A Distant Tomorrow Read Free

him.
    “Aye, they will,” he told her. “Now I wonder if I had accepted the lordship when they first offered it to me if Vartan would still be alive.” Liam sighed.
    “He had his fate to live out,” Noss counseled. “You have yours.”
    “You are becoming wise with age, wife,” he teased her gently.
    “Well,” Noss said pertly in reply, “I am almost twenty.” Then she grew serious. “Poor Lara, to lose her husband so cruelly. To leave her children behind. I do not envy her, despite her beauty and her faerie magic.”
    “I do not envy her because she must calm Bera,” Liam said with a grimace. “The woman was in a terrible state when I finally left the hall. I think she has gone mad.”
    “Lara will calm her,” Noss said with assurance.
    But entering the hall and seeing the state her mother-in-law was in, Lara wondered if anyone could ease Bera’s sorrow. The older woman paced up and down the hall muttering, her long gray hair swinging with each step she took. But her eyes were blank, without emotion of any sort. The three bodies were still upon the floor where they had met their end. Lara signaled to a male servant. “Fetch some others, and remove the dead,” she ordered. “And clean Andraste before returning her to her place of honor.” She handed her weapon to the serving man.
    “No!” Bera screeched, and ran to Lara. “You cannot take them from me. The bitch, yes! But not my boys. Not my boys!”
    “Go,” Lara said sternly. Then she took Bera by the hand, and sat her down by the hearth. “Listen to me, Bera. You cannot dishonor Vartan by leaving his body on the stone floor. His departure ceremony must be celebrated. He was the Lord of the Fiacre as was his father before him. The elders will demand Vartan be honored properly. As for Adon and Elin, they will be put into the earth unsung.”
    “From the moment he sprang forth from my womb Adon competed with Vartan,” Bera said. Her eyes were now filled with her pain. “But Vartan never complained. He treated his younger brother with kindness. It is not our way to murder our own, Lara. How could he have done it? How? It was his mate—that wretched, wretched girl! I never wanted him to wed her. She was greedy and wicked, Lara. And now because of her actions her son is orphaned. What will become of little Cam, Lara? What will happen to the child?”
    “You will raise him, of course,” Lara comforted the woman.
    Bera’s sorrowful face looked into Lara’s. “Yes,” she said. “I will take him.”
    Lara considered telling her all that had transpired in the short time following Vartan’s brutal murder, but she decided Bera was not yet ready to hear it. “You must rest now,” she told her mother-in-law, helping her to her feet. “I will do what must be done.” She signaled to a female servant. “Take the lady Bera to her chamber and give her a small goblet of wine.” She reached into the pocket of her robes and drew out a small gilded pill. “Put this in the wine. It will aid her sleep.”
    “Yes, lady,” the serving woman said, and led the grieving Bera from the hall.
    Lara now turned to the servants who had entered the hall. “Six of you take the bodies of Adon and his foul wife out onto the plain,” she instructed them. “Bury them deep in a single grave, and do not mark it. Have it done before the sun sets on this day. The rest of you are to build the lord’s funeral pyre. His departure ceremony will take place in two days time at the hour of the sunset. Have his body brought to the bathhouse that I may begin the preparations.”
    She watched the servants lift the body of their lord. Vartan had built the bathhouse for her when they had returned from the Winter War. The Fiacre were used to bathing in small round tubs. But Lara wanted a bath such as she had enjoyed in her time with the Shadow Princes, a large bath in which she might submerse her entire body. A bath she might share with her husband. So Vartan had surprised her