Silver's Bane. Anne KelleherЧитать онлайн книгу.
depths, to the peace the green sea promised.
The steam rose up in a high cloud as the Hag stirred the cauldron. She said nothing, but the same mocking voice Vinaver heard before swirled out of the steam, the words carried on the vapor. “Round about the circle goes, dark to light and back it flows—world without end can never be, so says every prophecy.”
“But what do you say?” asked Vinaver, suddenly brave with the courage of desperation. What, after all, did she have to lose? She had no chance of going back without the Hag’s help. If she were only fodder for the Hag’s eternal soup, so be it. “What do you say, Great Mother?” Something made the Hag look up. She fixed Vinaver with that cold unforgiving stare, but Vinaver refused to shrink. She took one step forward. “Must it end now?”
The rocks groaned, as though shuddering beneath the weight of some eternal sorrow, and the Hag’s appearance rippled, shifting from the hungry visage of She Who Destroys to the drawn and ravaged face of She Who Mourns. Suddenly she did not seem at all malevolent. Her shoulders collapsed, leaving her stooped and frail, and her face thinned and the reddish light in the green depths died. Her lipless mouth twisted and a tear seeped down one ruined cheek.
Time hung, suspended, the moment prolonged beyond all reality. The darkness seemed to shrink, expand, then retreat once more, as a light, white and clean as springtime sun leaped up from the cauldron’s depths. And in that radiant flash, Vinaver thought she saw the Hag transformed, her craggy features melting, dissolving, her flesh rounding and firming and lifting, flushing to a gentle shade of pink, and her eyes faded to violet. The Maiden, she thought. But even as Vinaver recognized the transformation, it faded away, dispersing into the air like one of the squirming things roaming the water’s depths. Finally it was Vinaver who broke the spell. “I think I understand,” she whispered. “You can’t change. Something’s happened. And you can’t change.” The rage that flared from the Hag’s red eyes gave Vinaver her first real thread of hope. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Make me understand. If I should be the Queen, why am I not? Why can you not become the Maiden, and why did Timias take your globe? What is it that’s killing Faerie, and how do I make it stop?”
Vinaver thought at first the Hag would not answer her at all, for the creature only shifted from side to side, and she wondered if the Hag was incapable of speech. After all, Herne had never spoken to her, in their encounter. But in a smooth motion that belied the image of the ancient crone, the Hag suddenly turned to face Vinaver and shrieked, in a voice that echoed across the vaulted space like the harsh cry of a crow, “Why? Why? Why?”
Perplexed, Vinaver stared. “Why what?”
With another shriek, the Hag went back to her stirring and the steam billowed up in great white clouds, wreathing and obscuring her face. For a moment, Vinaver was afraid the Hag would disappear. But as the steam cleared, she was still there, bright green eyes fixed on Vinaver. “Why should I help you?”
It was not a question Vinaver expected and the Hag’s voice alone unsettled her, grating on her ears like a blade scraped over stone. She cast about, taken aback, momentarily confused. What could she possibly say that would convince the Hag that Faerie should be saved? What part was more beautiful than the rest? Where to even begin?
And then Finuviel’s face rose before her, his form danced out of her memory, the tiny infant, delicately made, but sturdy, so fair and strong and merry as he grew, the epitome of what a prince of the sidhe should be. She remembered the first time she’d heard his laugh. A butterfly had landed on his toes. Her eyes clouded with tears and her throat thickened. “Well,” she said at last. “I have a son.”
“Ah,” sighed the Hag, and with a stir of her stick, the great cauldron released another cloud of steam. This time it resolved itself into the angular, antlered face of Herne, the Lord of the Forest and the Wild Hunt.
“You know—you know about my son?” Vinaver said. For the appearance of Herne’s image implied that the Hag knew he’d fathered Finuviel. No one else had ever believed Vinaver. Everyone accused her of using the claim of Herne as a way of concealing Finuviel’s true parentage. The enormity of the Hag’s knowledge burst like a sunrise into her mind and suddenly Vinaver believed that not only was there hope, but that the Hag would help her.
Without another sound, the Hag beckoned. Vinaver crept forward, wincing on her ruined feet, her heart pounding audibly. At the edge of the firepit, just before it was possible for Vinaver to see inside the cauldron, she held up her hand. “Yes,” the Hag whispered, a long, low croon that tickled the back of Vinaver’s neck like the barest stroke of her long sharp claws. “Yes, I know about your son. I know all about your son. And yes, for his sake, and for his father’s, I shall help you. But there is always a price, and so I ask you, Vinaver Tree-speaker, the would-be, should-be Queen—tell me, what will you pay for the knowledge of the Hag?”
“What would you have of me?” The water was still dripping off her hair. It ran in chilly rivulets down her back, between the cleft of her buttocks, trickling down her legs to drip off the two swollen lumps of throbbing flesh that were her bloodied feet. She felt as if she stood in a pool of her own congealing blood. The cold air raised gooseflesh on her entire body, but an act of will greater than any she had ever known she was capable of kept her upright and still. She had come so far and searched for so long that she had nothing left but the rags on her back. What could the Hag possibly want of her?
“There are three things.” The whisper rasped down her spine like a fingernail across granite. “For the first, I want my globe back. For the second, I want the head of him that took it from me.”
At that, Vinaver’s head snapped up. “Timias?”
This time she was standing far too close when the angry light flared in the Hag’s eyes. A searing pain lanced up her leg as she involuntarily stepped back onto a sharp edge, while an image blazed clearly in her mind, the image of Timias creeping away from the cavern, bearing the moonstone globe. “You want me to kill Timias?”
“His life is mine, and my cauldron wants his head.” The Hag’s hiss, her narrowed eyes, reminded Vinaver of a snake. “Cut off his head with a silvered edge, and give it to me for my cauldron. So those are the first two things I want of you. Will you agree?”
The depth of the hatred in the Hag’s voice frightened Vinaver. “All right.” She had no idea how she would actually fulfill the second requirement—for to do what the Hag asked required some forethought. And it had not occurred to her that murder would be involved. Vinaver swallowed hard. “What’s the third?”
This time the Hag’s response was a sinister chuckle. She leaned forward, even as Vinaver instinctively shrank back. “The third is the most important and the most necessary. I want your womb.”
At first Vinaver was sure she had not heard correctly, even as her hands clasped her belly. So she could only stare while the Hag chuckled with anticipatory glee. “What?”
“I need your womb.”
Vinaver looked at the scaly gray claws that gripped the stick, recoiling at the idea of those twisted, thickened digits anywhere near her flesh. “Why?” she whispered, horrified.
The Hag’s laugh was like the rumble of rocks down a hillside. “Ah, little queen. Already the circle widens into a spiral. The spiral turns, the center loosens, and soon all will spin away, down, into my cauldron. And my cauldron must not be cheated. If you would undo what has been done, you must feed it. And that’s what it wants. That’s what it needs. That’s what it craves.” She drew out the last long syllable, beckoning Vinaver closer with a crooked, yellow claw. “Come, if you will, and look within—but feed the cauldron to stop the spin.” She stirred the stick, swaying a little, eyes closed as she chanted. Suddenly she stopped and opened her eyes. “You want your sister pregnant with Faerie’s heir? Give me your womb. That’s how it has to work, I’m afraid.”
Vinaver swallowed hard, trying to control the beating of her heart. The monstrous thing muttered as she stirred, her lumpen shape rolling in slow motion in a large, left-turning spiral. Left-turning, Vinaver thought, the direction of breakdown, banishment