room, seize his wife, demand answers from her, but his frenzy was held in check by his fear. And so he walked out slowly, forcing himself to be silent if he could not speak calmly.
Malesa sat cross-legged on the floor as he had left her, her head drooping. She looked up as he entered, and blinked as if to clear her eyes. “Are you not weary, my love?” she asked.
“No. No,” he said.
“Does your head ache?” Her voice was almost pitiful in its bewilderment.
“No,” he said. He had fasted for a day; the wine did not help him to think clearly. Malesa tried to stand up, but cried out and crumpled to the floor. He carried her to their bed.
The fever rose fiercely in her. Though he held her in his arms, she did not know him. Her flesh felt as though it would scald his hands. She spoke of many men, and his heart was chilled to hear her say the names he had heard in his dream. Weyron, Larys, Ilberar, Maneron, Raneh. She remembered them all, but she did not grieve for them. So many of them, so long ago. She spoke of men living under the rule of kings dead for three hundred years.
“I waited too long,” she said at last. “He may have known. If I had lived three more lives, I could have spoken to the trees and they would have answered me.” A little later, she spoke again. “A life for a life, and you will not grow old. The gift must be given, and the price paid.” To whom she spoke, he did not know.
Then the heat in her body seemed to fail, for a brief time. The thin silk she wore was soaked with sweat. “Ilbran,” she said urgently. Her hand shook as it clawed at his wrist. “Get me sandray and helvuln, mix them in wine.”
He knew the names; they were healing herbs. He did not know if they would cure her, or merely ease her agony.
He knew nothing more than the names, and she had many jars of dried simples on her shelves. She had taught her daughter, but her daughter lay in a drugged sleep. She had taught him nothing, and now he was glad of it. He wiped her forehead with cool water, and waited by her side.
The heat in her body grew again, and her talk grew more and more wild. Screaming, she tried to fight off her enemies, warriors and minstrels and wanderers, all she had lived with, all who had loved her. Then the convulsions began, great racking ones. Her body bent backwards like a bow; her forearms twisted themselves until a bone snapped like a dry branch. Her screams tore at the air, and were answered by the baying of the forest creatures. Towards morning, she died.
Ilbran wrapped her body in the bedcovers, hiding her face. Surely she knew herbs that would give an easier death than this? He could not grieve for her death, or for his part in it, but he was sickened by grief for what she had never been.
His daughter still slept, but it had changed from a drugged sleep to a restful one. When he touched her, she opened her eyes and murmured something, and closed them again, her eyelashes lying long on her cheek, her face burrowed into the furs.
He went back to the other room and picked up the heavy burden of his wife’s body. An hour’s walk along the paths that led nowhere, there was a clearing with an outcropping of gray stone in the center, no safehold, but still a place set apart from the forest. He laid her on it, unwrapping the bedclothes from around her. The winter mist fell coldly on her upturned face.
He did not once look behind him as he returned home. He had never known her, Malesa of the forest, who had lived with twice twelve men, and slain them, all but one.
Chapter 14
Ilbran returned, an hour’s walk on the winding paths. When he looked at the golden lindel trees, he shuddered, and had to force himself to enter the clearing. But his daughter came running to meet him, wild with joy at his return. He knelt, and held her tight, and wept.
“Your mother is dead,” he said at last. She looked at him with dark uncomprehending eyes. He tried to speak gently to her, to tell her something she could understand, something that would not destroy her.
“She ate something