Children of Enchantment (28 page)

Something else about her eyes tugged at him, something familiar. He didn’t want to trust her, didn’t want to let himself give
in to the undeniable attraction he had for her. He wondered what Phineas had meant—that he had distrusted a beautiful woman
and so had made a terrible mistake? Did he refer to Nydia? What could possibly have changed Nydia from the beautiful woman
every man remembered into the monster she now was? Had her beauty been a disguise all along?

He shook his head, disgusted with his own thoughts. I’m behaving just as Brand feared. A bird twittered on the branch above
his head, scolding, and the rising breeze stirred the campfire. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and bent to roll up his blanket.
It was time to travel on.

From her window in the eastern tower, Annandale watched the comet streak across the sky. It disappeared into the west just
as the first light of dawn broke over the trees. She shifted the baby’s head against her shoulder. Silky wisps of dark hair
tickled her cheek. The child stirred, whimpered, and was still.

Melisande was teething. Her gums were swollen and sore, the tooth buds just visible beneath the skin like tiny pearls. During
the day there were more distractions, more hands willing to help and hold and soothe. But in the night, the pain intensified,
and now these vigils had become a habit.

Annandale sat down once more in the rocking chair. She tucked the blanket closer around the baby’s shoulders. Her own gums
ached and throbbed in a constant flux of pain and relief. She leaned back against the chair, shut her eyes, and listened to
the rising chorus of birdsong.

Behind the chair, the door opened. “Is the baby all right?” Peregrine spoke in a sharp whisper.

Annandale took a deep breath and braced her shoulders against the abrupt blast of Peregrine’s jealousy. “She’s fine. She was
in some pain last night—I don’t think the medicine did much—“

“That’s what my mother always used on the children at our estate.” Peregrine swept over to the chair, her lips tightly pressed
together, but her expression softened as she gazed at her sleeping daughter. The two women’s eyes met, and with a sigh, Peregrine
dropped hers and turned away. “I want to hate you, you know.”

“I know.” Annandale cradled Melisande close, reveling in her buttery, caramel scent.

“He went away because of you.” Peregrine stared out the window as though she could summon Roderic back by sheer force of will.
“And I have no idea when he’ll come back.”

“But he will come back.”

Raw emotion emanated from Peregrine in slow, hot waves—pain born of jealousy and fear. “It isn’t fair.” In the shadowy room,
Peregrine’s face was a pale smudge. “Why should he come back to you? Why should you be the one to marry him? What have you
ever done—?” Her voice faltered and Peregrine broke off.

Annandale looked away. Peregrine’s pain was like a snake, twining and twisting in her gut. “I’m sorry.”

Peregrine gave a little laugh. “For some reason I don’t understand, I believe you. It’s another reason I ought to hate you,
but how can I? Even my baby prefers you to me.”

“That’s not true.” Annandale rose and came to stand beside Peregrine. “She loves you. You’re her mother—” A sudden pang made
her break off as she thought of Nydia, alone in the tower, left with her grief and pain and regrets. Her voice quivered as
she tried to finish. “Nothing can break the bond between a mother and her child.”

If Peregrine heard the break in Annandale’s voice, she ignored it. “But you can make her stop crying when no one else—not
even I—can.”

Annandale drew a deep breath and, with a shudder, murmured a silent prayer to some unknown source of strength. Almost immediately,
her own pain ebbed away, and with a sigh, she controlled her emotions. Her mother had warned her, time and again, not to reveal
who and what she was, under any circumstances. “I—I have always had a way with small creatures,” she said after an awkward
silence.

Peregrine shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I ought to be glad you’re so good to her. Even if Roderic wants me to leave
after—I know you’ll take care of Melisande.”

“He may not decide to marry me.”

Peregrine snorted softly. “Not decide? He’s made the decision— he just doesn’t know it yet.”

A shadow of Peregrine’s pain shivered through Annandale. With only the greatest effort she fought back the impulse to reach
out, seize the pain, and make it her own. The promise of the exhilaration of its dissolution whispered seductively through
every cell of her body. Instead, she whispered, “I am sorry.”

