Free Crusader by Sara Douglass

before bursting triumphantly through to wave long, gleeful tendrils into the bright summer air down the length of the hedge.
    The hedge was ruined! It was doubtless dying! How could it support the parasitic ivy and still manage to keep—
    Gwendylyr realised suddenly that she was very, very afraid. There was no dividing line between order and disorder, was there? It was all a lie. Disorder would win every time. It could never be kept at bay.
    Gwendylyr backed slowly away, terrified that one of those tendrils would reach out and snatch at her at any moment. Where could she hide? Was there anywhere to hide? Perhaps the cellar…surely the dark would keep the ivy at bay…the dark would be safe…safe…
    Gwendylyr stopped, appalled. She would hide herself in the dark the rest of her life to avoid disorder?
    Was that a life at all?
    She swallowed, stepped forward, raised an arm, and took one of the waving tendrils gently in her hand.
    “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.
    “Likewise, I am sure,” said the ivy, and the sun exploded and showered both hedge and ivy and Gwendylyr in freedom.
    “Leagh?” said Gwendylyr.
    “No! No!” Leagh screamed, and grabbed at her belly.
    It was completely flat. Barren.
    As barren as the landscape about her. She ran, more than half-doubled over her empty belly, through a plain of hot red pebbles. A dry wind blew in her face, whipping her hair about her eyes.
    The sky was dull and grey, full of leaden dreams.
    “No, no,” she whispered. She was trapped in a land that had stolen her child to feed its own hopelessness. Both sky and ground were sterile, and both had trapped her.
    “No.” Leagh sank to the ground, gasping in pain at the heat of the pebbles, and then ignoring the burns to curl up in a ball.
    Nothing was left. Best to just give up. Best to die.
    Nothing worth living for.
    She cried, her breath jerking up through her chest and throat in great gouts of misery. She wanted to die. Why couldn’t she die? Wasn’t there anyone about who could help her to die? Why couldn’t someone just put a knife to her (hopelessly barren) belly and slide it in? The pain would be nothing compared to this…this horror that surrounded her.
    This desert. This barrenness.
    Leagh cried harder, and grabbed at a handful of pebbles, loathing them with an intensity she had never felt for anything or anyone before. She threw them viciously away from her, then grabbed at another handful, throwing them away as well.
    When she grabbed at her third handful she stopped, aghast at her actions.
    Why blame the land for her misfortunes? If she had lost the child she carried, then how could she blame this desert?
    A cool breeze blew across and lifted the hair from her face.
    A tiny rock squirrel inched across her hand, its tiny velvety nose investigating her palm for food.
    Leagh smiled, and then laughed as she felt a welcome heaviness in her belly. She rested her hand over her stomach and felt the thudding of her child’s heart, then…
    …then she gasped in wonder and scrabbled her other hand deep in among the pebbles about her.
    A heartbeat thudded out from the belly of the earth as well, and it matched—
    beat for beat
    — that of her child’s.
    “What are you telling me?” she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebbles explained it to her.
    Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light shone from her eyes.
    “Faraday,” she said.
    Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within the reality of her vision.
    She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted—the trees this time—and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.
    A thicket of thorns.
    Bands of thornbush enveloped her, pressing into the white flesh of arm and breast and belly and creeping between her legs and binding her to their own