“Silver from Gold (Part I)”

 

 

She stood, cold and alone, in darkness.

Mami said that some women could name the moment of conception, but all Analise knew was that her moment had occurred during one of many encounters almost nine moons ago. It had happened in this room; she knew that much. Not in the forest, not in the stable. In this room. His room. The room he had called his sanctuary, where he had brought her on the night of their blood vow, and on many nights afterward in the weeks before he left her. There had been so much love, so much passion. But the precise moment eluded her. She wished she knew. She wished she could have told him, but he might have left her anyway.

The room smelled stale and vaguely sour. The smells of emptiness. Not the warm, earth-and-sun smells that spoke of a living presence. She wondered why she had come. Why she had returned after all these months, on the brink of bearing her child—his child—when she had avoided the very citadel from the day he departed. Slinking up the back stairs, creeping along the corridor long after the main doors were closed … It was a drafty old place, gloomy and cold despite housing Fire in the form of Irfe’s Noni. She was here somewhere; in her own rooms, perhaps, nursing a cup of broth before retiring for the night.

The babe squirmed. Analise stroked him with loving hands, saying nothing. Tears rose in her eyes as he quieted. She could not name the moment of his being, but she knew he was a boy. Poppi had said so long before Analise had learned it for herself, long before the dream of shamir eyes and a deep, resonant voice bidding her be strong. He was a boy and he was gifted. He was the future of Irfe’s Children, the legacy of his father and the hope of days to come.

 

* * *

 

She made the sanctuary into a birthing den. It had always been sparely furnished, featuring little more than a lush nest of sleeping furs piled before the hearth. She found the furs bundled in a clothes chest, stuffed away to await Noni’s convenience. What remained of his clothes lay buried beneath the pelts; when she put on a shirt, the heat of her body roused the ghost of Luko’s scent in the fibres. She cradled her babe in her arms, curled into the soft dark furs by the fire, and cried herself to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Tero came first. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“I’m staying,” she said.

“You’ll be more comfortable at home.”

“I won’t be as safe,” she replied. “Neither will the babe.”

He nodded. “I’ll tell Mami.”

“Thank you, brother mine.”

Safe, in a cold empty room, only steps away from the woman who had forced Ana’s lover to the drastic decision of exile over murder. Tero knew all but had said little more, and Luko had said even less. But the truth remained that Ana felt no safer beneath her father’s roof than she did in Luko’s sanctuary. She had not lived here, but she had slept here. She had laughed and loved and sung and sighed and seen the stars up close. The last trace of Luko lingered in this room, the last fragment of his power lived in the walls and the floor and the furs enfolding her. She could name it no better than she could name the moment of her son’s conception, yet she felt it in her marrow and knew this was the place where the babe must be born.

 

* * *

 

Mami came next, looking stern to conceal her broken heart. “Are you certain of this, Analise?”

“Yes, Mami.”

“Shall I stay with you?”

Against a desperate desire to accept, Ana shook her head.

“Your father would wish it.”

“He doesn’t understand.”

“Naturally. All he understands is that he has a willful daughter and a terrible loss to bear. He did love Luko, my girl. He would not have sent Marko with him if he had not.”

“Does he regret sending Marko?”

“He regrets a great deal, child.”

“It’s not his fault,” Analise said. “He tried his best to dissuade me, but Luko was my heart. I couldn’t live without him.”

Mami shifted from stern to grim. She was kind enough to withhold the obvious, but she had also encouraged Luko’s play for Ana’s hand. That a wedding had not followed the blood bond was less Mami’s fault than it had been Poppi’s, though she blamed herself nonetheless. “Very well,” she sighed. “I would rather have you at home, but you won’t be moved once your mind is set. This won’t be easy, Analise. You know there will be opposition.”

“This is Luko’s room. No other authority rules here.”

“Still … ”

“Please understand, Mami. I have no choice.”

Mami frowned. “I believe those were Luko’s last words to your brother.”

There was nothing more to say. Except … “Mami, were you afraid?”

“Every woman is afraid of childbirth, Analise.”

“But you had Poppi, and Granmami Ida.”

