Willow Read Free

Sorsha.
    She strode down the last staircase and into the dungeon corridor, looking neither right nor left at the pathetic women in their cages. Some groveled, stretching their arms through the bars and pleading for water, for food, for any attention. Others had taken themselves out of the dungeons, out of their bodies. These sat rocking on their straw pallets, smiling, whispering, singing softly. Still others stood defiantly, glaring their hatred.
    Sorsha ignored them all. She entered the birthing room, knowing exactly what she would see. The walls glistened with seepage. Trolls crouched in the shadows. The exhausted mother lay on her filthy straw pallet, staring terrified at her.
    Ethna cradled a small bundle, and her gaze, too, was full of dread.
    “Well?”
    The widwife swallowed hard. Mouth grim, she folded back the blanket to reveal the child.
    Sorsha stopped.
    The child had red hair, she was looking directly at Sorsha with steady eyes, and she was laughing.
    To some of the women who heard it, that laughter sounded like the tinkling of crystal once made by the elfin glasssmiths far south of Nelwyn Valley, but to most it was the sound of water—water free in a green world.
    It turned all sounds to silence in that grim place. Murmuring women hushed. Even the trolls stopped their guttural chatter and turned large ears toward the sound, astonished.
    Sorsha stepped forward then. Her hand closed over Ethna’s wrist, and her dispassionate eyes held the midwife’s, for Ethna had recovered the child too quickly. “Wait! The inspection.”
    Ethna’s chin rose defiantly. “Your Highness, this child . . .”
    “The inspection,” Sorsha said again.
    She unfolded the blanket.
    Naked before them lay the laughing child, perfect in every way except that on the soft flesh inside the left elbow she bore a faint brown mark—the Sign.
    Sorsha knew it well. When she had been assigned this task, Bavmorda had scratched the Sign on the wall of the banquet hall. “That!” she had cried. “That is what you look for!” And then she had obliterated it with white-hot jets of flame, leaving the wall scoured clean. And Sorsha had seen it often since. Sometimes Bavmorda would sear it into the oaken hearts of trees before she had them hacked to kindling. Sometimes she would carve it into the backs of screaming prisoners before they were loosed for the sport of Death Dogs.
    Now, when she saw it on the arm of this laughing infant, Sorsha felt only relief, nothing more—relief that her onerous duty had ended. Relief that she could go back to the field. “I must get Mother,” she said. Then, remembering that it was dawn and that her mother would be chanting an invocation to the sun, high in the conjuring room where only priests were permitted, she pointed to the nearest troll squatting beside the door. “You. Come with me. Ethna, prepare the child. You know what must be done!”
    As soon a Sorsha had gone, the mother struggled up. “Ethna!” She grasped the midwife’s shirt. She was trembling and weak, but her grip held like a vice. “Ethna,” she whispered hoarsely, “you must save her! You know you must!”
    Tears brimmed in Ethna’s eyes. She bit her lip and shook her head, glancing at two trolls, who were creeping close now, muttering.
    “You must!” The woman clasped her with both hands. “Listen to me! The child is larger than we are, Ethna, larger than anything! Don’t think! Feel! Do what you feel! Save her!”
    “Here!” One of the trolls said, kicking Ethna’s leg. “Get away from her!”
    “Back!” said the other, elbowing her in the stomach. “Back! Back!”
    Ethna swallowed. She brushed away the tears. She took a deep breath, then moved. Clutching the child close, she kicked hard into the face of first one troll then the other. They fell back shrieking, and Ethna dashed past them, through the door and down the corridor, past the arms of women reaching to touch her as she ran, and to touch the child.
    Seconds