One trait Princess Britamund had inherited from her father was his impatience with hallways, corridors, roads, and any structure that existed only to serve as a conduit between the place where he was and the place where he wanted to be. She could dally when she reached her destination, but she always hurried everywhere she went.
Shosudin wished Tashnu could have come. They needed one elf to watch Malcolm and one elf to watch Egelric, since Vash wasn’t likely to watch anyone but Iylaine. For that matter, they needed a fourth elf to watch Vash.
“Supposing you told us what you came here to tell us?” Egelric snapped.
Lar heard Dre howling at Hel long before he reached her cell. He found him clutching a fistful of Hel’s dull red hair, dragging her head back and forth across the wall as he shouted at her.
“What’s going on in here?” Lar roared over Dre’s shouts and Hel’s squeals.
Imin was already in the middle of the room by the time the door he had flung open slammed against the wall.
“Get up, Lar!”
As soon as the hand had closed over her arm she could breathe, but it took further floundering for Iylaine to realize that she was yet underwater and then to find the air.
Now her head was above the surface, and still he would not let go.
“Iylaina!”
A deep voice came down from the sky. For a moment, Iylaine believed it was God. For a moment, she believed the Lord or an angel of the Lord was calling out to save her from some sin.
“Vash! What are you doing?”
Her chin trembled, and her cheeks were already wet with tears of exasperation, but Vash could not have known it. He had not once turned his head to look at her.
Though she had scarcely seen him and never truly touched him, she knew that body as though she inhabited it: so gloriously long in every limb, supple and slender as a sapling. His arm waved just as a young branch would wave in a wind. He stood in the shadows of taller trees, but his silhouette sufficed. It was Vash.
He made no move to approach her. As pregnant as she was, she could not hop over the creek and go directly to him. She would have to walk down to the bridge below the house and double back.
It was the hour when the animals of day and dusk and dawn slept, and only the few creatures that were truly of the night were abroad. The woods were quiet: not hushed and expectant, but slumbering. The leaves hung limp from slack branches, and the tall, heavy-headed stems of grass in the yard were silent and swooning with dew.
Only the moon moved, and even she rose ponderously, heavy-bodied and full like a pregnant woman—like Iylaine, if she would rise.
Catan’s husband liked to rise before the sun. Perhaps he had not always done so, but she knew that a year and a half of blindness had taught him a deep love for the beauty of things he could not smell or hear or touch. He liked to climb onto the roof and watch the dawn.
Cat had spent enough sleepless nights that she had developed a dread of the dawn. Her nights were sweet now, but enough of the old dread had lingered that it was a great pleasure to sleep through the dawn entirely and not even see it come.
“Ho shit. Cenwulf?! One of The Four Sigsketeers?”
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