Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [57]
The dairy-crofter sat, obedient and dazed, passing one hand before his eyes. "Agnette," he murmured. "Agnette!"
I looked at his wife. "Your daughter."
She nodded her head like a puppet, face still white. "Our daughter.
Eleven years, going on twelve." She swallowed. "She went missing, my lady, some three months ago."
"Ah, no." I felt a wave of sorrow, gathering and breaking, too immense to be comprehended. "No." A sense of dread hung over me like thunder, and red haze clouded my vision. My ears were buzzing with a sound like a hornet's nest. I saw, at last, in the forming pattern, the thing I had been missing, the hand I had forgotten, awesome and implacable.
Kushiel.
It was Joscelin who drew the story of their daughter's vanishing from the dairy-crofter and his wife, though I daresay it was a familiar enough tale. The spring rains had been meager and she had gone with a portion of the herd seeking pasturage in the next valley. Sweet, pretty Agnette, with her mother's vivacious face, had never returned. Her father Jacques had sought her that evening, with the help of a lad they hired during the days, pushing his way among the lowing cattle with a lamp held high.
She had vanished without a trace.
Elua is not so cruel as to use a child to lesson his priests . . .
So Brother Selbert had said, and he had believed it; but it was not Elua who was once named the Punisher of God. It was Kushiel. And I knew too well his cruel justice to dismiss this as mere coincidence. A pattern too vast for me to compass. So Hyacinthe had said, reading the dromonde for me. Truly, it was. I had expected anything—anything— but this. I sat dumb as a post and listened as Jacques Écot warmed to his topic, his stoic demeanor forgotten in the passion of his grief. A bear, they had thought, or wolves—but surely creatures of the wild would have left traces, signs of passage, prints and struggle, bloodstains. No, he concluded grimly; it must have been human, whatever took Agnette. Tsingani, most like. Everyone knew the Tsingani were not to be trusted, that they would steal D'Angeline babies from their cradles and raise them as their own, given half a chance.
"They wouldn't," I murmured, but my voice went unheard, buried beneath the flood of anguish our inquiry had unleashed.
Somehow, Joscelin managed everything that night, hearing out their terrible story, making amends and apologies, pleading the travails of our journey and spiriting me away to our simple bedchamber. Agnette's chamber, I knew now, the counterpane stitched by a loving mother for the only child of her blood. I sat upon it, turning my dumbstruck gaze to his.
"Oh, Joscelin! What if it's . . . it's nothing to do with politics, with the Queen's kin, with Melisande. What if it's just. ..." I searched futilely for words. "A bad thing that happened?"
"We will find out." He knelt beside the bed, eyes fierce, gripping my hands in his. "Phèdre, if someone is abducting D'Angeline children from their homes, we'll find out about it. We'll go in the morning to Verreuil. My father won't stand for this lightly, I promise you that! He'll give us every aid, put his men-at-arms at our disposal, rouse the countryside. We will find them."
I was shivering, to the marrow of my bones. I dared not think to what purpose the children had been taken, not yet. The rawness of the Écots' grief was unbearable. I do not know, if it had been my child, if I could have endured it. What did I know of a parent's suffering? It was that very fear had kept me from motherhood, and this bereavement was worse, far worse, than aught I had imagined. "These poor people ."
"I know." Joscelin wrapped both arms around me, warm breath against my hair. "I know," he repeated. "I know."
EIGHTEEN
A LIGHT rain was falling when we took our leave of the Écots' household. I sat my mare, raindrops