Derision crossed Peregrine’s face. “What have you got to be sorry about? It’s not your fault that you’re the one his father
wants him to marry. Roderick’s always done what his father wanted him to do.” She faced the window. The wind had picked up
and the trees rustled as the rising sun tinted the puffy clouds orange and pink and gold in the pale gray sky. “I remember
the first time I saw him. I had just come to Ahga— he was only fourteen, but he was all the serving maids talked about. He
was always so kind, they said, but he’s his father’s son … an eye for a pretty girl already. I saw him in the courtyard. The
other boys were teasing one of the scullions—he was fat and slow, and always the butt of their jokes. But that day Roderic
stepped in front of him and dared them all.”

“What happened?” Annandale shifted the sleeping baby in her arms.

“Just then the King happened by. They all scattered, even the scullion, all of them but Roderic. He faced the King and took
his punishment—“

“But why was he punished?”

“Fighting’s forbidden. Teasing isn’t. The King set him to shoveling out the stables. And Roderic did just as he was told,
but by the way they looked at each other, I knew they understood each other completely. He really was his father’s son, but
not in the way the maids all meant. He saw me watching, and I tried to duck out of sight, because I thought he wouldn’t want
anyone to see him shamed, but he smiled at me and winked. I think I fell in love with him then.”

Annandale placed the baby in her mother’s arms.

“I knew,” Peregrine continued, her cheek against the baby’s wispy hair, “I knew that someday a woman would come— that he would
marry. I thought I would just go away. I didn’t think it would be so hard.”

“To leave’?” prompted Annandale, sensing that as Peregrine spoke of her feelings, some of her pain diminished.

“To hate.” Peregrine clutched the baby close and turned to leave the room. As if from very Jar away, there was the distant
sound of shouts and the clatter of horse’s hooves pounding across the cobbled courtyard. “They’re here.” Peregrine walked
to the threshold.

“I knew he’d come back,” Annandale said.

“But not for me,” replied Peregrine. “He’s come for you.”

When Roderic opened his eyes, Annandale was sitting on the bed next to him, adjusting a veil around her head. A pile of bloody
linen lay in her lap, and his bedroom was in semidarkness. Roderic lay for a moment staring up at the wooden bedframe. He
blinked. He remembered riding into the courtyard, remembered the shouts of welcome as the household came running to greet
him. He remembered the stable boy’s grimy hand on the bridle. He had started to dismount and the horse had reared unexpectedly.
He remembered falling backward, out of the saddle. The rest was blank. He raised his head, expecting pain, and was surprised
when he felt nothing. “Annandale.”

“How do you feel, Lord Prince?” She tensed, as though poised to flee.

“What happened?”

“The horse shied as you were dismounting. You fell and hit your head.”

“My head?” He felt cautiously around the back of his head, expecting to feel a bruise or a wound. He rose up on one elbow.
A bloodstain soaked the pil low. He sat up and frowned. At the back of his head, his fingers encountered matted, sticky hair,
but nothing else: no scab, no soreness, nothing. He looked from the pile of bloody linen on Annandale’s lap to the bloodstains
on the pillow. “Where did all this blood come from?”

She kept her eyes down. “You were hurt.”

“Why do I feel nothing?”

She averted her face and finished adjusting her veil.

“Annandale?”

She looked at him with such naked, unclouded fear, he was confused. Scarcely believing what he did, Roderic pulled the veil
off her head. He touched her hair and stared in disbelief, for it was sticky with clotting blood. He held out his bloodstained
fingers. “What is this?”

She drew a quick breath and she twisted her hands in her lap. “I could not let you die!” The anguished words burst as though
torn from her throat. “I don’t care what you think of me—I could not let you die!”

“Let me die?” He wanted to touch her again, wanted to touch her so badly he clenched his hand in a fist and reached around
to the back of his own head instead.

“You were very badly hurt—“

“What kind of witchcraft is this?”

She shuddered at the word. “It isn’t witchcraft at all. It’s— it’s what I am.”

“What you are?” he echoed, even as he remembered Vere’s words. “An empath? That’s what you are. My brother said—” What had
Vere said?
“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
Roderic sat up straighten The mattress dipped and Annandale leaned closer involuntarily. Immediately she drew back. “Vere—one
of my older brothers—said you were an empath. But he didn’t tell me what that meant.” Roderic took her chin and forced her,
gently, to face him. “So you tell me. Just what is an empath?”

