Read The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil for Free Online Page B

smouldering incense inside. Long-stemmed lilies and fruit were
laid out on a ledge before an icon of Enyu: a carved wooden bear statuette, with one mighty paw circling a cub.
    A curving bridge arced from one side of the Kerryn to the other. Carven pillars etched with all manner of bird, beast and fish sunk deep into the river bed. The river was a deep, melancholy
blue, its natural transparency made doleful by the salts and minerals it carried down from the Tchamil Mountains. It threw back the sun in fins of purple-edged brightness, dappling the smooth
underside of the bridge with an endless play of shifting water-light. The effect, intentionally, was that of calm and beauty and idyll.
    Tane consulted with his masters, and an aged priest examined her. He concluded that she was starving and fevered, much as Tane had said, but there were no more serious afflictions. She would
recover with care.
    ‘She is your responsibility,’ Master Olec told him. ‘See if you can keep your mind on something for a change.’
    Tane knew Olec’s withered old tongue too well to be offended. He put her in a guest room on the upper storey. The room was spare and white, with a sleeping-mat in a corner beneath the
wide, square windows. The shutters were locked open against the heat of oncoming summer. Like most windows in Saramyr, there was no need for glass – much of the year it was too hot, and
shutters worked just as well against adverse weather.
    As evening wore on to a dark red sunset, Tane brewed a tea of boneset, yarrow and echinacea for her fever. He made her sip and swallow it as hot as he dared, half a cup every two hours. She
muttered and flinched, and she did not wake, but she did drink it down. He brought a bucket of cool water and mopped her brow, cleaned her face and cheeks. He examined her tongue, gently holding
her mouth open. He checked the flutter of her pulse at her throat and wrist. When he had done all he could, he settled himself on a wicker mat and watched her sleep.
    The priests had undressed her – it was necessary to determine if she had suffered from poison thorns, insect bites, anything that might influence her recovery – and given her a
sleeping-robe of light green. Now she lay with a thin sheet twined through her legs and resting on her ribs, pushed out of place by her stirrings. It was too hot to lie under anyway, especially
with her fever, but Tane had been obliged to provide it out of respect for her modesty. He had cared for the sick before, young and old, male and female, and the priests knew it and trusted him.
But this one interested him more than most. Where had she come from, and how had she got into the state she was in? Her very helplessness provoked in him the need to help her. She was incapacitated
and utterly alone. The spirits knew what kind of ordeals she had gone through wandering in the forest; she was lucky even to be alive.
    ‘Who are you, then?’ he asked softly, fascinated.
    His eyes ranged over the lines of her cheekbones, a little too pronounced now but they would soften with the return of her health. He watched her lips press together as she spoke half-formed
dream-words. The light from outside began to fade, and still he stayed, and wondered about her.
    The fever broke two days later, yet there was no immediate recovery. She had beaten the illness, but she had not overcome whatever it was that plagued her waking hours and
haunted her dreams. For a week she was nearly catatonic with misery, unable to lift herself from the bed, crying almost constantly. Very little of what she said made sense, and the priests began to
doubt her sanity. Tane believed otherwise. He had sat by her while she sobbed and raved, and the few fragments of what he could understand led him to the conclusion that she had suffered some
terrible tragedy, endured loss such as no human should have to undergo.
    He was excused from some of his less pressing duties while he cared for his patient, though