Artemis Awakening (19 page)

“Yes!” Bruin said. “That is so and that is why I say what the Old One does is not all the same. I am not a great reader, but even I know that reading one book is not the same as reading another. I have hunted much game. I know that no hunt is the same as the one before—and that believing such will be the best way to find oneself dead or injured.”

Those final words fell into an absolute silence. Griffin Dane saw Lynn’s hand slide over her thigh as if she would touch her damaged leg, but she caught herself in midmotion. When the silence was growing painful, one of Adara’s kitten companions meeped a tiny mew. As if the sound had been permission, a log on the fire snapped, the old woman in the kitchen began to chop something, and a semblance of normalcy returned.

However, even reminders of past tragedies were not enough to distract Lynn from her purpose. She straightened in her chair and shook her head.

“Like you, Bruin, I once thought that the Old One’s discoveries were new experiences. Later, though, when I fell in love, when I first bore a child, I began to wonder. Later still, when I suffered the death of a child, when my first true love died, when Hal proved to me that I could love again, then I began to wonder. Can books and puzzles be experience, dry challenges that they are, compared to the wetness of love and pain?”

Bruin said, “I understood that the Old One knew both love and grief in what might be called his ‘first life,’ before he realized he was gifted with unaging years. He has moved beyond such things, as I have moved beyond a boy’s games.”

“So I thought,” Lynn said softly, “so the Old One took care all of his students would think. However, unlike you, my eyes were stripped open. Hush, now. I know you’re angry, but I can’t tell you why we stole Kipper without saying things you don’t want to hear.”

“Fair enough, but I could do with fewer taunts regarding my ignorance.”

“Fair enough,” Lynn echoed with a grin, but Griffin saw sorrow beneath the smile. “I am, perhaps, unfair, especially since many years have passed from the time I was first given to question to the day that I fled with all that was left to me into this last refuge.”

“Go on. Give me the pieces of your puzzle. Perhaps I already know them but have arranged them differently.”

Lynn cocked her eyebrows, suggesting wordlessly that she doubted this was so. “Shall I begin with when the Old One suggested to me that I might consider breeding—I cannot call the act other, for he was very practical about the matter—with another of his protégés? I was already feeling maternal urges, but the very coolness of this suggestion shocked me, especially when I realized that the Old One did not intend for me to keep my child. I was to give it to him, as I might give Adara one of those kittens. He stated he would arrange for the child to be raised and educated. Something in how he spoke of that education made me think the Old One did not intend merely to make certain the child could read and cipher and someday work at a trade.”

Bruin looked uncomfortable but not shocked, so that Griffin thought he might have heard some version of this tale before. In any case, the old bear’s response was mild.

“The Old One has long wondered what damage is done to those who are born adapted when they are raised in environments where their blossoming is met with apprehension, if not with open loathing. Perhaps he wished to rear a child in such an environment.”

“
A
child?” Now Lynn looked fierce. “You speak as if he had not tried this experiment before.”

“I had heard him make such suggestions,” Bruin said uncomfortably. “He even made such to me, but I would not agree since the woman he had in mind was clearly reluctant. When I met my own wife and saw how she clung to her children, I thought it unlikely the Old One would get his wish.”

“No?” Lynn asked bitingly. “Now I see I must enlighten you.”

*   *   *

Adara toyed with a particularly adventurous calico kitten, hoping to hide her increased interest in this discussion. She dreaded that as matters became more sensitive Bruin would send her away, as Lynn had earlier suggested.

Adara had never confided in Bruin her own mixed feelings about the Old One Who Is Young. In any case, they’d only met once, when she had been about eight. Adara had been disconcerted to see her mentor deferring to someone who, to all appearances, was nothing more than a beardless youth. The Old One had asked Adara many questions, and had even taken her on a tour of part of the vast facility that was now his home. Adara had tried to be polite, but she hadn’t much liked the place and knew he sensed her dislike. She suspected she had been a disappointment to the Old One and guessed that was why Bruin had been so easily dissuaded from taking her with him on any of his other trips to Spirit Bay.

