Essalieyan Chronicles 04 - The Weapon Read Free Page B

set Veralaan down in his place.
     

The child started to cry, but the tears were quiet.
     
“Veralaan,” Melanna said, shoving her hands through her hair, “I don’t have a choice . If I
     
leave this lot to cook, we’ll be eating dirt and burned milk for the next three days!”
     
Veralaan nodded, folding her hands together; they were small and white. But she still cried. “Hazel, what do you think you’re doing with that? The milk will just cake the bottom of the
pot! Pay attention! Veralaan, we can go back upstairs when I’ve finished. I won’t forget the rest of the story. But I—EBRICK!”
Emily had never seen her quite like this, and watched in silence from the safety of the door. Veralaan said something, and Melanna bent to catch the words. Her face froze a moment,
and then she smiled, but it was a tight, tight smile.
     
“Yes,” she told the child, lowering her voice. “His mother finds him, and brings him home.” Small hands were entwined in the fabric of the older woman’s robes before she’d even
finished her sentence. “Veralaan, I’ve told you a thousand times not to do that. Not where people can see you. These are the Robes of the Mother; they’re to be treated with respect.” She was
busy prying those robes from small fingers as she spoke; it was a losing battle.
     
In the end, she sighed and hefted the child again in her right arm, lodging the bulk of her weight against her hip. She turned and resumed the marshaling of her beleaguered forces, carrying Veralaan as if she were some sort of precious mascot.
* * *
     
“I don’t understand it, Iain,” the Mother’s Daughter said, over the same dinner. “What don’t you understand?”
Had they not been quite so isolated, she would have guarded her tongue; she was the Mother’s Daughter, and inasmuch as she could be wise, she was expected to personify wisdom. Given that there was already a god that did just that, she thought it a tad unfair.
“Melanna.”
     
He was quiet for a moment, which was often a dubious sign. At last he put his knife down and pushed his plate an inch forward. “Emily,” he said quietly. Her name; a name he almost never used.
She met his gaze and held it. But he did not look away. Had she desired it, he would have. Or maybe not, she thought, as his expression continued to shift.
“Was that not your purpose in giving the child to Melanna to foster?”
     

“What purpose?”
     
“She will never have another child,” he said quietly. “The injuries she sustained made it certain.”
“I know. I was there.”
     
Grave, now, he said, “You have given her the only child—save perhaps one, if we are blessed—that she will ever be allowed to raise in peace.”
“I gave her,” Emily replied coolly, “the daughter of the man responsible for the slaughter of her family.”
“Yes, and so, too, did she see the child.”
     
“And she cared so little for her son that she could—”
     
“That is unworthy of you, Mother’s Daughter. Worse, it is a thought unworthy of the Mother.” Not since she had been in the Novitiate had he dared use that tone of voice on her. It brooked no argument, allowed for none; he was rigidly certain.
“I do not know what you intended. I do not wish to know. Leave me with the illusion of your mercy. Melanna will grow, from this. She will remember things that will hurt her, but once she is past the pain, she will remember things that will define her.”
“She will love this child.”
     
“In time, Emily, accept that we will all love her.” “She is the daughter of—”
“She is a child. Whose child has yet to be determined; it is not in blood and birth that such decisions are made, but in the life itself.”
“Iain—” She held out a hand. It shook. “I have looked long and hard at this city, harder still at the Baron who rules it; I have evaluated, as I can, the foreign Barons who bark at the gates. They are of a kind, Baron Breton and the others; if he loses his