he’d described, and I feared that somewhere out there, among the other Mayfairs, he’d fathered a male, and the male would find her and they would breed. That would have been his victory. In spite of all I suffered and what Michael had suffered, and all the Mayfair witches, from the beginning, for this … this coupling, this triumph of the Taltos.”
Ash nodded.
“My daughter had come to me in love,” said Rowan.
“Yes,” Ash whispered, obviously eager for her to go on.
“I shot my own daughter,” she said. “I shot my own lonely and unprotected girl. And she’d cured me, she’d come to me with her milk and given me this and healed me of the trauma of her birth.
“That’s what worries me and what worries Michael, that you should know this, that you’ll discover it, that you, who want to be close to us, will be horrified when you discover that a female might have been within your grasp if I hadn’t snuffed out her life.”
Ash had leant forward in the chair, his elbows resting on his knee, one finger curled beneath his soft lower lip, pressing into it. His eyebrows were raised, coming together in a frown only slightly, as he peered into her face.
“What would you have done?” Rowan asked. “If you had discovered her, my Emaleth?”
“This was her name!” he whispered, amazed.
“The name her father gave her. Her father had forced me and forced me, though the miscarriages were killing me. And finally, for some reason, this one, Emaleth, was strong enough to be born.”
Ash sighed. He sat back again, putting his arm on the edge of the leather arm of the chair, and he studied her, but he seemed neither devastated nor angry. But then, how could one know?
For one split second, it seemed madness to have told him, to have told him here, of all places, on his own plane, flying silently through the sky. But then it seemed simply inevitable, something that had to be done, if anything was to progress, if anything was to come of their knowing each other, if love was in fact already growing between them out of what they’d already witnessed and heard.
“Would you have wanted her?” Rowan asked. “Would you have, perhaps, moved heaven and earth to get to her, to save her, to take her away safely, and father the tribe again?”
Michael was afraid for her, she could see it in his eyes. And she realized as she looked at both of them that she wasn’t really saying all this just for them. She was talking for her own sake, the mother who had shot the daughter, pulled the trigger. She flinched suddenly, eyes shut tight, shuddering, her shoulders rising, and then sitting back in the chair, head to one side. She’d heard the body drop on the floor, she’d seen the face collapse before that, she’d tasted the milk, the thick sweet milk, almost like a white syrup, so good to her.
“Rowan,” said Ash gently, “Rowan, Rowan, don’t suffer these things again on my account.”
“But you would have moved heaven and earth to get to her,” Rowan said. “It’s why you came to England when Samuel called you, when he told you Yuri’s story. You came because a Taltos had been seen in Donnelaith.”
Slowly Ash nodded. “I can’t answer your question. I don’t know the answer. Yes, I would have come, yes. But tried to take her away? I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now, how could you not want it?”
“You mean how could I not want to make the tribe again?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head and looked down, thoughtfully, the finger curled beneath his lip again, elbow on the arm of the chair.
“What strange witches you are, both of you,” he whispered.
“How so?” asked Michael.
Ash rose to his feet suddenly, his head almost touching the top of the cabin. He stretched and then turned his back, walking a few steps, head bowed, before he turned around.
“Listen, we cannot answer each other’s questions this way,” he said. “But what I can tell you now is I am glad the female is dead. I am glad it’s dead!” He shook his head, and placed his hand on the sloped back of the chair. He was looking off, hair falling down over his eyes, rather wild now, so that he looked especially gaunt and dramatic, and rather like a magician, perhaps. “So help me, God,” he said. “I’m relieved, I’m relieved that you tell me in the same breath it was