Read Hart's Hope for Free Online Page B

after the coronation of the King, and the babe was being born now, well into the new autumn. Ten months. The child must have been conceived since the little ship first came into the bay of Brack, and the father of the child could only be the child’s grandfather as well. It was a terrible thing, but the ways of those who buy their power from the living blood are not to be questioned.
    The priestess of the Sweet Sisters knew better, however. She, too, could count the months, but when she poured tears, sweat, and sea-water drops on the hot pumice, they beaded up and stayed, skittering for a moment, then drifting across the rough stone like a fleet of sailboats in a bay, runing for her the message of the Sweet Sisters to this watcher by the sea. It was no incestuous child that would be born, but a daughter whose blood was filled with awesome power: a ten-month child ruled by the moon from her birth.
    What should I do? asked the priestess, terrified.
    But the water evaporated at last, leaving thin trails of salt upon the stone. It was not for her to do anything, only to watch, only to know.
    Some of the wives saw the fear in her face as the priestess looked across the water to the wizard fisherman and the hut where the babe already crawled in the sand.
    â€œShould we drive them away?” asked one.
    â€œWizards come and go as they like,” said the priestess. “The Sweet Sisters do not ban, they quicken what they find in the world.”
    â€œShould we leave, then?” asked another.
    â€œDo your men come home with empty boats or full?” asked the priestess in return. “Does the wizard do you good or ill?”
    â€œThen why,” asked another woman, “why are you afraid?”
    And the priestess caressed the quartz crystal at her throat and professed not to know.
    At last the priestess could bear no more. She got onto her feeble raft and poled her way across the placid water of the bay until she beached before the wizard’s hut. The fisherman’s daughter was playing with her child in the cool afternoon of early spring. She looked up curiously at the priestess who picked her way along the kelpy sand. The babe, too, looked up. The priestess avoided the baby’s eyes—a ten-month child is not to be caught in the gaze of a stranger—and so stared instead at the mother. She was younger than the priestess had thought, watching her from a distance. She might have been the babe’s sister. Her eyes were hot and challenging, cold and curious, and for the first time it occurred to the priestess that the mother might be more dangerous than the child.
    But it was the wizard she had come to see, not the women, and so the priestess of the Sweet Sisters went to the door of the hut, pushed aside the flap, and went inside.
    â€œClose the flap!” barked the wizard. “I could go blind from the sunlight, coming sudden like that.” When the flap was back in place, the pink-eyed fisherman stopped squinting. “You,” he said. “Took your sweet time about coming.”
    â€œI need a good day on the sea,” said the priestess. “I rarely travel.”
    â€œYou witches, who use the dead blood, you don’t ever seem to have much life in you at all.”
    â€œOut of death comes new life,” she answered. “And out of living blood comes old death.”
    â€œMay be true. I don’t much care, actually. You women never teach us your rite, and you may be sure it’s a fool who teaches a woman ours .”
    She looked around the hut and saw that it was better equipped with books than with the tools of fishing. “Where do you mend your nets?” she asked.
    â€œThey never break,” he answered. “Child’s play.”
    â€œThe child must die,” said the priestess.
    â€œMust she?”
    â€œA ten-month child is too powerful to stay in the world. You must know that.”
    â€œI’ve never studied the lore of births