“An empath,” she said, so quietly he had to strain to hear, “has the ability to heal—to heal completely. I didn’t tell you
because I was afraid. My mother warned me never to tell anyone, not even you.”

“Why?”

She gave a little shrug and a sad smile. “She told me the story of how she came to be at Minnis—how the Bishop of Ahga threatened
to have her burned as a witch. Empaths, too, are considered witches by the Church.”

“You healed Barran’s leg that day in the forest. And Tavia. You had something to do with Tavia getting better, didn’t you?”
When she nodded, he asked. “How can this be?”

With her head cocked like a child reciting a lesson, she said, “There is a balance to the body and the mind. When the body
or the mind is injured or ill, I can restore the balance by taking on the injury or the illness. The other person is left
whole, restored.”

“So you took my injury on yourself?”

She nodded.

“Let me see.”

She bent her head and gently parted the tangled, blood-matted curls. He peered at her scalp. On the white skin a wide angry
red mark was fading even as he watched. “That’s all?”

“That’s what’s left.”

He sat back. “Do you feel the pain?”

“It doesn’t last very long.”

“But—but it must last long enough. And you do this willingly?”

“I must. The healing would not happen if I did not will it so.”

“I have never heard of such a thing.” He looked at her in wonder and disbelief.

“Another empath healed Tavia long ago.”

“How can you know?”

“Because when I touched her, I could feel the residual pain echoing through her mind. She was attacked by the Harleyriders
and left for dead. What was done to her—there is no other way she could have survived such a thing.”

“But why did that empath not heal her as you did?”

“The ability has limits. I cannot make the lame to walk or the blind to see. There is a limit to how much energy I can expend
at any one time before I too am spent. If I overstep my limit, I will die.”

“And this has nothing to do with the Old Magic?”

Once again, she twisted her hands together. “It was the Old Magic that made us.”

“What do you mean?” He forgot his wariness and gently disengaged her hands.

“Long ago, before the Armageddon, the men we call Magic-users sought to bring an end to all the mortal sicknesses which plagued
humanity. In those days, people got sick—“

“Got sick? They ate and drank too much?”

“No, not that. You know, the Mutens have the plague they call the purple sickness? It kills within hours, but it never attacks
humans. In the days before the Armageddon, there were many sicknesses like that, sicknesses which did attack humans, which
would attack us still. But the Magic-users changed us. They used their knowledge and deciphered the instructions each of us
carries within the tiniest units of our bodies, the instructions which make us what we are. But when they did that, there
were consequences.”

“Of course,” Roderic muttered as a chill went down his spine.

“With their experiments, they did all sorts of things. That’s how the Mutens came to be, and why humanity is impervious to
disease—now, we only die from injury or old age. And also, there were others who were even more different, yet who appeared
like everyone else. They could see the future, as my mother could, and their children were fike me—they could heal.”

“So the priests—“

“Are right, in their fashion. The Magic did bring about the Armageddon. But we—the prescients and the empaths—we are not evil.”

“The child—the child in the wood, that day I killed the lycat—what did you do to him?”

“I healed him and sent him on his way.”

“He was almost dead.”

“He was the worst I’d ever tried to help. But children are amazingly resilient—they are easier to heal. And each time I do
this, I’m strengthened and better able to help the next person.”

“So there are more like you?”

“A few, perhaps. I don’t know. So many were killed in the Persecutions. My mother told me never to let anyone know. She said
the priests would burn me if they knew.”

“Then why did you tell me?”

She bit her lip, and would have twisted her hands together, but he still held them. “Because—because I did not want secrets
between us.”

“My father knew what you would be?” he whispered.

She nodded.

He lifted her chin with the tip of his finger. “I see.” Their eyes met and held, and suddenly, he was acutely conscious that
they were alone, that the bedroom was shadowed and very private. Dust motes danced in the thin beams of light which penetrated
the drawn curtains, and time seemed to slow, to stop. Only the thudding of his heart told him that the minutes were passing.
This gift of hers must be the reason Abelard had chosen her to be his bride. And no wonder. What need had he of land, of men,
of horses? What were any of those things beside the extraordinary ability this woman possessed? She could keep him alive and
whole and healthy until the country was united and settled once again. Surely this ability alone would be enough for Amanander
to want her, and yet, Vere said she had something to do with Magic, too?