red fish that lay bankside in mats of roots, then flashed quicker than a frightened heartbeat into the shelter of the opposite bank.
The air was filled with a sharp scent like the paste that Nane had used on scrapes and bruises. Andiene remembered … just a few days before … she had come running down the stone stairs that led from courtyard to the cellars, slipping and rolling down the whole flight.
Nane, her nurse, had rubbed her with heal-all paste from sole to crown, till none of her brothers or sisters cared to be in the same room with her. Her face grew more grim, as she remembered, but she did not weep.
Something touched her mind like the brush of a cobweb. Then the calling began.
“Come, child,” it whispered. Pictures flashed through her mind, of peace and comfort, love, laughter, a home with fire in winter and cool refuge in summer.
It drew her for a moment, then she laughed. “Find some other bait for your trap,” she shouted.
The call came again, that dry powerful whisper. “Come, Andiene, come. Your kin have been slaughtered. Blood calls for blood. Your benefactors have been taken and tortured. Do you not owe them revenge?”
Visions came again, scenes of torture and bloodshed, ones she had seen, others she had never seen. Nahil was in all of them, smiling as he ordered his men to kill. And in one scene, a gentler one that roused her to greater rage, he smiled as he watched his lady, Amile, cradle her new-born son, the heir to the kingdom.
The call came from up the green gorge. “Will you let him live in peace and joy? Come and you will have revenge.”
Andiene clenched her right hand around a tuft of sangry leaves. The saw-toothed blades cut deep. The pain cleared her mind, the calling died away, but when she opened her hand, a dozen cuts sprang open. She sank her hand in the cold water. If she held her fingers curved slightly and motionless, the pain was less. Bloodfish gathered and lipped her skin curiously, but flickered away at the slightest motion of her fingers.
Silence. A watchful silence. No sound echoing in mind or air. So easy a victory? Hunger reminded her of her first need. The tri-fold Gifts, Tree and Grain and Thorn, were nowhere to be seen. All she could see were the fish that flickered to and fro, and how was she to catch them?
An answer came, a memory of her brother boasting to the younger children of his trip to the eastern mountains with a tutor who believed that even lords of a kingdom ought to know how to survive in the wilderness.
By the time that the sun had passed its height, Andiene regretted her idea. She lay flat on her belly at the edge of the pool, her right arm submerged up to her shoulder. At first, she had imagined touches that were not there. Now, her arm was so numb that she doubted that she could feel a fish brushing against her fingertips.
She raised her head, cautiously, so she could look down into the pool. Something moved there. Her hand clutched it, moving swifter than she had known that she could move. She flung the fish out onto the wide bank, and plunged after it to catch it and strike it with a stone before it could flap itself back into the water. Then Andiene looked at it and laughed with triumph as she turned to shout up the gorge, defying the power that lay waiting.
“I can feed myself! Do you hear me? I can feed myself! And when I choose, I will win my own revenge! I will build me a boat to take me home to my kingdom!”
The fish was not one of the swift slim bloodfish, but large, gray-brown, with long tentacles around its mouth, a sanderling. Andiene had spent long hours in the kitchens, standing out of the way of the servants, watching, so she knew what to do. She hacked off the tough unscaled hide, with a sharp stone and cut the fish open. Then she looked at it, half-sickened by her work, her stomach rebelling at the thought of eating it raw.
An answer came to her, more memories of idle talk. The descent from river gorge to beach was more difficult than the climb had been, but she stepped carefully, and did not slip. Flint struck against flint and flashed out sparks countless times, but the dry sea-grass