The Lady of Han-Gilen Read Online Free PDF

he vanished into it.
    Just short of the summit, the priestess checked her senel.
There was fear in her eyes, here where none could see.
    None but the god, and Elian dreaming. The god would not
speak. Elian could not.
    Need not. All this, long ago, the priestess had foreseen.
She had chosen it. She must not turn back, now that it had come upon her. Her
lips firmed; her eyes kindled. Lightly she touched heel to the bay’s side.
    The trees opened on a greensward, a stream and a pool, a
loom of stone. By the pool her guide waited. She rode toward him.
    Something hissed. Her stallion reared, suddenly wild,
stretched to his full height, and toppled, convulsed on the grass. A black
arrow pierced his throat.
    The priestess had sprung free and fallen, rolling. Swift
though she was, warrior-trained, her long robe hampered her; before she could
rise fully, the weight of many bodies bore her down.
    After the first instinctive struggle, she lay still. Hard
hands dragged her to her feet. Gauntleted hands; masks of woodland green and
brown, with eyes glittering behind them.
    Her guide had dismounted. Now that his part was ended, he
carried himself not at all like a farmholder; his lip curled as he looked at
her, and he swaggered, a broad dun-clad figure among the band of forest folk.
    She met his stare and smiled faintly. His eyes held but a
moment before they slid away. “If one of your folk has need of healing,” she
said, “I will tend him freely, without betrayal.”
    “Without betrayal, say you?” This was a new voice. It raised
a ripple among the reivers: a clear, cold, contemptuous voice with an accent that
could only be heard in the very highest houses of Han-Gilen.
    Its owner advanced through the circle of armed men to stand
beside the pool. A body once slender had grown gaunt with time and suffering;
hair once red-gold was ashen grey, strained back from a face which even yet was
beautiful, like an image cast in bronze. The eyes in it were lovely still,
though terrible, black and burning cold.
    The priestess regarded her in neither surprise nor fear. “My
lady,” she said, giving high birth its due, “you are well within the borders of
Han-Gilen. It is death for you to walk here.”
    “Death?” The woman laughed with no hint of mirth. “What is
death to the dead?” She moved closer, a tall sexless figure in mottled green,
and gazed down from immeasurable heights, too high even for hatred. “Dead
indeed, dead and rotted, with a curse upon my grave; for I dared the
unthinkable. High priestess of Avaryan in Han-Gilen, face to face with a
wandering initiate from the north, I accepted her into my temple. She swore by
all the holy things, by the god’s own hand she swore that she had kept her
vows. To serve the god with all her being; to Journey as he bade her, seven
years of wandering, cleaving to his laws; to know no man.
    “Aye, she served him well indeed in whatever task we set
her, even servants’ work, slaves’ work, though she boasted that she was the
daughter of a king. There were some who thought she might become a saint.
    “But saints do not grow big with child. Nor do even common
priestesses, unless they hunger after death: the sun-death, chained atop the
tower of the temple, with an altar of iron beneath them and Avaryan’s crystal
above.
    “I was slow to see. I was high lady of the temple, and she
did her service in the kitchens; and a priestess’ robe can hide much. But not
the belly of a woman within a Brightmoon-waning of her time, as she bends over
a washtub scouring a cauldron. And every priestess in the kitchens moving to
conceal her, conspiring against their lady, defying the law of their order.
    “I dared observe it. I held the trial. No answer did it gain
me, no defense save one, that the miscreant had broken no vows. Her guilt was
as clear as her body’s shape, stripped now to its shift that strained to cover
her. I condemned her. I commanded what by law I must command. ‘I have broken