A contraction doubled her over. When it passed, strong hands took hold of her and lifted her gently atop Daybreak. She sat sidesaddle as best she could. Derreg mounted behind her, enclosed her in his arms as he whickered at the mount.
She hissed with pain as the horse started to move. She kept one hand on her belly, felt the movement of her child within.
“The abbey isn’t far,” Derreg said. “Tell me if it becomes too much to endure.”
“It’s tolerable,” she said. “But please hurry.”
The rest of the patrol fell in around them as they rode through the pass. The way narrowed as they followed a winding, circuitous path of switchbacks and side openings. A mist formed around them, thick and pale, obscuring vision. Whispers sounded in her ears, sibilant words suggesting a meaning that slipped away just prior to understanding. She thought she heard Erevis’s name in their whispered tones, and another name, too: Erevis’s real name—Vasen.
“Try to ignore the whispers and whatever else you see,” Derreg said to her softly.
She nodded, alone with her pain. “Please hurry.”
Faces formed in the mist, men and women with eyes like holes. They dissipated moments after forming, fading like lost memories. She squeezed her eyes shut, but still the fog tugged at her clothes, pawed at her belly. Still the voices hissed in her ears, speaking of her child.
It’s the child, they said.
He’ll dream of the father.
And the father of him.
“They know me!” she said, terrified.
“No,” Derreg said. “They’re the voices of spirits that serve the Oracle and guard the way, but they’re harmless to us. They only confuse. Don’t heed them.”
Varra swallowed, nodded, and ignored the voices. She soon lost all sense of direction. The pass was a maze, and the voices of the spirits thickened her perception, dulled her mind. The moments passed with agonizing slowness. She tried through force of will to delay the birth of her child.
The birth of Erevis’s child.
The child, the voices said. The child.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wondering where Erevis was, if he was safe. He had left her to save his friend and she had reconciled herself to it, but she missed him still, and always would. She hoped he was well, but Derreg’s words resounded in her mind—Ordulin is a wasteland. Sembia is gone.
How could that have happened so fast?
“Oh, gods,” she whispered, as realization broke over her. It seemed impossible, and yet. . .
“What’s wrong?” Derreg asked.
“What year is it?” she said, her voice breaking on the rocks of the question. She braced herself for the answer. Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Year?” Derreg said. “By Dalereckoning, 1450.”
The child squirmed within her and she cried out.
The child is come, said the voices.
“Are you all right?” Derreg asked.
She nodded as one pain passed, replaced by another.
1450.
How was that possible?
Seventy years had passed in what felt to her like moments. She wrestled with understanding but failed. She could not make sense of it. Her child was seventy years old before he was ever born.
She began to weep, not with pain but with grief for all that she’d lost, all she’d left behind.
“How can this be?” she whispered, and had no answer.
If Derreg heard her, he offered no answer, either.
They emerged from the mist, leaving the voices of the spirits behind. Through tear-filled eyes, she watched the last, glowing sliver of the sun sink behind the western mountains, watched the long shadows of the peaks stretch across the pass. The already meager light faded to black. They had reached a forested vale. Huge cascades fell from cliffs and a simple stone abbey was nestled in the trees.
The priest’s head appeared between her knees. Sweat slicked his thin hair to his pale, age-spotted scalp. The dim lantern light put shadows in the hollows of his cheeks.
“If I’m to save the child, you must not push until I say.”
“Breathe in and out slowly,” the midwife said.
Varra swallowed, nodded. The rush of her heart boomed in her ears. A contraction girdled her pelvis in agony. She screamed, and the portly midwife, wincing, sopped up more blood from the bed, cast some of the sheets into the gory pile on the floor.
“I’m thirsty,” Varra said.
“Almost,” the priest said, not hearing her as he stared into her body and tried to save her child.
“Do something!” said Derreg from somewhere behind Varra. “She’s in too much pain.” He had refused to leave her since bringing her to the abbey.
