The Wizardwar - Elaine Cunningham [36]
"So great a sacrifice!" Whendura said, speaking into the scrying globe. "If Keturah has lost this much memory so soon, I fear her mind will not survive the birth of the child."
"You did well to contact me. I had not realized it was so bad with her."
Dhamari's voice floated from the globe, resonant with earnest concern.
"Childbearing does not come easy to Keturah, in the morning she wants no one near her. Sometimes her sickness lingers until highsun. Is there no potion that can relieve her suffering?"
The ringing sincerity in his voice made Keturah want to shriek with fury.
"You know there is not," the magehound said sternly. "She cannot take any magical potion of any kind, for fear of altering the delicate balance and harming the child."
Keturah's eyes widened as a grim possibility seared its way into her mind.
Dhamari knew her devotion to Halruaa. If she were chosen as a jordain's dam, she would find a way to accept her fate. Yet he had made sure that she knew nothing of this.
"Keep my lady with you," Dhamari went on in his gentle voice. "She is too confused to travel alone. I will come presently and collect her."
Keturah hurried to the window. A tall iron trellis covered with pale lavender roses leaned against the wall, leading down into the greenmage's garden. As she eased herself out and began to climb down, she blessed Mystra that Dhamari had never had much talent for travel spells. He would have to depend upon their stables. The ride to the magehound's home and back granted Keturah some time.
Once she reached the ground, she conjured a travel portal and leaped through it. She emerged not in her own home but in the public gardens, near the pool where she had found the blue behir nearly a year ago.
For a moment she considering attempting another gate spell but was afraid what the next random location might be. She set off on foot, hoping that the sedate mare Dhamari usually rode kept to its usual, plodding pace.
After what seemed an eternity, she reached her tower. She raced up the stairs to gather a few belongings and seek some answers.
"Mistress."
Keturah stopped on the stair landing and whirled, regarding a woman with a face similar to her own, yet somehow coarser and lacking in symmetry.
"What is it, Hessy?"
"Did you see Whendura the greenmage this morn?"
Keturah blinked. "Yes. What of it?"
"She is dead. I heard it cried in the marketplace." Hessy swallowed hard.
"It is said she was killed by starsnakes."
"A starsnake? At this hour? Unless she climbed one of the bilboa trees to accost one in its sleep, that seems unlikely."
"She was attacked in her own tower. They say there must have been at least three of the snakes."
Dread began to gnaw at Keturah, giving way to growing certainty. The winged snakes never ventured within human dwellings. They were also fiercely solitary creatures, capable of bearing young without need for another of their kind. They avoided each other assiduously-never had she seen more than one of them in the same place. Though starsnakes had a high resistance to magic, no natural starsnake would attack a wizard-unless compelled to do so by a powerful spell.
Keturah began to see the shape of Dhamari's plan. He could not allow the sympathetic greenmage to become Keturah's ally for fear of what the two women might together discover. Keturah would be confined to her tower, under Dhamari's care, until the birth of the valuable child. Then she would be turned over to Halruaan law-if indeed she survived the birth with her mind intact-and the child would be Dhamari's to control. No doubt a magehound would detect some spark of magic in the babe, and the child would be rejected by the jordaini order.
Everyone would regard this as a tragic waste and look upon Dhamari with great sympathy.
Oh, but he was clever! The only flaw in his plan was Keturah was not yet with child. He probably had spells prepared to entrap her long enough to remedy this lack.
"It was Dhamari who found Whendura, I suppose." Her voice was harsh as a swordsmith's rasp. "Or what