The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [155]
The light was growing brighter, resolving into shapes.
But I am awake, witch! he wanted to shout, only his jaw would not work. She had thought her poison would keep him asleep until tomorrow, yet it had not. Once before a witch had underestimated him. Kyrene. That was how he had been able to rise from the stone bier, to throw her down, and to put the torch to her.
Why was it he had twice proved a witch’s spell weaker than she had thought? He wasn’t sure, but his own mother, Elire, had been a witch after a fashion.
As a young man, before he became king, Beldreas had gone riding into the marches of western Calavan to hunt stag and had come upon Elire in the village of Berent. Her green eyes had drawn him to her bed. However, when he learned the next day that the other villagers held Elire to be the village wisewoman, he had flown into a rage. Never had the followers of Vathris been fond of witches, and Beldreas had been a warrior to the marrow.
He came upon her in the village common, and he would have struck her down in his rage had she not told him that his bastard son was already alive and quickening inside her belly. Young and hot-tempered as he was, even Beldreas would not harm a woman who was with child—his child.
However, she was still a witch, and Beldreas would have nothing to do with her. He rode back to Calavere, and Beltan had spent his first seven years in Berent with his mother. Often she made him drink bitter teas she brewed, or bade him chew on some foul-tasting piece of root that would make him go green and vomit. He never knew why. She would only tell him, It will make you strong, my little prince. But he had loved her and had never disobeyed, and when the potions made him sick, she would take his head in her lap, stroke his hair, and sing until he slept.
Then, the summer he was seven, Elire caught a fever, and while she would have tended to any villager so stricken with some of her simples, there was no one to make simples for her. Despite all she had done for them, no one in the village would lift a hand to bury a witch. So Beltan had placed her favorite green scarf in her stiff hands where she lay on her bed and had kissed her cold cheek. Then with a lamp he had set fire to the little wooden house where they had lived and watched it burn.
Such was the measure of Beldreas’s honor—if not his affection—that he would not see his only child, bastard or no, live as a pauper in a provincial village, and so he sent his seneschal, Lord Alerain, to bring Beltan to Calavere. Quickly enough, Beltan grew to adore Beldreas and his new home. But he never forgot his mother, or how in the end her witchwork had betrayed her—and ever after Beltan believed it to be a treacherous art.
Yet Lady Grace Beckett was a witch. And perhaps it was from all the simples his mother had made him drink as a child that he had some resistance to them now. Even as he remembered these things, the room grew clearer. He could see the flat ceiling, and the strange, blue-white lights. He made out a shadow on the other side of the room: slender, sitting at a table, head bowed over something in her hand.
It was good that he had not managed to cry out. This way she did not know that he could hear, that he could somehow understand her words—or at least some of them, for there was much she said that indeed sounded like the words of a witch’s spell.
Another click. Now she spoke in softer words.
“Personal note. We know that the subject is genetically a fully modern human being. The results of the phylogenetic analysis based on the DNA sequencing came back yesterday, and the most parsimonious tree suggests a divergence from northern European populations five thousand years before the present, with a margin of error of one thousand years.
“My own ancestors came from Norway. In a way, I suppose