Read Online The Golden Swan by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online Page A

reproachful.
    â€œThis taking of thrones, Fabron, greed for power and lust for gold and sell—sell—selling of your own child, you will die! Die! The hounds of hell rend you—” He sobbed, then struggled upright in rage. “Never mind!” he shouted wildly. “You’re a dog anyway, and a son of a bitch, and that makes me a dog too, a pup, Shamarra said so—”
    Silence took hold of him and he stood half bent over, staring fearfully. I went to him and pressed against his unsteady knees, trying to support and comfort him, but he did not notice. He was seeing things that were not there. “Hands,” he hissed, “hands of doom,” and he inched back, taut. “Damn—lake,” he panted. “Hates—me. The—face!”
    He turned, stumbling, and tried to run, but pain staggered him and he fell—I bore the brunt of it, making a cushion for him until I scrambled out from under his thrashing weight. He was still running, legs beating the air madly, going nowhere, in the sort of fit that puppies suffer sometimes when they are about to die. Frightened, I tried to make him stop by lying on him, but he pummeled me with his one good hand, shouting, and drove me away. At last exhaustion quieted him and he lay in the dirt, covered with the leaf mold he had kicked up, panting again.
    I went to fetch water—I in my wolf form, too dismayed and too unpracticed to find my way out of it—taking the flask in my mouth and finding a stream and dropping it in until it was full, padding back with it, spilling it over him. Again and again I did that until he was lucid enough to grasp it and drink. Then with my teeth I tugged blankets over him, and he dozed.
    Before midday he awoke again and lay gazing fixedly at a straight and slender gray-barked sapling that stood nearby.
    â€œShamarra,” he addressed it, “I have never been able to understand what he did to you. How he could make that mystic tool into a hurtful, thrusting thing, a weapon of his hatred, no better than a broomstick—”
    The thought seemed to both inflame and alarm him. He started struggling and shouting again. “I know what I would do to him if I were you, Shamarra! I would wind his guts around a stake. I would flay him alive. I would—no, oh, no—”
    He started clawing at himself, his chest. Coming closer, I saw that his skin had gone as red as if it had been seared. “Shamarra, not me!” he shouted fiercely. “Hag, why do you despise me? You know I am doomed to—oh, Tirell, my brother.…” He started to weep. He was raising great welts and bloody gashes on his body, tearing at himself, and I took his wrist in my jaws, struggling with him and trying to calm him. I knew now what ailed him, and I felt a cold chill thinking of it. The rye plague, the holy fire. Seed of it had come to him in the bread. Very likely it would leave him either insane or dead. “Shamarra, please!” he groaned. “Let go!” I could have cried for despair. But slowly, after some moments, a sense of hope came to me, for little as he seemed to know me he was speaking to me still in the language I understood, the Traderstongue. It must have become second nature to him in all the years of wandering. And how could he feel, I wondered, speaking always that mongrel tongue, a thing of mismatched parts and fragments as he himself—
    â€œLet me die and have it over with,” he whispered. I suppose if it had not been for that matter of bathing in a forbidden lake he might have died. He was grievously ill for some days, unable to eat. At first he ranted and flailed, and I had to try to control him—luckily he had only the one arm and I was able to keep him from hurting himself too much. Later the fire left his skin but he lay like a corpse, nearly senseless, wasting away until his fair skin was stretched taut over the bones of his face and they showed through