The Firebird's Vengeance (6 page)

Sakra did not let her finish. “Bridget, have you … ever seen Anna’s ghost?”

Bridget swallowed with difficulty. “No.” Her voice was hoarse, and she did not trust herself to speak more than that one word. She had seen the shades of her mother and her father, and the man whom she had grown up with as her father. But not her baby.

“And you did not seek to.” Sakra spoke the words for her.

Bridget nodded her agreement, her mouth still firmly closed.

Sakra sat silently for a moment, giving himself time to think, and giving Bridget time to collect herself. Of all the things that might possibly have brought her again to the Vixen’s attention … this had not even entered her mind. How was it possible she was sitting here with Sakra discussing Anna?

Sakra reached out and touched the arm of her chair, his fingertips a hairsbreadth from her sleeve. “I am sorry, Bridget, but can you tell me how Anna died?”

Bridget licked her lips. Of course she could, but she did not want to. “She just … it was a cradle death. It was night. I woke up to help Poppa tend the light, when I came back down …” She could not say it. Nine years later and a world away, and she could not say it. “I tried,” she said instead. “I did everything I could think of. If I’d been a moment earlier … If I’d done more than glance into the cradle instead of the light, maybe …” That was the thought that had echoed through her head the entire time she stood in court. If she’d been a moment sooner. If she’d cared for her child first and her duty to her father and the light second. If, if, if …

Maybe she had truly wanted the child dead, as the prosecutor had said. Maybe she was taking revenge on her lover Asa Kyosti, who took her virtue and left with nothing but a bastard daughter.

Bridget closed her eyes.

“Then there was no mark upon her body? No cause or sign?” Sakra spoke as gently as he could, but the words still burned.

“No. It’s … something that happens.” A moment sooner. If she had looked into the cradle for more than a second. Spared Anna more than just a passing glance …

“Yes, I know. But it is also something which may be hastened … or it may be made false by magic.”

Bridget’s eyes flew open. “What are you saying?”

Sakra had drawn his hand back and now he rubbed it across his brow. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Are you saying someone … a sorcerer … from Isavalta might have murdered my baby?” Her voice rose high and sharp. “Why? How could they? They didn’t even know I existed.”

“But Medeoan knew your mother existed. Who knows when she first sent Kalami across to the world of your birth, and who knows what he saw there?”

Bridget pressed her hand against her mouth as if she were about to be sick. She was suddenly glad she was sitting, because her knees would not have supported her at that moment.

“Could Kalami have murdered my daughter? Why? Why would he murder a baby? Why not me? I was the threat to him.”

“The children of sorcerers are a rare breed,” said Sakra slowly. “When they come into being, they are powerful. You are the daughter of a sorcerer, Bridget. Your daughter would have been the third of her line, and I don’t know that there has ever been such a child. There is no telling what her powers would have been.”

Rage swelled like a fire in Bridget’s heart. A single hot tear ran down her cheek, but whether it was for that rage or the cold sorrow that warred with it, she could not tell.

“Murdering bastard.” She clenched her fists. “Murdering bastard.” She tried to control herself, without success. “How could he do such a thing? Anna was an infant. She’d barely drawn breath. How could he do it!” She pounded the arm of her chair.

“There is one other possibility.” Sakra held himself very still.

“What?” demanded Bridget. “Do you think Medeoan did this? Medeoan killed my child?”

“Bridget, your child might not be dead.”

Bridget stared at him. She couldn’t understand. His words made no sense. “What?”

“Your daughter, your Anna, might still be alive.”

“Sakra, do not taunt me like this. Anna is dead. I buried her.”

“Bridget, have you ever heard of a changeling? Or a stock?”

“A changeling is a fairy child left in place …” Bridget’s voice died in her throat.

Sakra nodded as if she had completed a full sentance. “A stock is a wooden image, made to look like a certain individual, whoever or whatever the sorcerer desires. It is then enchanted and left in that person’s place. It will live a few days, or a few weeks, depending on the strength of the spell, and then it appears to die, and is given funerary rites, as if it were the real person, but the real person is still alive.”

It took a moment for Sakra’s words to assemble themselves inside Bridget’s mind in comprehensible phrases. When they did, Bridget knew her mouth fell open, but she could not move to close it.