“You are not alone, little wolf. I will send Tero every day with food and anything else you require. I would come as often myself, but yours is not the only child about to appear. I can do little better for you than that, given the circumstances.”

“Will Poppi come?”

The sadness that welled in Mami’s violet eyes countered the surly set of her jaw. “Poppi is not a midwife. When your labour begins, send for me. There will be plenty of time before the babe arrives, but I mean to attend you from the first pain. Are you certain you want bear him here?”

Ana nodded tearfully. She had sought the sanctuary for her own sake as much as her son’s. Hearing what Mami had not said confirmed the wisdom in her decision. It was better for all concerned that she birth her babe away from home.

 

* * *

 

And then came Noni. Tall, dignified to severity, beauty without soul, she stood at the threshold and confronted the dregs of her grandson’s leavings. “You may have been his whore, but that will not be his child.”

“We swore a blood vow. This child can be no one else’s.”

Noni folded her arms and squinted. “The blood ritual is valid only with Irfe’s consent. I did not grant it for him, therefore that child is no heir of his.”

“What you say cannot change what is,” Analise retorted. “Like it or not, Luko is gifted. His blood binds me to him. Neither of us needs your word to make it so.”

Noni remained contemptuous. “Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“Yet the blood bond connects all shamir to their consorts. All you need do is call and he will hear. Have you not tested your vow? Or do you fear to fail?”

Analise set her jaw, then lied. “He asked me not to. I have honoured him.”

“Though he dishonoured you. That’s too noble for one of your father’s pack.”

“If you wish to insult me, fair enough. Do not insult my father.”

Noni shook her head, gently tsking. “Loyal to all the wrong folk.”

“At least I’m loyal to someone other than myself!”

Silence too brittle to be born of Fire fell between them. Analise stayed seated on the floor, knees up and arms wrapped about them, protecting her child as best she could from the old woman’s menace. Noni stood like rock at the door, defeated by more than a belligerent girl’s defiance and determined to hide it.

“You are not the only girl who has seen these walls—or that ceiling, I daresay.”

Analise knew this for a lie. Luko had been no innocent. He had taken women for escape, for release, but he had never taken them here. The sanctuary was sacred. Yet when he had bound himself to Analise, he had lain with her in this room on that first summer night. He had made love to her and she had asked nothing more of him; he had held her in his arms and confessed he had not dared dream of such happiness. For a heartbeat, Analise had glimpsed the boy he had never been, and had loved him more deeply for the man he had become. His absence tugged, but she held fast to her resolve.

“I belong here,” she said, “and so does my babe.”

A pulse beat in the old woman’s temple. Ana braced for a fight. Remarkably, Noni relented, albeit through clenched teeth. “Bear your bastard here if you must, but you will do it alone. These rooms are forbidden until I decide what to do with them. No one comes near them without my leave.”

“I have no need of your leave,” Ana said, boldly. “Keep your people away; I’d not have them here in any case—and I’d like to see you try to bar my mother or my brother from my side.”

Noni all but sneered. “I might bar your father, then, if he was minded to join them. Apparently, he is not. Tell me, Analise: would he be so dismayed if he knew without doubt that my grandson sired his little she-wolf’s brat?”

“Ask him,” Ana dared. “Better yet, tell him yourself, after you’ve named the babe and his blood has spoken. My child is gifted, Noni. Don’t take my word. Wait for the naming. Then you’ll have to face the truth!”

It was a reckless challenge, and Luko himself would have scolded her though he had stoked his grandmother’s wrath for the brutal fun of it, but Analise regretted nothing. Whatever angst had existed between Luko and Noni now existed between Ana and Noni, without Ana knowing how or when it had happened. Perhaps it had happened with Luko’s leaving, for Ana sensed Noni’s part in that even if no one had openly blamed her. Poppi had no use for Noni and she had less use for him; perhaps it sprang from a lifetime of overhearing slanderous talk between adults. Whatever the cause and wherever the beginning, it was now Ana’s own, and she embraced it with a dogged ferocity that few but her family would say was natural.

