Read Online Lyrec by Gregory Frost - Free Book Online

off crisply when he tugged it loose. A thin pus seeped out. The wound was a purple crescent, raw and ugly. A gangrenous odor assailed him, and Slyur cringed from it. His tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth.
    The child, no more than four, had been playing yesterday in the fields where her father and brothers worked. And while her undernourished brother swung a scythe too large for him to wield, she had sneaked up impishly behind him. A surprise. A slip. The scythe had opened her thigh to the bone. The brother was twisted now with guilt. His sister was dying.
    Slyur looked into the girl’s fevered eyes. He held the skirt up with his good arm and made signs in the air, calling upon the goddess to renew the child’s life, to make her whole. The child’s eyes followed the movements of his right arm as if watching a fly. Slyur made a crooked smile against his nausea and ended his prayer, lowering her skirt again. He held the stump of his right wrist nearer her face.
    “I lost my hand when I was your age. A scythe took it—just like your leg. And I lived.” He doubted she understood his fabrication, and finished by saying simply, “So you see, child, there is hope.” Even if he didn’t believe so himself.
    Slyur had been ten, trapping with his father in the reedy marshes of Novalok. Coming upon a forgotten trap left by some unknown hunter, he had carelessly reached down to pick it up and throw it out of his way. The trap sprang—he could still hear the twanging snap—and his hand was gone. Just like that. And the pain, the throbbing awful pain—he thought he would go mad feeling his heart hammer into his wrist, each beat a notch carved out of his sanity.
    “Sleep now,” soothed the Hespet. He touched her puffy eyelids closed.
    *****
    Prayers ended, Hespet Slyur stood, his knee-joints creaking painfully. This capricious weather would be the death of him. Perhaps he would become like the last Hespet and refuse ever to leave the temple. He drew marks of blessing in the air before each of the family members present, then backed out of the circular hut.
    In the shadow of the doorway he found another child staring up at him, and Slyur caught his breath. She was identical to the girl he had just prayed over. She looked at him as if she could see into him. Suddenly she drew near enough to take his blue net robe in her hands. She kissed a strand and said, “My sister will die, won’t she?”
    Slyur started to answer, but the lie caught in his throat. She seemed so calm. He grimaced and hurried through the doorway.
    The uneven ground beyond sparkled where early morning sunlight had not yet melted the many thin pockets of ice. Slyur plunged blindly through them, cracking and splashing up the chill water beneath. He barely noticed.
    He passed one of his mounted escorts close enough that his flurry made the man’s horse shy back. The door swung back on his coach. He tumbled in and called, “Take me back,” to the driver. “Take me back his instant!”
    The coach lurched forward, and Slyur, magistrate of all the priests in Secamelan, goggled back at the conical hut and hissed with fear.
    From the depths of the coach came a wintry voice: “Frightened of children, is it?”
    Slyur jolted against the door. The violence of his reaction nearly pitched him from the coach.
    His uninvited passenger now manifested, sneering in deprecation, revealing sharp ebony teeth. The figure was painful to look at. It wore blinding armor of alabaster fire; the hair of its beard and brows was similarly white flame. Its eyes were shrunken and cruel blood oranges.
    “Ch-Chagri,” Slyur stammered, “Great god, I didn’t expect you here.”
    “Slyur … I’m everywhere. I appear in chapels and temples to please priests. It suits me to be convenient.”
    The Hespet recovered himself somewhat and tried to slide casually from the doorway and onto his royal velvet cushion. “Yes,” he said, “of course. It’s simply that for years I