“That’s impossible. It couldn’t be.”

“Why?”

“Because.”
Because I have been nine years alone mourning my child. Because I stood accused of her murder. Because if she were alive for all these nine years I could have been looking for her. I could have found her. Because if she was alive, I should have been doing something other than grieving her death
.

Oh, God. Oh, God
. Bridget closed her eyes. “It can’t be. I would have known.”

“How, Bridget?”

“Because I was … I am … I was her mother!” Bridget bowed her head into her hands. “That was my baby I held. I would have known if it wasn’t. I would have seen it! I would have seen her!” Her hands clenched into fists, and her knuckles pressed against her eyes. She would not cry. She would not cry.

Silence, and then the touch of Sakra’s hand. Bridget unknotted one fist and wrapped her fingers tightly around his. She stayed like that for a moment, eyes closed, holding his warm hand like a lifeline, and not saying a word.

Gradually, she was able to open her eyes and lift up her head. Sakra stood beside her, his eyes filled with sympathy and concern. She drank in his gaze for a long moment, drawing into herself all the strength he could give, she needed it all to speak her next words.

“God Almighty, Sakra, could … could it be so? Could my Anna still be alive somewhere?”

Are you that sure of all your family?
Had the Vixen truly stressed the word “all,” or was that only Bridget’s fancy?

“I don’t know. I only know that such a thing can be done, and that Kalami was aware of you much longer than you were aware of him.”

“God, Sakra, I don’t … I have to …” She took a deep breath. “What do I do? Do I try to find her ghost?”

“That is one way.”

The idea made her sick with fear, and worse than fear. Fear of what failure of such a spell would mean, and fear of what success would mean. She was in no way certain she could stand to look on the ghost of her infant daughter. Ashamed of her own cowardice, she asked, “Can you do it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have no tie to her, Bridget. You and I are not married.”

Bridget’s throat tightened. She was not sure she could speak. To see her child again, even as a spirit. To see Anna with the eye of memory and imagination, which was how one beheld a ghost, to see the little girl and the young woman she had once imagined her child would one day be …

“Why is the Vixen doing this to me?” Bridget choked out. “Was it something I did? Have I offended her?”

Again, Sakra shook his head. “I cannot say. We have none such as her in Hastinapura. She was banished by the Seven Mothers millennia ago. I think, though, if she meant to avenge some offense, she would find another way than this to make you pay.”

Bridget got to her feet. She paced aimlessly around the firepit. The stone walls seemed suffocating now. She wanted to tear them down, to see right through them to the Land of Death and Spirit to see Anna’s ghost at peace there, and she wanted to be struck blind so she never would have to see such a thing.

At the same time, this was an uncertainty she could not bear. The whole of her felt balanced on a knife’s edge. Now that the possibility that Anna might be alive had been raised, she had to know for certain.

Another thought came to her. “I’d have to go back to Wisconsin, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m sorry?”

Bridget turned and faced Sakra. “To be sure, I’d have to go back to Wisconsin. Otherwise, any spell I might use, even with my second sight, if it didn’t reach her … spirit, it might just be because I can’t reach far enough, or that she can’t cross to Isavalta. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Sakra considered and then nodded. “Ties of love and blood are immensely strong, but the space between worlds is vast. Were I to perform such a working, I would want to be near the bones.”

“And if I went, now this minute, and the Firebird came to Isavalta, I’d be out of reach and unable to help stop whatever this vengeance might be.”

Sakra considered, his brown eyes flickering back and forth. “That is also true.”

“So either the Vixen is doing me a great favor by telling me my daughter may still be alive, or she is luring me away from Isavalta when my help would be most needed.”

“Luring us,” corrected Sakra.

For a single heartbeat, Bridget thought to say, “What do you mean?” but she realized she had no need. Sakra meant he would go with her back home. He would not leave her to face her daughter’s grave alone.

Instead of that, she said, “You may not be permitted to go.” Sakra was bound-sorcerer to the Empress Ananda. His first duty lay in serving her and the bond that had been solemnized by a series of complex oaths. Bridget knew he carried those oaths in the center of his soul.