It took Irfe’s Noni aback, but it was not her habit to retreat. Analise watched a pale face pale further, until it assumed the bloodless look of moonlit marble offset by gleaming green eyes. She had not imagined such frigid malevolence was possible in a Daughter of Irfe, but the hair prickling along her arms and the babe holding his breath in her belly warned that she had never been in greater peril.

“I am not afraid of you,” she growled, glaring through narrowed eyes.

“That may be your mistake,” Noni replied. She broke Ana’s lock on her gaze as if dismissing a negligible irritant, but Analise was certain that she spied a tremor in the old woman’s lips before she turned away.

 

* * *

 

One more came: Luko’s twin sister, Rikka. A younger cut of Noni’s cloth, beautiful with a hard edge yet still possessed of her soul, she came like a shadow in the night, long after Noni’s bedtime. Ana was brooding before the fire, picking at the picnic supper Tero had brought from home, and jumped, startled, when the tirade started.

“I am most seriously displeased with you, Jarkko’s Analise! How could you—how could you?!—come here to bear your child so close to my wedding day? Do you know what people are saying?”

Analise knew. She had known for months, from the time of her first showing, when the babe began to grow and people smiled at her approach then whispered as she passed. Poor Analise, they had said, abandoned by one man then used by another—or many others. No one really knew how many; only that Luko may have been her first, but had certainly not been her last. Wearing his ring proved nothing. The bloodstone had ceased to pulse almost immediately after his departure. It sat dark and dead in its wrought silver setting, mocking her fidelity where it had once glowed as irrefutable evidence of his. She did not know why she kept wearing it. Sighting it was a punishment.

“Analise? Are you listening to me?”

She glanced up from her hand. Rikka towered above her, glaring from the verge of tears. Luko’s sister wore pride as a sheltering cloak and propriety as a shield, weapons against prettier girls of lighter heart and easier smiles.

“I’m listening,” she said. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “What are people saying?”

Rikka balked, either unwilling or unable to recall specific details. She looked nothing like her brother, but for the majestic profile marked by a long and very prominent nose. Her hair was straight where his was wavy. Her colour was dark honey while his was hammered sun. Her eyes were grey and tilted where his were green and slanted; shamir eyes, the eyes of the gifted, who were said to see beneath the surface and detect a deliberate lie. Shamir were sworn to protect and defend, not to ridicule and revile. Luko had held his calling to heart. Had Rikka been the gifted one, Ana could not have sworn the same of her.

“I don’t mean to cast a shadow over your wedding,” she said, after an awkward and fuming silence.

“You are casting one nonetheless!” Rikka hissed. “It’s bad enough that you’re with child at all, but to bear it here … This was Luko’s haven—I doubt he would appreciate another man’s child being born in his room.”

Analise flared. “It’s not another man’s child! It’s Luko’s child and you know it!”

“I know no such thing!”

“Don’t you believe your brother is gifted?”

“I have no choice but to believe it!” Rikka shouted. She caught herself with an effort, passing a shaking hand over her brow as she struggled to regain her composure. “Because he is gifted, that child cannot be his.”

“Then whose is it?” Analise snapped. “I’ve been with no one else. We swore a blood vow, Rikka. See the mark on my palm? He cut me there and mixed his blood with mine; I felt his power sear like lightning through my veins. I was bound to him from that moment on—you know it’s true, Rikka. You know that this is your brother’s child.”

Rikka chewed on her lower lip, frowning to stay the unnatural glaze in her eyes. “My wedding,” she said lamely, when she could speak again.

“I won’t interfere with your wedding, Rikka. I simply want to deliver my babe in this room.”

Rikka regarded her as if she was mad, but most of her fervour had fled. “Do you know where he is? Have you heard from him?”

Ana shook her head.

“But the bond—”

“He’s blocked it. I can’t see him. Sometimes at night, I think that I feel him, but just when I accept it, the feeling disappears and I wonder if it was ever there at all.”

Rikka stared at her. The babe stretched and Analise shifted her weight, but Luko’s sister remained frozen between duty and desire. In the end, she chose duty. “Noni has ordered that no one attend you.”

“Will you disobey her?” Analise asked, already knowing the answer.

Rikka knew it, too. She stared a moment longer, then abruptly turned and stalked from the doorway. 

To be continued …