Lynn had paused but, when Bruin only pressed his lips together into a tight line, she went on. “Not only has the Old One managed to convince some women to bear children for him under terms such as I was offered, I have evidence that some women weren’t offered a choice. Winnie?”

A woman Adara guessed to be in her thirties stepped forth from the cluster in the kitchen. Her long, smooth brown hair was pulled back from skin nearly the same color. Her bearing blended nervousness and challenge into a raw wash of emotion so intense that Adara fought an urge to pull back.

“My family is from Breezy Harbor,” Winnie said, her words cold and precise. “We are descended from those who served as dive pros in the days of the seegnur. For generations, we have received the patronage of the Old One, in large part because he is interested in the artifacts our divers occasionally bring up from the reefs. You may or may not know, but the seegnur hid many of their installations beneath the water because that enabled them to pretend that Artemis was all wild, unspoiled nature, untainted by the technology they depended upon.

“Now, I said my family benefitted from the Old One’s patronage because of these artifacts, since that’s what I believed until I was fifteen. By then, I had grown into a good swimmer. Though I showed no sign of the greater adaptations, my eyes did see a bit better underwater than most. Even though I didn’t have gills, I could hold my breath a long time. I also had what my father jokingly called a ‘treasure sense.’ By this he meant that if I went looking, more often than not I found something. It’s very hard to explain.”

She trailed off. Lynn gently prompted her. “Go on, Winnie. I know it’s hard, but Bruin needs to hear this.”

The brown on brown woman drew in a deep breath. “I was pleased and surprised when my parents told me the Old One had asked if I might come up to Spirit Bay and work for him. He’d given out that some of the things he was interested in were underwater, easy enough to retrieve in the days of the seegnur but almost unreachable today.

“I was a little surprised that the Old One didn’t want a brother of mine who was fully adapted, with gills and everything, but I didn’t think much of it then. My brother was a few years older than me and had a sweetheart. I guessed that he’d been asked and had refused. That would explain, too, the nervousness I saw in my parents. I knew they wouldn’t want to refuse the Old One entirely, since much of our clan’s prestige and wealth came from his patronage.

“So I said my good-byes. Spirit Bay is quite far from Breezy Harbor, so I knew we wouldn’t be visiting much. With adventure singing in my heart, I went off to what I thought were new waters and new discoveries. Before too long, I realized that the waters in which the Old One intended me to swim were much murkier than those in any bay.”

Winnie had been speaking normally enough, even managing a bit of a loremaster’s cadence, as if to distance herself from the personal aspects of her tale, but now her voice became ragged. “I … Oh … I thought I’d talked about it enough that I could do this easily.”

“Never,” Lynn soothed, “have you spoken before such an audience. Would you like me to speak for you?”

Winnie shook her head so violently that a bit of her hair came loose from its tight bundle and tossed about as if it had a will of its own.

“No! Listening would be worse. Just give me a moment.” She paused, took a ragged breath, then continued. “There’s no pretty way to put it. I soon realized that I had come to a strange place. It was not the Old One’s main facility, but it was a place like it. It was hidden underground, and although in the daylight it was well lit, at night it was somehow darker than one of our houses, even though there were ample lanterns and candles.

“I soon learned that the purpose of this place was the breeding of what the Old One thought would be ‘interesting’ children. When I first arrived, I was kept by myself in a dark room. A man would come to me. He’d rape me, never speaking a word, then leave. I never saw him, but I’m pretty sure it was always the same man. From what I learned later, it would have had to be.

“Eventually, I got pregnant. When my pregnancy was certain, the raping stopped. A woman—she told me to call her the Stablekeeper—informed me that I’d be allowed out with other women in my circumstances if I behaved, that we’d be treated really well, but only if we behaved. If we didn’t … Is it enough to say that the Stablekeeper took me and showed me what happened to one girl who had rebelled? What I saw was enough to convince me to surrender.”

Winnie’s voice had calmed now. She spoke of the months of her pregnancy as if they had happened to someone else, ending, “I went into labor and when I awoke, my baby was gone. I was given a year to recover, then I was ‘reassigned,’ as the Stablekeeper called it. From bits and pieces I’d put together over the previous year and a half or so, I gathered this meant that my first baby had survived and I was considered worth breeding again. I don’t know if the man was the same as before. I rather suspect not, since it would be too early to tell whether the end result was worth anything. By the third time…”

Adara heard Bruin mutter, “Third time?”

