“In six months I will return to make an accounting.”
“Where do you go, Stronghand?” Trueheart asks. “Will you fight again in Salia?”
He looks at Deacon Ursuline. She nods. “I must consult with the WiseMothers. I believe they have much they can tell me.”
“Should they choose to do so,” she says.
“Should they choose to do so. There is much I desire to know. This war is only beginning.”
another tear.
The tears were only beginning.
Dizzied, he shaded his eyes with a hand, but he had to concentrate, to fix on this moment, this Earth, this place—not the other one—because Henri was still talking.
“She was strong-willed but weak in her heart. Desperate, and beautiful. She used her beauty to feed herself, to get what she wanted. It was the only way she knew, Alain. Had she not been so desperately poor, she might have been otherwise. I do not know what she endured before she came to Lavas Holding. She would never speak of it. Pregnancy killed her. It’s the war women fight. Just as men die in battle, so some women are fated to die in childbed, wrestling with life. You survived it. She did not, though she wished to live. Fought to live. Sometimes beauty is like a candle flame—it shines because it burns. I would have married her, but she wanted something else.”
“What did she want?”
Henri shrugged with one shoulder, a movement so constrained that if Alain had not lowered his hand at that instant he would have missed it. “I don’t know. She wished to be something she was not.”
“As I did.”
“No, Son. No. Well, perhaps.” He laughed weakly. “That comes of her, I suppose.” He set down the file, scratched his beard, scratched his hair, and picked up the file again. “After all this, who do you think your father is? I mean, the one whose seed watered her garden.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I know who I am now because I know what I must do.”
Henri frowned. “You will leave us.”
“I must.” Sorrow barked, and he heard the hounds thrashing back through the undergrowth. He rose and stepped to see around the boat and up the trail. “Here comes Artald.”