Before The Mask Read Free

     well. The cave light did not reveal the finer details of her face, and his eyes were too
     frost- and wind-burned to study her clearly.
    He crouched by the fire and extended his hands, regarding the druidess warily. His eyes
     played over the soft, dark skin of her neck, the purple pendant at her throat that
     filtered the firelight as stained glass catches the sun. He would not trust beauty such as
     this. It was entangling, beguiling....
    L'Indasha noticed the stormcrow brooch, ice-encrusted, that held the man's cape
     uncertainly about his throat.
    “You are Daeghrefn of Nidus,” she noted, drawing a small iron kettle from a shadowy nook
     in the rocks. “The dayraven. The stormcrow. Your castle is not far from here. Why? Why do
     you travel on a night such as this? Where did you think you were?”
    The woman cried out softly to Abelaard. The boy helped her closer to the fire.
    Daeghrefn ignored them, his eyes fixed on the druidess. “You know already who and why and
     where,” he muttered, “and you've augury enough to know more. Why ask?”
    L'Indasha glared at him and stalked into the darkness, returning with the kettle brimful
     of water. “It would take more than augury to sound this foolishness,” she said, soothing
     the man's wife with a soft brush of her hand. “Out in the Khalkists on the worst of winter
     nights, your wife and small son behind you like a straggling infantry. What could have .
     .. ?” Like the melting of ice or the settling
    of ashes, a slow awareness seeped into LTndasha's mind. She tried to hide her face when
     the truth came to her, but Daeghrefn saw it.
    “Ah,” she breathed. “You've been cuckolded, haven't” The druidess glanced down at the
     woman. The thin cloak had fallen and now revealed the source of the woman's crying. She
     was about to give birth.
    L'Indasha didn't finish the sentence. Daeghrefn lurched up angrily with a clatter of
     breastplate and greaves.
    “It is not your concern, druidess,” he growled. He wished for a secret blade, for a sudden
     lapse of the Oath, and surprised himself with his own edged and ready anger. “Nose into
     your vegetation and your failed gods if you want,” he murmured, his voice deep and
     menacing. “Pry into the heart of the oak and the phases of the moon, into whatever
     mysteries and omens you consult when your wits fail you. But keep out of my affairs.”
    The druidess stared at him darkly. Brown, he thought absently as the wind outside whistled
     and eddied. Her eyes are brown ...
    His wife cried out again in Abelaard's small arms. “Too soon!” she wailed, her long scream
     rising in pitch and volume until it became deafening, as chilling as the wind in the
     mountain passes below.
    Daeghrefn covered his ears as L'Indasha rushed to attend the woman. And then, as suddenly
     as it began, the scream cut off. One of the cats yawned in the cave's far corner.
    L'Indasha's face was grim. The woman's pulse fluttered
    and faded, then surged again as she cried out in agony. Reaching for the kettle, for
     soothing herbs for anythingthe druidess cast her eyes on the bucket by the mouth of the
     cave.
    The last of the moonlight played almost cruelly over the ice. On the glazed surface of the
     water, the light took the form of thick stone, the snow like white robes swirling around a
     distant childbed....
    Another child. Another child was being born tonight. It was the other face, the brother to
     this bastard child. Somewhere, in some warm and nurturing country. But this poor woman lay
     moaning in an icy cavern, her first son young and helpless, her husband unbalanced and
     venomous. . . . L'Indasha Yman fought down her anger and bent to the work of the night.
    Huma's kin were being born.
    Somewhat later, in the uncanny silence, something in the depths of the cavern stirred from
     its hibernation with a stifled, painful cry. Daeghrefn strained to make out the distant
     sound as the creature