The sling was dyed the same deep purple as the robe, so that it almost looked as if the child’s tiny head floated at the keeper’s heart.
She’d never seen such a thing. A man carrying a child thus was strange enough. Men did not care for infants. But a keeper with a child was beyond comprehension.
She closed her eyes and opened them again, but the keeper remained, his hand extended, the sleeping babe lolling in his purple pouch.
“I have come to see the Highest Keeper,” she blurted, rubbing her eyes. “And I cannot wait until the morrow.”
“I am not Master Ivo. I am only Keeper Dagmar, but I will do what I can.”
He gripped her arm to help her stand. Baldr felt her efforts to rise, and stood as well, patting her leg, searching for her hand.
“Is this your son?” Keeper Dagmar asked.
The child was sturdy and handsome, with dark, curling hair and dimpled limbs, but his eyes were twin pools of empty green, clouded and cold, and people often stared at him in horror and hurried away.
“Yes. He cannot see,” she explained. “Some say he is marked. His eyes frighten people. But he is not evil, Keeper. He is sweet, and he is smart. His mind is not slow.”
“What do you call him?”
“Baldr.”
“Baldr the Beloved. Son of Odin,” Keeper Dagmar said.
“Baldr the Beloved. Baldr the Brave. Baldr the Good. Baldr the Wise. He is all those things,” she said proudly.
The keeper gazed down at the boy without fear and patted him on the head. His kindness made her eyes smart; it also gave her hope.
“I am of Berne, Keeper. And I need a hearing with the Highest Keeper,” she pled.
“You are sick?” he asked.
“Yes.” She knew her eyes were bright and her cheeks were red with fever, and though she tried to suppress it, a deep cough rattled and escaped from her chest. “Yes. I have been sick for a while, and I am not getting better. I am in need of a blessing. But not for myself. For my son.”
Master Ivo, the Highest Keeper of Saylok, was irritated.
The doors of the temple are open to all the citizens of Saylok during the Tournament of the King, but the doors had closed and the day was done, and he was an old man who needed his rest.
Yet this woman and her child had found their way into the sanctum, where no one but keepers and kings—and the chieftains on occasion—were allowed. Someone must have let her in.
“You must leave at once,” Ivo hissed.
“I need only a moment, Master,” she said, undeterred, and continued toward him. His perch was more throne than chair, with spikes that radiated out on the high back like rays of the sun or spokes of a wheel. It did not look comfortable, he knew, so it pleased him greatly that it was. It sat on the dais near the altar, and it was where he did all his best thinking . . . and sleeping.
The woman stopped a mere ten feet away, beside the altar, and folded her hands like a beggar.
“I would ask a blessing of you, Highest Keeper . . . and then I will go.”
She had the courage of the desperate, and it radiated from her feverish gaze and pleading lips. Though the dust of long travel and the rags of destitution cloaked her thin frame, the child who walked beside her was healthy and relatively clean.
But there was something wrong with the boy’s eyes.
The woman’s mission was suddenly clear, and Ivo cursed whomever it was who had taken compassion on her. The Highest Keeper was not the only one who could bestow a token or pardon. Every keeper spent his days during the tournament healing and calling on the runes. Yet this woman had been brought to him, slipped into his sanctum without introduction, so that he would have to tell her that some ailments could not be righted with a rune. Cowards. He would punish the lot of them.
“Did he ever see?” Ivo asked, impatient, waving toward the boy.
“No, Master. His eyes were thus when he was born.”
“He was not ill?”
“No.”
“Then I cannot heal him. I cannot restore what never was.”
The woman’s shoulders sagged, and he thought for a moment she would collapse.
He cursed the Norns who delighted in tormenting him.
“I will give you both a blessing of strength. Then you will go,” he relented.
He drew a half-hearted rune in the air, mumbling a blessing on the marrow