Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [140]
“Aye, ’tis true I am old, daughter, but I still breathe. I still walk and I can still reason.”
Ferlain sucked in her breath, but she didn’t move. She showed no fear, no elation at Hallad’s sudden presence. She stood there, staring at her father as he strode toward her. “I didn’t kill Nirea and you know it. She was a sweet girl, not the faithless bitch you created in your own mind.”
Ferlain merely shrugged. “Then it was Helga. She hated Nirea and she has even bragged to me once about sticking a thin knife into her neck. She didn’t mind that you got blamed for it. She hated you because you wed Nirea and kept producing children. Neither of us wanted you to have more children, yet you wouldn’t listen.”
“Helga is beyond foolish but she didn’t kill Nirea either.”
Laren said, “You told me that Uncle Rollo was in love with Nirea, that he was mad with jealousy, that—”
“Be quiet, you stupid girl!”
Laren stared at her half sister. Never had Ferlain raised her voice, never had she heard such venom.
“By all the gods, I was stupid. I should have had my men kill you and that brat our father sired off Nirea. But no, I let the men sell you to slave traders from the south. I wanted you to suffer as I suffered and I wanted you to know pain and hunger and hopelessness. Otta wanted to kill you but I didn’t let him. By all the gods, he was right.”
“We did suffer, Ferlain,” Laren said, but Ferlain wasn’t listening to her, just continued over her, saying, “They told me they didn’t gain much with your sale to slave traders, but with what I added, the villains did well enough. Otta then killed them, for he didn’t trust them to keep silent. He never gave me my silver back.”
“Why, Ferlain, why?” It was Hallad and there was pleading in his deep voice, and such sorrow that Laren couldn’t bear it.
Ferlain held silent. She was smiling, taunting them with her silence. “I didn’t do anything. It was all Otta. I am innocent. I am like Helga, making myself important by teasing you with half-truths. I am more a skilled skald than Laren is. Aye, I am innocent and that is all there is to it.”
“You are as innocent as an asp and as deadly,” Rollo said. “Why did you kill Fromm? Why did you send men after Merrik? Why, Ferlain? You have always gotten what you wished from me. Your dead babes, it was always a tragedy, but these things happen. Women don’t turn into monsters because of dead children.”
“All of them died,” Ferlain said, her voice calm, too calm, staring now beyond Rollo, at the thick crimson draperies behind his throne. “Dead in my womb, all of them. Not a single cry when each of them emerged. All dead.” She turned back to look at him. “I believed it was Cardle’s fault, all my dead babes, and thus I took Fromm to my bed, and he sired the last three, but they were dead too. My body killed them, all of them. They rotted in my womb until I thrust them out. The pain, uncle, the pain would have bowed the strongest man, but I wanted a babe to live, so very badly, and that babe would have come after you, and I made myself thrust out those dead and rotted scraps, praying each time that there would be a cry of life, that there would be arms and legs that would move, eyes that would see something other than death, and I endured the pain and made myself try again and again.”
“Ah, Ferlain, I am so very sorry,” Hallad said. “I had no idea.”
“You wonder why I killed that miserable bully Fromm? He threatened to tell you he had bedded me. Even now, after two years, he threatened to tell you. The fool was jealous when he found out I had taken Otta to my bed. He made no sense. ’Twas he who told me after that third and last babe died that I was fat and ugly and he didn’t want me anymore. Why would he care what I did? Ah, but he did because he was afraid I would find Otta more to my liking than I had found him. Not that Otta did much of anything, the braying fool. He could not even sire a dead babe. All he did was hold his