“We’re doing all we can, Derreg,” the priest said, tension putting an edge on his voice.
“Do more!” Derreg said.
Varra focused on her breathing and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. Her entire frame of reference distilled down to an awareness of only her abdomen, the birth canal, the child she was soon to deliver. But there was no ease from the pain. Her vision blurred. She feared she would be too weak to push when the priest told her to do so. She feared she would never see her child.
She screamed again as the priest manipulated the child within her, a dagger in her belly.
“Get the child out!” Derreg said, stress causing his voice to break.
The priest looked up from between Varra’s legs, looked first at her, then past her to Derreg.
“I can’t. It’s dying. The cord is . . .”
He trailed off, but his words left Varra hollow.
“No,” she said, and tears wet her cheeks. “No.”
The priest looked at her, his expression soft, sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”
“You are not trying hard enough, Erdan!” said Derreg, and she heard him move across the room toward the priest, although he remained behind Varra, out of sight.
The priest’s soft voice never lost its calm. “I’ve done all I can, Derreg. We must . . . take steps if the woman is to have a chance.”
Varra felt Derreg’s hand on her head, on her hair, a protective gesture that soothed her, warmed her.
How strange, she thought. She realized in the clarity of the moment that in another time, another place, he was a man she might have loved, despite the difference in their ages.
“Her name is Varra,” Derreg said. “And there must be something—”
“Cut the child out,” Varra said, her voice as soft as rain, its quiet resolve slicing through the room.
Derreg’s hand lifted from her head as if he were recoiling.
The priest looked as if she had spoken in a language he could not understand. “What did you say?”
The midwife squeezed Varra’s hand. “You’re not clearheaded—”
“Cut my child out,” Varra said, louder, her mind made up. Her body tensed, a contraction gripped her, the child moved within her, and she screamed. “Cut it out! I’m already dead! I see it in your face!”
The priest and the midwife stared at her, eyes wide. Neither gainsaid her words.
“I’m already dead,” Varra said, more quietly, the words spiced with her tears, her grief.
The priest swallowed, his tracheal lump bouncing up and down. “I haven’t prepared the correct rituals, and I do have not the needed tools . . . ”
“A knife will do,” Varra said, and managed to keep her voice from faltering. The room began to spin. She closed her eyes until it subsided.
“A knife?”
“There’s little time,” Varra said.
“Right, of course,” the priest said, looking past her to Derreg, as if for permission.
Derreg’s hand returned to Varra’s head, cradling it as he might an infant, as he might a daughter. His fingers twisted gently in her sweat-dampened hair. She reached up and covered his hand with hers as her tears fell. His skin felt as rough as bark. His bearded face appeared next to hers, his breath warm on her cheek.
/> “You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“It’s my child,” she said, three words that said everything there was to say about anything. Her eyes went to the sheets piled along the wall, a crimson pile. “I’m dead already. We both know that.”
The priest produced a small knife and held it aloft in a shaking hand. The lantern light flickered on its blade. Stress squeezed sweat from his bloodsmeared brow.
The midwife’s clammy fingers clenched Varra’s hand. Varra alone seemed to feel calm.
“Derreg, listen to me,” Varra said. “Someone . . . did something to the child, changed it. I do not know what, but it’s my child. Mine. Do you understand?”
His hand squeezed hers. He buried his forehead in her hair.
She breathed in the smell of him—he still smelled of the rain—and wondered how she could have come to care for him so much in mere hours, in mere moments. How cruel that they’d had only hours to share rather than a lifetime.
“I understand,” he said.
She swallowed in a throat gone dry, nodded. To the priest, she said, “Do it.”
The priest winced, steeled himself to his work.
“This will pain you,” he said, but did not move.
“Do it,” Varra said. “Do it now.”
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. His hand shook uncontrollably.
The midwife took the knife from the priest’s hand, stared for a moment into Varra’s eyes, and began to cut.
