The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One Read Free

heir left alive. There was only her womb.
    Her special blood.
    Linnet returned with the dusk. ‘Another draught, and still his heart skips. I dare not give him more.’ She rubbed her eyes wearily. ‘I have done all I can, daughter.’
    Rhiann pressed trembling fingers into her cheeks. ‘But surely he can fight this, aunt. He is strong – Goddess! Fighting, eating, drinking! They were his life !’
    Linnet shrugged in defeat. ‘Perhaps all that eating and fighting harmed his heart. Sometimes the soul blazes too bright for the body, and burns it from within. I’ve seen it before.’
    The birch fire snapped and sent up a spray of sparks, which drifted to ash against the thatch roof. Rhiann turned to face it, wrapping her arms around her thin chest. Did death follow her? Was she one of those unfortunates who were stalked by marsh-sprites, which sucked human life dry? Her own birth took her mother into the Otherworld; her father followed only five years later. And then … and then came that other loss, those other deaths, a year ago on the Sacred Isle …
    The force of Linnet’s gaze drew her back into the room. In the way it was between priestesses, Rhiann sensed the weight of her aunt’s concern on her skin. She knew why. She knew what Linnet saw.
    Once, Rhiann took after her mother’s beauty, so the bards sang.They shared the same hair and eyes: amber and violet to the bards, auburn and blue to Rhiann. But now her mother’s bronze mirror was buried deep in her carved trunk. Rhiann’s fingers had found the deep hollows in her own cheeks, and traced the prominent bones in wrist and neck. She did not need a mirror to tell her she no longer favoured her mother. That wide mouth would be a gash across her fine bones; the long nose a sharp prow. Linnet’s features were showing the strain of days; her own showed the strain of moons. Shame and grief could consume flesh, as all healers knew. So it was with her.
    There was a rustle of linen skirts, and then Linnet’s warm hands were smoothing back her hair. An ache sprung to Rhiann’s throat, an ache that she could not give in to, for fear the tears would never stop. She hunched her shoulders, struggling to swallow it. After a moment, Linnet sighed and dropped her hand.
    ‘There must be something we can do, aunt!’ Rhiann turned to her, fists by her sides. ‘Cold slows the blood … there will be ice on the peaks now …’
    Linnet shook her head, fingering the moonstone pendant at her throat. ‘I’ve considered everything. We must entrust him to the Goddess now, daughter. Only She knows the warp and weft of the loom.’
    Even though Linnet must know the fate that reached for Rhiann with those words, no other comfort came, as it had not since the King’s illness struck. The familiar hurt gave one great throb in Rhiann’s chest.
    It was then that they heard it. One piercing wail rose from the pinnacle of the crag; a soaring, lonely sound, plaintive as a curlew-call. It came from the King’s Hall. It was Brude’s wife. And as the rest of his women broke into their ululations, cry after cry arced down from the crest, sharp enough to pierce Rhiann’s breast.
    She met Linnet’s eyes. The King was dead.
    The hours passed in a blur of ritual wailing, and the pale, shocked faces of people crowding the King’s Hall, and the tears of his daughters wet on Rhiann’s neck. Eventually, Linnet ordered her to seek her bed. Under pale starlight she could barely put one foot in front of the other, and once in her house she warded off Brica’s attentions and crawled on to her bed pallet.
    There, face buried deep in deerskin, she sought the oblivion of sleep.
    Her mind would not rest, though. All eyes would be on her now. She bit her lip to stop herself from cursing the womb she carried. Without it, she would be no more than a man. Without it, the elders would not care who she was. If only she’d been born to a tribe in the south, in what the Roman invaders called Britannia.