The Winged Histories Read Online Free PDF Page B

swordmaiden will hold evil in one hand, or, if she fights with a Nainish blade, in both. Consider then the purpose of each stroke. Maris the Crooked was asked on her deathbed: “What led you to turn against your king?” She answered: “Ask the women of Oululen.” This was a people who had been destroyed by the armies of King Thul: it is written that “their very names became dust.” When the men of Oululen had perished, the women took up arms. The last of them died defending herself with a harrow.
    The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.
    Maris was a renegade general, Galaron a rebel, the False Countess a bandit. Which of these now reclines on a couch of light?

    When I came down from the hills that rainy spring with a shattered thigh they had already sent most of the servants away, and the east and north wings of the house had been shut off and locked and the unused keys hung in a row in Mother’s cabinet. Even from the window of the carriage the house and grounds looked lonelier, as if an expected visitor had failed to arrive. At the time I thought the gloom was caused by the unseasonable rain that dripped from the eaves and darkened the sand in the court.
    Mother came out to greet me with a shawl over her head, tripping lightly across the mud in her felt slippers. “Oh Fulmia,” she cried, “have you brought her?”
    “Yes, sudaidi,” Fulmia called, “and the two of us can take her, she weighs no more than a chicken.”
    “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “Get Fodok and Gastin.”
    Mother had climbed into the carriage and she knelt beside me and kissed my cheeks and brow. Her hair was loose and her face was wet with rain or tears and she wanted to embrace me but since I was lying down she could only squeeze my shoulders.
    “Drive on,” Fulmia shouted.
    Mother’s shawl had slipped and fallen onto my chest. The carriage shifted, getting closer to the door.
    “Don’t try to lift me yourselves,” I said. Her hair blocked the light and the pallor that was her face moved slightly as she raised her hand to her eyes.
    “Do you hear her, Fulmia?” she sobbed. “She says we’re not to do it alone, we must bring Gastin. Call him, Fulmia. Call Gastin.”
    The carriage stopped, the doors opened, and as they eased me out the rain dropped on my face and I blinked in the cold rain-light.
    The servants gathered by the door, the children staring at me and sucking their fingers as I was carried across the court. “Don’t let me fall in this mud,” I said, and everyone laughed. They carried me under the lintel into the warm air of the amadesh. There was the same soft yellow glow and the odor of roasting apples and I closed my eyes and let my head roll against Gastin’s shirt; I could hear him breathing and feel him gripping me carefully as they took me down the hall where there was less light. I opened my eyes.
    “ Not so quickly, ” Mother was saying.
    “And look at your slippers!” Nenya cried. “All over the carpets too.”
    At the end of the hall stood Father. He stood very straight at the foot of the stairs where the glassed-in porch opened into the hall and looked down on me sternly and held his pipe. As we lurched past he turned his head aside and muttered something. I craned my neck as we started up the stairs, catching a glimpse of his slightly rounded back and the shawl about his shoulders as he went back to the gray light of the porch.

    I lay in that room all through the spring and they brought up my meals on a tray. Outside a milky froth of blossoms came out on the trees, pink and then white, and I rested propped on pillows and watched the changes in the section of orchard visible from my window. When it rained Mother came and read to me, her voice keeping back the thunder. We read Hodis the Solitary and Tales from the White Branch , and the whole Romance of the Valley and a number of similar stories, all the tales I had