“Yes, sir,” Winnie said with mocking humility. “That would have been when I was about nineteen. That time I was fairly sure this was the same man as the first time. By then, they didn’t need to tie me up and all, so I got to know the feel.”

“And you’re certain the Old One knew about this?” Bruin asked, not as if he doubted Winnie, but as if he had to make himself say the words.

“I am certain. We didn’t see him often, but from time to time he would come to the facility. Once, during a time when I was recovering from a pregnancy, I was helping with light chores, as was expected. My duties took me past a door to a dining room. Usually that door was shut, but this time it had been left open a crack. The Old One was talking to the Stablekeeper, going over what he called a stud book. They even referred to the mothers as brood mares.”

Bruin’s expression was tight and strained, but he courteously inclined his head toward Winnie, inviting her to continue. As she did, a certain brutal glee entered her voice.

She’s revenging herself on her tormentor,
Adara thought,
by swaying his ally from him.

“The fifth time,” Winnie said, “was the worst. This one had been a bad pregnancy. I had nightmares like you can’t imagine, practically from the first. I was weak, too, and couldn’t keep food down, no matter how hard I tried. The baby came early. Whether it was that or my weakness or just plain error, they didn’t put me out as well as they’d done before. They thought I was out—that was clear—but I could hear everything. Worse, I could see.

“The Old One was there, garbed like a doctor, in sterile gown and mask and gloves. Even so clothed, I knew him, and not just from how the Stablekeeper acted. She always acted like he was all the seegnur returned to Artemis in one. The Old One was the one who poked around and got the baby out of me. When it was free, he lifted it up and cut the cord, then smacked it so it wailed.

“Still holding the little thing by its ankles, he inspected it. Then he said, ‘Damn … Went too far with this one. It’s never going to survive.’ Cool as can be, the Old One took the little thing and bashed its head against the edge of the table. I felt the wet of blood and brains on my leg. Then the Old One dropped the body in a can and went out, stripping off his mask and gloves. He was cursing under his breath, not, mind you, like he cared, but more like someone who had put in a lot of work painting a window frame and then had smudged the paint at the last minute.”

Winnie had started weeping. Though the tears rolled down her cheeks, she didn’t seem to notice until Lynn handed her a square of worn fabric to use as a handkerchief.

Eventually, Winnie went on. “It’s possible that pregnancy ruined something in me, because even though I had a good many men sent to me, I didn’t get pregnant again. Eventually, I was paroled, I guess you could call it, to housekeeping work, set to cooking and cleaning for those who were still bearing.”

“Were there many of these?” Terrell asked gently.

“Not so many,” Winnie said. “Maybe eight or a dozen at a time pregnant, some recovering, some ‘in training,’ as the Stablekeeper called it.”

“Your family,” Fred asked. “Do you know what the Old One told them to explain your vanishing?”

Winnie looked very sad. “I suspect they were told I drowned. I wonder if they believed it. In my worst moments, I’ve wondered how much they might have known about his plans for me. I can’t be sure they didn’t know. I’ll never go back and ask. If they’ve mourned me, that was long ago. If they sold me—as I have wondered—they wouldn’t welcome me.”

“How did you get away?” Adara asked.

“Lynn did it…” Winnie looked sideways at Lynn. “Can you?”

“I’ll tell it,” Lynn said, “if Bruin wants to hear it.”

Bruin’s nod made Adara’s heart ache in sympathy, for his shock and grief were written in every line of his face. Lynn, however, was beyond sparing anyone’s feelings and, based on what Winnie had just told them, Adara could understand.

Lynn began. “Hal and I have a daughter named Mabel. When Mabel was fifteen, she vanished. She was supposed to have drowned in a boating accident, but those who planned her disappearance had forgotten that the crippled wreck who was the girl’s mother had been a hunter and had long been a gamekeeper. They forgot I had friends. We tracked Mabel down, me and Hal did.