was fine when I left this house to meet with the generals. We’d planned an outing with Danu before I have to leave with the troops.”

Ismene took the crown prince’s arm and led him from the bedchamber. She was one of the oldest living Atlanteans and one of their greatest healers. A small woman with white hair braided into a crown and a thin diadem of silver around her brow, the priestess retained a timeless beauty and carried herself with the grace of someone much younger. “This is no normal illness,” she said quietly. “I fear Rhiannon has been bewitched.”

Worry etched lines in Morgan’s forehead as he glanced back at his wife. “But who would want to hurt her? Rhiannon has harmed no one. She has no enemies.”

“Not her they wish to hurt, I think,” Ismene said, “but you.”

He turned his back to the doorway and began to question the healer further about this possible bewitchment in a hushed voice.

Danu slipped between her father and the doorframe to creep close to her mother’s couch. Rhiannon lay on a great round bed carved from a marble block and cushioned with thick stuffing and coverlets of the finest Fijian sea grasses. On the headboard were carved sea horses and starfish and shells so rare that they came only from a single beach in all the oceans. Her usually pale green coverlet was woven of the finest material, its pattern one that Danu loved to trace with her fingertips. Not now. Now the beautiful spread was tangled and stained with her mother’s blood.

Her mother was sick, maybe dying. Daddy had told her to stay away, that Mommy didn’t know what she was doing and she might hurt her, but Danu knew better. Her mother was a royal princess, and the best mother in the world. She told Danu every day how much she loved her. Mommy would never do anything to harm her. Besides, even if there was danger, Danu didn’t care. She wasn’t a baby. She was five, and she had fought with the dolphins against the bad men. Her mother needed her, and no one would keep her away.

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