Cobweb Bride Vera Nazarian

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.Within moments there was only stillness.The ice pieces gently bobbed on top of the sludge.“Holy Mother of God.have mercy upon your loyal servant Ian Chidair and receive him unto your bosom,” Beltain whispered, crossing himself.He removed his helmet in grief and in final honor of his fallen Lord father.In the dark, his eyes were without an end, places leading only into hell; his hair, like filaments of the night.Some distance away there were various sounds of retreat.Goraque soldiers returned to their own side of the lake, while straggling figures of Hoarfrost’s men started to fall back to the place where the Duke himself had just sunk in the waters so near the shore.In the darkness it was not clearly visible that some of these men should not have been walking upright.Indeed, many did not realize their own condition, feeling only numbness and winter closing in, and attributing it to the circumstances of battle.From the shores came the reserve troops, soldiers carrying torches to illuminate the scene of battle, for at last it was true night.“Soldiers of Chidair! All of you now my men—good, brave men,” Beltain continued, his face illuminated with the angry red flickering of torches.“I promise to you, his death will not go unavenged.I now count on your loyalty to—”But his words tapered off into silence.Because in that moment the ice at the shore of the lake began to shudder, and then was shattered violently from the inside.out.It was broken by the blow of a metal-clad fist emerging from the lake itself.The fist was followed by an arm, and then another.The two hands tore and pounded at the ice, until it cracked and shattered, and the hole widened, became the girth of a man’s body, then wider yet.At last a human shape burst forth, sputtering and gasping, then throwing up water mixed with blood upon the shore.He stood up, the waters coming up to his waist.Then, bracing himself with his arms he crawled out and lay upon the surface at the edge of the hole, clad in mail and a soaked darkened surcoat that should have been faint blue, the color of frost.He had lost his crested helmet underneath the ice of the lake.But the hair plastered to the skull with ice water was unmistakably that of the Duke Hoarfrost, Ian Chidair, Lord of the west lands of Chidair within the Kingdom of Lethe.He lay twitching upon the ice, while lake water and the last vestiges of his own blood came pouring out of the fissures in his body.And then he slowly raised his head.Illuminated by the torches of his own soldiers, a pale bloodless face of the man they knew and served looked at them impassively.He was like a god of Winter, white with a bluish tint.The water was freezing into true ice upon the planes of his face, rimming his brows and hair with dead crystalline whiteness.Duke Hoarfrost stood up, while many, including his own son, reined in their mounts to move away, and foot soldiers took an involuntary step back and unto the shore, away from the ice.“Father?” Beltain Chidair whispered, his voice cracking.“Are you my father? Are you.dead?”And the man before him parted his frozen lips, and then spewed forth more brackish water and the last taint of living blood.“My.son,” he croaked.“I.don’t know.”Death’s third stop was intimate, and once again no time had elapsed.In a poor house with a badly thatched roof, no attic and a drafty ceiling of old wooden rafters—one of the most decrepit dwellings in the village of Oarclaven, in the Dukedom of Goraque, which in turn lay within the Kingdom of Lethe—an old peasant woman lay dying.She was Bethesia Ayren, possibly older than the elm tree growing in the back yard.She was a widow, the mother of two sons one of whom owned this house, and the grandmother of one grandson and three granddaughters.It was a rather small family, as peasant families went.Bethesia had been beautiful in her day, with cream skin and bright auburn hair that was long and soft as goose down, and shimmered as apricot silk in sunlight.She wore it loose once or twice when a maiden, and it had caught the eye of a passing lordling’s handsome son [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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