
escape its rage.
She paused briefly, adjusting the burden of wood on her back, wishing she
could ease the load of the child as easily. Last night it had shifted down into the
pit of her belly, seeking the birth canal. The birth was close. Perhaps tonight,
perhaps tomorrow. She could feel the bones of her pelvis grating apart with the
pressure of the child's head each time she took a step, making it hard to walk.
She squinted through the snow to the thick line of conifers about three
hundred paces ahead. She had done her best with her camp. It was sheltered
well behind the tree line in the lee of a rocky hill that, jutting above the peaks of
the trees, was the first in a long range of hills leading into the distant Icescarp
Alps. Well before her pregnancy had begun to show, she'd slipped away from her
friends and family and travelled the Avarinheim to reach this lonely spot far to
the north of her usual forest home. From the first of the autumn months,
DeadLeaf-month, she had occupied her days with gathering and storing as many
berries, nuts and seeds as she could. As hard as she searched, however, she had
found only small amounts of malfari, the sweet fibrous tubers that provided her
people with most of their winter sustenance. She had been forced to go without,
and fears of what malnourishment might do to her and the child kept her awake
at nights. The remains of a few scrawny rabbits, dried into leathery strips, were
all she had for meat. She sighed and absently rubbed her belly, trying to ignore
the fiery ache in her legs and pelvis, desperately wishing for a few chickens or a
goat to supplement her diet.
She should never have tried to carry this child to term. Had she remained
with her people she would not have been allowed to. It was a Beltide child,
conceived during the drunken revelry of the spring rites, a time when her people,
the forest dwellers, and the people of the Icescarp Alps assembled in the groves
where mountain and forest met. There they celebrated the renewal of life in the
thawing land with religious rites, followed, invariably, by an enthusiastic excess
of whatever wine was left over from long winter nights huddled by home fires.
Beltide was the one night of the year when both peoples relaxed sufficiently to
carry interracial relations to extremes never practised throughout the rest of the
year.
Every Beltide night for the past three years she had watched him, wanted
him. He came down to the groves with his people, his skin as pale and fine as
the ice vaults of his home, his hair the fine summer gold of the life-giving sun
that both their peoples worshipped. As the most powerful Enchanter of his kind
he led the Beltide rites with the leading Banes of her own people; his power and
magic awed and frightened her yet she craved his skill, beauty and grace. This
last Beltide night past, eight months ago now, she had drunk enough wine to
loosen her inhibitions and buttress her courage. She was a striking woman, at
the peak of her beauty and fitness, her nut-brown hair waving thick down her
back. When he'd seen her striding across the clearing of the grove towards him
his eyes had crinkled and then widened, and he had smiled and held his hand
out to her. Eyes trapped by his, she had taken his outstretched fingers,