She wanted to say, “Let’s wait until we’ve found the Firebird. Then we’ll go.” But the words would not come. Anna’s name pulsed through her mind in time to the beating of her quickened heart. What few memories she had appeared before her mind’s eye. She remembered Anna, red and wrinkled, her dark hair plastered to her skull, how her eyes had opened and shown themselves to be green already, instead of the usual baby blue. She remembered warmth and living weight and the scent of sweet milk. With these actual memories came the remembrance of dreams. All mothers dreamed of their child’s future, but Bridget with her second sight had more than usual reason to think hers might be true. She remembered telling herself how beautiful, how tall, how strong Anna would be. How she’d always raise her hand in class, how she’d be so quick and clever at her chores, and how well she’d read in the evenings. She’d go on to the teacher’s college, or nursing school. Anna, Bridget, and, of course, Asa would move down to Madison …

So many dreams and not one of them showing her daughter’s death. Was that because she did not die?

Bridget knew she would not be able to wait. The world might burn down around her ears, but she would still go. If it was possible that Anna lived, if there was even a faintest whisper of that impossible hope …

Bridget bowed her head. If this was the Vixen’s trickery, she had done her work very well.

But Sakra had other duties, and other claims on his loyalties, whatever he might feel for her, or however much he might wish to help. Bridget knew that. She always knew that.

Perhaps that was why he had not yet spoken of love to her.

Bridget brushed that thought aside. “I’ll speak to the empress in the morning,” she said, clasping and unclasping her hands. “She’ll surely give us leave once she understands …”

Which was something else she had to stop to consider. What if the empress did not give leave? She knotted her fingers together. Bridget would go anyway. She would find her way back across the gulf between worlds, but what then? If Anna lived, could Bridget find her alone? If Kalami had done this unspeakable thing, where would he have taken her? To Tuukos, his homeland? Or someplace else? She had to leave to be sure Anna was alive, but could she come back to Isavalta if by leaving she defied the empress? Or would she be giving up this new life that promised to be so sweet, for something too faint even to be called hope?

Too many questions. Bridget felt positively sick with all of them churning around her skull.

“I have to go.” The words fell from her one at a time without strength. She felt only defeat and fear, fear that this thing might be true and fear that it might not. “It doesn’t matter what the Vixen’s plan is.”

“I know,” said Sakra simply. Was that sorrow beneath his voice? She couldn’t tell. She was too caught up in the whirl of her own emotions. She did not want to be this way. She wanted to be able to reach out to him, but the gulf was too wide.

“We can do nothing until morning,” Sakra went on, setting his cup of cider down. “Will you try to sleep?”

“I don’t think I can.” Bridget ran her hands over her hair, as if trying to press down the thoughts filling her skull.

“Come, you must try.” Sakra mustered a small smile. “If only for Richikha’s and Prathad’s sakes. They cannot go to bed until you do.”

“Of course, of course, you’re right.” She glanced across at her maids, who waited in the corner, each sewing at some piecework, pretending to ignore what was happening by the fire. She stood, smoothing her dress down fussily. “I will go to bed now.”

Prathad rose and reverenced, her face betraying no hint of the relief Bridget was sure she must be feeling. With Richikha, she went back behind the wooden screens that separated Bridget’s bed from the rest of the apartment. The rustling of bedding being turned down and night attire being shaken out drifted from the sleeping alcove.

“I’m almost afraid to sleep,” Bridget breathed. “I’m afraid I’ll dream, or see something … Anna’s ghost, or I don’t know what.” To her shame, her voice began to shake. “Sakra, this can’t be true, but if it is … I don’t know which way to turn.”

Sakra moved closer to her so she could feel his warmth, his solidity. Close enough so she could touch him if she wanted to. “You have nothing to fear in this place, Bridget. I will watch over you until sleep comes.”

It was a highly improper suggestion that he stay at her bedside, but Bridget only looked up at him in mute gratitude. His eyes were warm, and filled with the kindness she had come to understand was so much a part of him. But there was something else, and again Bridget thought of sadness. Her hand longed to move, to take his hand, to ask what was wrong, what he thought, whether he would help her, no matter what Ananda said, because this was about her daughter, the most precious thing she ever had, ever would have.