Read Online Glimpses by Lynn Flewelling - Free Book Online Page A

Hâzadriëlfaie was a cagey man,
and it was clear he knew he was being stalked even as he stalked
Amasa.
    When Amasa did find a safe place to sleep, he
dreamt of Ireya and what had happened that long ago spring. The
last time she came to him in that cave had been a few weeks after
the splint came off. They made love in the musky furs and then she
began to cry. When he begged her to tell him why, she took his hand
and placed it on her belly. The message was clear enough.
    “Baby?” he asked, throat tight with emotion.
A child!
    “Yes,” she whispered, weeping. “Kill. They
will kill!”
    “Kill the baby?”
    She nodded.
    “Then you have to come away with me. Leave
with me!”
    She rested her head on his broad chest and
nodded. “Leave with Amasa.”
    But the next morning she was gone again.
    He never knew if she’d changed her mind or
gotten caught going back for more supplies. It didn’t matter. He
was strong enough now to track her, and he did, all the way up a
side pass so narrow he could hardly squeeze through, to a huge
valley beyond. There were scattered stone cottages and farms all
the way up its length, to what looked like a town in the distance,
perhaps Fay Tast, as she’d said to him that first day. Looking down
from the heights, he could see riders and carts on roads, and when
he crept down through the forest for a closer look, he saw they all
wore the same blue-and-white head cloth—sen’gai, Ireya called
it.
    He had no intention of being killed before he
found her, so he skulked for weeks like a wolf in the night and
finally caught sight of her in the yard of an isolated farmstead
not far from the narrow pass. He watched for days, but she was
never out of the cottage without an escort—brothers, most likely.
At night she slept in a room with iron bars on the window.
    He crept to her window late one night and
scratched softly at the shutter. Her face appeared there an instant
later and the look she gave him was one of horror.
    She reached out through the bars for his
hand. “Leave!” she whispered frantically.
    “No. Not without you!”
    “They kill you, Amasa. They kill me! You
leave!”
    “I’ll kill them!”
    Her hand tightened on his. “No, Amasa. No
kill mine!”
    He could tell by her tone that she would
never forgive him if he killed her kin, even to help her. “Do they
know about me?”
    “No,” she whispered. “They wait, to see the
baby.”
    “To see if it’s Tír.” He’d learned that word,
the one that meant ‘outsider.’ “And when they do?”
    “Leave,” she pleaded softly, but he could see
tears shining in her eyes as she turned away and closed the
shutters.
    But Amasa didn’t. He came back night after
night, but her answer was always the same. The bars were set in
mortared stone. There was no getting her out that way, so he could
only skulk and keep watch and bide his time.
    Never once was she allowed further than the
well, and not once alone. He’d come to recognize the four brothers,
and the parents who lived with them. As spring gave way to summer
Amasa narrowly evaded the brothers time and again and watched
Ireya’s belly grow round and heavy under her long tunics.
     
    On a warm summer night the sound of a woman
crying out in pain drifted up the hill to where he sheltered in the
trees. Creeping down, he found too many people out in the yard to
get to the window, but as the cries continued, he guessed that his
child was being born, here, among his enemies. He sat in the tall
grass at the edge of the forest, keeping his lonely vigil among the
crickets and weeping for them both.
    He was there when the sun came up, and saw
Ireya slip from the silent house with a tiny bundle in her arms.
Her feet were bare, her skirt bloody, her face a mask of
desperation. She was making in his direction and saw him when he
started down to meet her. She waved him back to the trees as she
ran through the meadow and up the slope toward him. She was nearly
to Amasa when her brothers