ANMELDEN"Whose child is this?"The healer had not come away from the wall. His voice was steady, but his hands shook, and he kept them clasped against the front of his grey robe where Lyra could see them."Mine," said Lyra. "Heal him. That is all I am asking.""Child, I asked whose he is.""And I told you."He looked at her for a long time. The fire popped. The pot on the hearth went on bubbling, and the smell of boiling roots filled the room. Then he pushed off the wall and came slowly across the floor. He did not look at her face. He looked at the bundle on the table.He stopped an arm's length away."Lift the blanket from his chest," he said. "Slowly."Lyra did. Her fingers trembled so badly she had to use both hands. The baby's skin was hot and dry, and the thin dark lines ran up from his wrists to the bend of his elbows like cracks in old glaze. Under them, faint and steady, a red light moved beneath the skin of his chest.The healer bent close. He did not touch him."Three fires," he sa
"Nobody climbs this road in winter without a reason."The old woman stood in the middle of the path with a basket on her arm and a grey shawl pulled over her head. She was small and bent, and she did not move aside.Lyra stopped. She had been climbing since before dawn, and her legs shook under her. Snow lay in dirty heaps along the edge of the track. The wind came down from the peaks with a sound like cloth tearing, and it cut straight through the cloak Hesta had pushed into her hands the night she left the valley."I am looking for the healer," she said. "Nothing more.""Whose child is that?""Mine."The old woman looked at the bundle in the sling. Lyra shifted her arm so the blanket hid his face. He was too quiet. For two days he had burned and cried, and since last night he had done neither. He lay against her chest like a hot stone, breathing in short, dry pulls, and she could feel the heat of him through her dress and through the cloak and through her skin. Under the blanket, th
Chapter 63: The Red Ribbon in Brielle's Hair"I can get you out of this village, and I will not ask for a thing you cannot give."Lyra did not turn her head.She sat on the floor of Hesta's cottage with her back against the wall and the little kitchen knife resting across her knee, and she watched the door that had just closed. It was past midnight. The fire had burned down to a bed of orange coals. On the cot, under three blankets and a layer of river stones that Hesta had warmed and cooled and warmed again, her son lay with his small fists clenched and his breath rasping, and the light under his skin pulsed slow and dull and red.A figure stood in the shadow of the door with a shawl over her head."Everything you offer," said Lyra, "is a hook.""That is true." Brielle pushed back the shawl. "But sometimes a hook is the only thing hanging in the water."She looked different.The bruise on her cheek had faded to the yellow of old butter. Her hair had been combed and pinned, and the cr
"Put that down, Lyra."Her father said it from the middle of the square, with his hands held out in front of him like a man calming a horse.It was dawn. A thin grey light lay over the cobbles, and a mist drifted off the well, and the red hands on the doors looked almost black in it. Lyra stood on the top step of the cellar stairs with the sky above her for the first time in a night and a day. The kitchen knife was in her right fist. Her left arm was hooked around her stepmother's neck, and the old woman's breath came in short, sobbing wheezes against her sleeve.Behind her, Brielle stood in the cellar doorway, white to the lips, with a bruise across her cheek the color of a ripe plum.Four of Gorath's men had been at the head of the stairs when she came up. They had seen the knife at the throat of the woman who would be their lord's mother in law, and they had stopped, uncertain, while somebody ran to fetch the master of the house. Now they ringed the stair at a careful distance. Pas
"Smell his lips, my lord."Lyra said it quietly.She stood with her back against the wall of the cellar and the small knife held low at her side, and she did not raise her voice. Across the flagstones, Brielle had stopped in the middle of her crossing, one slippered foot in front of the other, with the baby in her arms and a smile spreading over her wet face. Gorath had not moved from the foot of the stairs. His huge red hand was still held out, palm up, waiting."What did you say, widow?""The boy's mouth." Lyra did not look at her stepsister. She looked at the warlord, steadily, the way she had once looked at a hanging rope. "Put your nose to it. If I am lying, my father's men can drown me in the river with my son.""Lyra," Brielle breathed, sweetly. "Do not make a scene."Gorath's pale eyes slid from one woman to the other. He had the look of a man at a market stall who has been offered two loaves and told only one of them is poisoned."Give him here," he said.Brielle laid the bab
"You pointed at my window in front of everyone. You gave me to him."The kitchen knife shook in Brielle's hand.It was a small, ordinary knife, the kind used for peeling turnips, and she held it low and out in front of her like a girl who had never held a weapon in her life. Candle stub, cold cellar, the breath of both of them rising in thin white threads. Lyra stood on the bottom step with her chained wrists hanging in front of her and thirty armed men waiting above, and she looked at the stepsister she had not seen in nearly a year.She had changed. Brielle had been a round cheeked woman of twenty when Lyra left, with ribbons in her braids and a way of tilting her head when she wanted something. Now she was tall and pale, in a nightgown and a man's coat, with her hair hacked off at the shoulder, and her eyes were red and wide and brimming. She looked like the victim in a ballad. That was what Lyra noticed first.She had always looked like that when she wanted something."Give me my







