On Fire's Wings - Christie Golden [51]
Yeshi moved as if she were a dead person trapped inside a living body.
The last thing she had felt, really felt, was overwhelming grief as Tahmu snatched their child from her arms. She had raged, sobbed, railed against the Dragon, screamed curses at her husband, beaten her still-swollen and sensitive belly with her fists for not housing a clean child.
Then the darkness descended. Later, she would find it difficult to believe that she had even been able to continue to draw breath, that her heart had not simply stopped beating. Despite her desperate wish to die, Yeshi lived.
She had vague recollections of soft skin, of concerned eyes, and gentle hands that pressed tidbits into her unwilling mouth, that bathed a soiled physical shell. Her body ate, used the food, excreted what it did not need, and demanded more. How strange, that it continued when her soul felt so dead.
The emotions that came afterward were pale in comparison to her grief, but she clung to them anyway. She hated Tahmu for what he had done. And she could not bear to lay eyes on her beautiful, healthy son. Why should he live, if his sister was born only to die of exposure on a mountainside? Why should Tahmu laugh and move forward with his duties, when he had been the one to execute the dreadful deed?
No matter that the traditions were clear on this point. No matter that it would have been impossible to disguise her daughter’s disfigurement. No matter that there was no other course for anyone to have taken. There was no sense in anything Yeshi felt now.
She took her lover not out of passion and desire, but of an urgent need to feel something. She would not let Tahmu touch her, but she wanted arms around her in the night, wanted to taste the salt of sweat and remember that she wasn’t dead yet, even though she yearned for death’s graces.
The one place where she felt even the faintest brush of peace was when she was alone in the caverns. Before the tragedy, she had not often liked to be alone. Now, she craved the solitude. She did not need women to scrub her back and dry her body. She needed a place to be embraced by cool water, where all was silent save her own racking sobs.
So when she descended the steps, padding softly on bare feet, she felt a lightening of the grief that clung to her like a burning shroud. She was just about to enter the cavern when she heard voices. She stopped, straining to listen.
“Why do you always pick red?” It was Jashemi’s voice.
“I like it. It’s pretty.”
Kevla! She shouldn’t be talking with Jashemi, she was just a servant. Yeshi straightened and turned the corner, her mouth open to rebuke both son and servant, when she went still as stone.
Her steps had been light, and they were too engrossed in their game of Shamizan to notice her approach. They sat with their dark heads bent over the board, foreheads nearly touching. Jashemi wore a cloth around his loins, and Kevla wore a damp, sleeveless rhia. Yeshi noted distractedly that her son had a scar across his chest, but Jashemi’s war injuries were of no concern to her, not now.
The two children were of the same height and build. Both had their gazes on the board, but simultaneously they looked up and grinned. Two mouths of the same shape pulled back from even, white teeth; two pairs of eyes the same color tilted up at the corners in an identical fashion. Jashemi said something, but Yeshi heard no words. Blood pounded in her veins.
How could she not have seen this? She knew every inch of her son’s face since she had held him in her arms a few seconds after his birth. Kevla had attended her for almost two full years. She had thought the girl looked familiar when she had first laid eyes on her, but it had never occurred to Yeshi that Tahmu had…that he would….
Yeshi was so shocked that she had to lean against the stone steps for support. She was cold, so cold, and her stomach churned.
Betrayers. All of them. How they must have laughed at her