you here while Ettinmere’s elders hear her petition in your behalf.”
But Arithon had firmed his own course: to smile and be gracious, and smartly move on once he had established his harmless credentials. “No matter the outcome of Vivet’s appeal, I expect to fare eastward directly.”
The speaker bared wolfish teeth. “Stranger, our custom says otherwise. If the elders reject you in Vivet’s behalf, you will not leave here alive.”
Arithon controlled the spark of his anger. Conversational, uncompliant, he said, “You would seize rogue authority and condemn a blameless traveller subject to crown justice?”
The spokesman returned a bold ultimatum. “The blameless man does not venture here, and we answer to no other law beyond Ettin.”
Arithon kept his own counsel concerning the sovereignty of charter law. Rather than argue, he showed them contempt and settled back for a catnap. Mage-trained and in sharp command of his nerves, he slept, perhaps for an hour. Until inbound tension like a plucked string stirred the dead air and roused him.
Incomprehensible voices in dialect approached the barred door. A Masterbard’s sensitivity picked out the discordant notes of outraged surprise, fast tempered by someone’s authority. Whatever the unforeseen hitch, the Ettinmen with him surged to their feet. The bilingual fellow, eyes gleaming, explained in his stilted accent, “Vivet is brought here. You are permitted to speak with her alone. None will disturb you although our guard stays until the elders request your word on the matter.”
Prickled at his nape, Arithon probed with delicate courtesy, “What business of mine concerns Ettinmere’s council?”
The man smiled, eyebrows raised. “If the business in question is yours,” he began, then snorted back sudden laughter, and grinned. “Ah, by Teaah’s sacred pink tits! You don’t know, then? Well, laddie, bequeathed by my breath to your ears: our shaman’s confirmed that Vivet Daldari is pregnant.”
The news punched Arithon windless. Stone-faced, he watched the door open and shut behind the spokesman’s departure. The tallow dip fluttered to the influx of draught, then steadied and streamed again as the panel flung inward. The young woman entered, whose artless deceit had contrived this benighted embarrassment.
She had bathed and changed. Hair twined with primroses cascaded in splendour, reddish strands glinting over a draw-string gown that exposed the freckled, cream skin of her shoulders. Her scent pervaded the windowless gloom as she knelt at his feet, a scared doe in poised entreaty.
Her upturned face and the imposed view of her cleavage raised a stab of visceral hatred. Stung as though whipped, Arithon moved back, annoyed that his mindless male instinct still stirred to her flaunted attributes.
“I told my elders the quickened child was yours,” she confessed, scalded scarlet. “What choice did I have? Its life would become forfeit without a willing sire’s grant of child-right.”
“Your dishonest seduction was an attempt to establish paternity?” Arithon accused, stunned incredulous. Her claim was unconscionable, that one bungled tryst might pin her luckless conception on him. “The chance is slight, Vivet. Birth is likely to prove I am not the babe’s father.”
“Although you could be!” She clung, head bowed, and disclosed in agony, “Outsider, you don’t understand. If my people find out I’ve been used, unwilling, they’ll say my womb’s been cursed. A forced woman brings sour luck. If no man claims the burden as ward, her offspring henceforward are shunned as ill-fated.”
“Without my protection, you claim to be ruined?” Brittle with sarcasm, Arithon snapped. “That’s bathos!” Her glass-beaded necklace shivered as she shrank. The glint against her trembling flesh did not stir him, and the tawdry effort to dress for appeal offended his natural intelligence. “Just leave. Why stay for this piteous drama, Vivet? Anywhere else, you’d live free. Why not marry for love, without stigma?”
“I prayed to Sky and Earth that my courses would come,” the woman gushed on, woe forced through a choked throat. “I wasn’t beyond a fortnight overdue!”
“Then why rush things into a public scene?” Arithon asked, furious the issue had been broached before strangers without his prior awareness.
Vivet lifted a face streaked with tears, delicate as the glaze upon an heirloom porcelain. Fragile enough to shatter at a touch, she reached for his hand, and the constraint of s’Ffalenn compassion entangled his personal need to pull back.
“A woman’s moon time is not private, here!” Vivet hastened to explain. “By Ettin tradition, females who travel abroad are questioned upon their return. The shaman condemns those who answer him false. Could I forsake my last pretence of virtue? Of course I told the truth! Roaco’s divination ascertains I will bear a male child in the spring.”
Arithon engaged his mage-sight straightaway, loath to rely on an Ettinman’s word. For self-integrity, he confirmed the ephemeral gleam of the quickened seed in her belly.
Yet Vivet refused to have her get’s rightful paternity deferred until birth. “What proof will matter, then, whose babe draws breath? Here, offspring of rape are killed without quarter! Exposed on the mountain side and left to die, unless someone of character agrees to foster them.”
Arithon’s fury exploded past restraint. “Murder in cold blood! Your people execute blameless newborns for the lack of a paternal name?”
Vivet flinched. “Ettinmere raises no half-orphaned children. More, as the mother abandoned, I would be outcast. Fit only to serve others, and never to be chia, cherished as a wife. A woman in pregnancy must have a provider to pledge surety for her welfare and the babe’s upbringing.”
Wisdom in this case spoke for mature strength. “A liaison gained by manipulation won’t give you that happiness.”
“Did I ask to be forced?” Sobbing, Vivet clutched his legs and poured out the dregs of her misery. “This is my home, with my ties to family thrown into jeopardy by an ill turn. Ettin’s way embraces tuoram, a code of responsibility that assigns privilege through honour.”
“I should walk away.” Arithon wrenched free in disgust. “Your people’s tradition is nothing but vicious barbarity.”
Yet in the dense distance between them, the unspoken, slim chance: her babe might in fact bear his lineage. And if the innocent get of a stranger, his choice to sacrifice that unborn life laid an infanticide at his feet. S’Ffalenn prince to the core, his blood heritage chained him to Vivet’s needy plight.
“What of the child?” Arithon pressed. “Could a luckless bastard find any joy amid this rigid culture?”
Crest-fallen, Vivet exclaimed, “But you sorely mistake us!” She flooded him with eager reassurances. “Outsider blood is highly prized! We may be an unworldly folk, hidebound by obligation and kin ties, but our lines are in need of fresh vigour. Your charge as a foster parent won’t last for life. The community holds our children as equals after they celebrate puberty. Mine would be sought as a coveted mate if, by your grace, he survives.”
Tallow-fed flame dipped the moment in gold, the flush on the woman’s over-bred skin transparent with hope, and the slim man before her armoured in retreat, his stubbled jaw clenched and his eyes chipped emerald. Twelve years of freedom, balanced against a blameless, new life: forced to capitulate through compassion, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn yielded to the bitter price that silenced the outcry of his royal conscience.
The static that deranged the flux through the Storlains allowed only erratic glimpses of Arithon’s straits. The bursts of connection brushed over Elaira where she camped under stars in the flatlands beyond the outskirts of Shipsport. The air smelled of dust and paper-dry grass, muddied by a south breeze fecund with marsh taint off the river delta. A squall line formed over the Cildein deeps riffled her skin to the distanced flicker of heat lightning.
The mainland would be sodden by dawn. Therefore, her