Varra walled off a scream behind gritted teeth as the edge slid across her abdomen and opened her womb, spilling warm fluid down her sides. The midwife’s resolve spread to the priest and he moved forward to assist.
Spots formed before Varra’s eyes. Sparks erupted in her brain. She might have been screaming, she could not be certain. She felt the priest and midwife manipulating the hole they’d made in her, felt them reaching inside her.
She was screaming, she realized, swimming in pain, in blood.
She focused on Derreg’s hand, its solidity, the gentle way it cradled her own. Warmth radiated from his flesh, dulled the edge of her agony.
He would never leave her, she thought. Never.
Something warm and wet pattered on their joined hands. Her fading consciousness mistook it for blood at first, but then she realized it was tears. Derreg’s tears. She felt his mouth near her ear and he whispered words of faith.
“From ends, beginnings, from darkness, light, from tragedy, triumph. Night gives way to dawn, and dawn to noon. Stand in the warmth and purifying light of Amaunator who was Lathander and fear nothing. Fear nothing, Varra.”
She felt herself fading, slipping. The room darkened.
“Care for him,” she whispered to Derreg.
“Him?” Derreg said.
Varra nodded. She knew the child would be a son, a son for the father, the spirits in the pass had told her. “His name is Vasen. After his father.”
“I will, Varra,” Derreg said. “I promise.”
Varra heard a rush like roaring surf. The room darkened. She could no longer see. She felt herself drifting, floating in warm water, sinking . . .
She heard a tiny cough, then a newborn’s cry, the defiant call of her son as he entered a world of light and darkness.
She smiled, drifted, thought of Erevis, of Derreg, and feared nothing.
Derreg had slain many men in combat, had seen battlefields littered with corpses, but he had to force himself to look on Varra’s body, at the bloodsoaked bed, at the opening in her abdomen out of which Erdan, the priest, had mined the child. Her face, finally free of pain, looked as pale as a new moon.
He could not release her still-warm hand. He held onto it as if with it he could pull her back to life.
“She is gone,” the midwife said. “Gone to light.”
Derreg nodded. He’d known Varra perhaps two hours, but he had felt a connection with her, a whispered hint of what might have been had they met under other circumstances. Through sixty winters he had never married, and now he knew why. He was to meet his love only in the twilight of his life, and he was to know her for less than a day.
He thanked Amaunator for that, at least.
“What’s wrong with it?” the midwife said, her exclamation pulling Derreg’s attention from Varra.
Hand to her mouth, the midwife backed away a step from the birthing bed, a step away from the child. Erdan, eyes as wide as coins, held the baby out at arm’s length, as he might something foul.
The child, pinched, dark, and bloody, his legs kicking, cried in sharp gasps. The umbilical cord still connected him to Varra, and a thin vein of shadow twined around the cord’s length and slowly snaked toward the child as if the baby—Vasen, Varra had named him—had received nourishment not only from blood but also from darkness. Vasen’s eyes flashed yellow with each of his wails.
“It’s born of the Shadovar!” said Erdan, and looked as if he might drop the child. “Look at it! The darkness moves toward it!”
Vasen’s appearance and the coil of shadow around the umbilical made the claim hard to deny, but deny it Derreg did.
“He’s born of this woman, Erdan. And his name is Vasen.”
The child kicked, wailed.
“It must be killed, Derreg,” Erdan said, although uncertainty colored his tone, and he paled as he spoke. “If the Shadovar learn of the abbey . . .”
“Killed?” the midwife said, and put her hand to her mouth. “A child? You cannot!”
“No,” Derreg said, his hand still holding Varra’s, feeling it cool. “We cannot. You heard me give this woman my word. I’ll keep it.” He let go of Varra’s hand and held out his arms for the child. “Give him to me.”
Erdan looked dumbfounded, his mouth half open. His two rotten front teeth looked as dark as Vasen’s skin.
“Give him to me, Erdan. It’s not a request.”
