Hart s Hope Page 0,14

books and pore over them, trying to learn what it was that the witch so feared. The hints were vague and obscure, and Sleeve grew more and more frustrated with his books. They spoke so little of women's magic, for only men wrote and read these works. The ten-month child - they dreaded her, it was plain, and called for the child to die at birth, its blood poured out upon mouldering vegetation. But why the child was so dangerous they did not bother to explain, not in so many words.

All the while the child grew. In spite of his fears, Sleeve found himself liking the little one; even more surprising, he liked Asineth as well. She was not just enduring captivity, but thriving in it. Her habit of fishing with him bare-breasted was annoying, since it was obviously meant to discredit him with the local fishermen, but now that she had the child, she seemed alert and alive and the hate left her face for hours, for days at a time. Asineth was no more friendly with Sleeve, but she babbled on with the child.

"What will you name her?" asked Sleeve.

"Let the father name her," she answered coldly.

"He never will."

"Then let her go unnamed," she said. That was the only sign that she had not forgotten her woes. No matter how much her love for her daughter cheered her, she would not name the child.

"Is it fair to punish the child because you hate her father?" asked Sleeve. Then he heard his own words, realized that it was a question Nasilee's daughter might well have asked him, and left the conversation alone after that.

The visit from the witch undid him, really, though no doubt the woman thought her mission a failure. Sleeve had been growing contented there on the edge of the sea. Even though Asineth almost never spoke to him and the fishermen shunned him, still this life was the least solitary he had ever been. The fleet of little ships that put out to sea with him in the morning - they were a comfort to him. Though his fragile skin could not bear the sunlight, so that he remained forever clothed against the eyes of the Other fishermen, still there was friendship in this: that his arms knew what their arms knew, that he lived as they did with the smell of fish and salt spray and sunlight hard on the wood of the boat. For the first time in his life, he felt at one with other men, and if they could not match his wit, they were still brothers of the flesh. Asineth and the child had been a comfort, too; he had almost come to understand the home-feeling that he had always despised because it turned other men weak.

What he never noticed was that Asineth spent all morning every day inside the hut, reading whatever he had read, studying also to learn women's magic from the books that were written to men. What he never guessed was that she knew enough of the Sweet Sisters' lore that things that meant nothing to him meant much to her. Every book began with a page of warnings to guard these secrets, especially against the prying eyes of women - but Sleeve was careless of women, since only men had ever tried to steal knowledge from him. It did not occur to him that Asineth could understand what was written there.

On a day late in summer, when the child was nearing her first yearday, Sleeve finally understood a passage that had long eluded him. It was while he was on the boat, feeling the rhythm of wind and current with his feet, his buttocks, and his arms; suddenly he trembled with discovery and nearly capsized himself as the jib went flying. Only one person had anything to fear from a ten-month child, and that was the child's mother. Sleeve turned about at once and tacked back into the harbor, right among the fleet of fishermen who scrambled to maneuver their boats out of the way. They asked him for no explanation, and he did not offer any. True, the infant had done no harm till now, but now that Sleeve knew the truth he would not delay in taking precautions. It would not do to report to Palicrovol that Asineth had died because Sleeve had to finish his day's fishing before getting back to save her life.

Sleeve did not know that Asineth matched his reading day