The priest blinked, handed the blood-slicked boy to Derreg, then wiped his bloody hands on his yellow robes.
Vasen stilled in Derreg’s hands. His small form felt awkward, fragile. Derreg’s hands were accustomed to holding hard steel and worn leather, not a babe. Shadows coiled around the baby, around Derreg’s forearms.
“You’d damn us all for the child of a stranger?” Erdan said, his tone as much puzzled as angry.
Derreg did not bother to explain that he did not regard Varra as a stranger. “I gave my word.”
“I must take this to the abbot. I take no responsibility—”
“Yes,” Derreg snapped, unable to keep the sharpness from his voice. “You take no responsibility. I understand that quite well.”
Erdan tried to hold Derreg’s gaze, failed.
“Give me the knife,” Derreg said.
“What?”
“The knife, man. I can’t use a sword on the cord.”
Muttering, Erdan handed Derreg the small knife he’d used to cut open Varra’s womb. With it, Derreg cut the shadow-veined umbilical, separating boy from mother, then wrapped him in one of the sheets stained with Varra’s blood.
“You must find a—” the priest began.
“Shut up, Erdan,” Derreg said. “I know he’ll require a wet nurse. I’m childless, not a dolt.”
“Of course,” Erdan said. He stared quizzically at the boy. “The shadows, Derreg. What is he if not a shade?”
“What he is,” Derreg said. “Is my son.”
Holding the boy against his chest, Derreg stepped to Varra’s side and leaned over her so the boy could see his mother’s face. Her mouth was frozen in a half smile, her dark eyes open and staring.
“That is your mother, Vasen. Her name was Varra.”
“You know the abbot will consult the Oracle,” said Erdan. “You risk much.”
“Perhaps,” Derreg said. He stared down at the tiny, bloody child in his arms—the tiny nose, the strange yellow eyes, the dusky skin, the thin black hair slicked back on his small head. He resolved that he would not turn Vasen over to the abbot, no matter what the Oracle
said. “If the Oracle sees danger in the child, I’ll take him from here. But I won’t abandon him.”
Erdan studied him for a moment, then said, “I will see to the woman’s— burial. And we’ll see what the abbot and Oracle say. Perhaps I’m mistaken. I was . . . surprised by the boy’s appearance and spoke hastily. Harshly, perhaps.”
“It’s forgotten, Erdan,” Derreg said softly. He knew the priest to be a good man.
“I’ll prepare her . . . body for the rituals,” said the midwife. “I, too, was—”
The lantern light dimmed and the shadows deepened. The child uttered a single cry and burrowed his face into Derreg’s chest.
Derreg felt pressure on his ears, felt the air grow heavy and found it difficult to draw breath. The shadows in the far corner of the room swirled like a thunderhead, their hypnotic motion giving Derreg an instant headache. He caught a pungent, spicy whiff of smoke, the smell somehow redolent of times old and gone.
“By the light,” said the midwife, fear raising her voice an octave.
The shadows coalesced. A presence manifested in the darkness.
“Shadovar,” Erdan hissed. “I told you, Derreg!” Then, to the midwife, “Get aid! Go!”
She ran from the room without looking back, stumbling over the bloody sheets in her haste.
The entire room fell deeper into darkness, the lantern’s flame reduced to the light of a distant star.
Cradling Vasen against his chest, Derreg drew his blade and took a step backward, toward the door. “Go, Erdan. Now.”
“You have the child,” Erdan said, taking his holy symbol in his hand. “You go.”
An orange light flared in the darkness—the glowing embers of a pipe bowl. They lit the face of the man who resided in the shadows, a man who was the shadows.
Long black hair hung loose around a swarthy, pockmarked visage. A goatee surrounded the sneer he formed around the pipe’s stem. He was missing an eye and the scarred, empty socket looked like a hole that went on forever. The embers in the pipe went dark and the man once more disappeared into the shadows.
“Maybe you should both stay,” the man said, and the lock bolt on the door slid into place.