Free The Rose of the World by Jude Fisher

lords and chieftains to sit endlessly around chart-strewn tables, discussing war. What did she care for such matters? It did not touch her heart, brought no threat, except this dull loss of her husband’s presence. She could sense the great expanse of the Northern Ocean that separated this rocky outpost from the distant shores of Istria. The beginnings of it could be glimpsed below the stout castle, beyond the harbour’s sentinel towers and the sorcerous traps which lay beneath the dark sea there. When she reached out to it with her mind, all she felt was a vast and limitless void, for little moved upon its treacherous waters. No army could cross that ocean without her knowing it: yet she hugged that knowledge to herself and waited for the time to share it with her love.
    She had other concerns to absorb her time. Maintaining the veils of illusion around the child and its nurse required her effort by day and night, more so now that the seither had gone. Festrin One-Eye had vanished as mysteriously as she had come, and none had seen her leave. After the safe birth of the babe and the formal acceptance of the court of the little red squalling thing as the heir to the Northern Isles, the seither had woven yet another set of mazing spells around the King, his sceptical old mother, the Lady Auda, and all his scheming enemies. She had even tried to stifle the natural mother’s memory of her ties to the creature, first with a decoction of herbs designed to soothe away the distress of traumatic events; and when that did not work, with a strong enchantment.
    She had left the Rosa Eldi to maze the eyes of her beloved: there was, as she pointed out, no one better equipped to address
that
problem.
    But after the seither had gone, her influence had waned, and only a seven-night later, the Rosa Eldi had heard two ladies of the court discussing her relationship with the child in less than favourable terms.
    ‘You never see her cradle it,’ one said.
    ‘Poor little thing,’ acceded the other – a tow-headed woman with a massive figure which suggested she had brought a longship crew into the world in her time. She shot a swift glance across the flame-lit room at the subject of their conversation, apparently fully engaged with filling her husband’s wine cup. ‘No maternal instinct, that one.’
    Her companion had nodded, thinking her position out of the pale queen’s view; but the Rosa Eldi had a fine awareness of her surroundings, could see and hear with as great an acuity as any feline. She knew the first speaker as Erol Bardson’s daughter, the one Ravn had spurned at the Gathering on the Moonfell Plain. She was a sharp-featured girl; sharp-tongued, too.
    ‘I have heard of mothers who cannot love their offspring,’ the older woman went on, ‘particularly if the birth was hard.’
    ‘But she spawned the child in moments!’ the other spat triumphantly. She lowered her voice, ‘Or so they say . . .’
    The pause had drawn itself out into greater significance than any words could offer. Then the matronly woman said, ‘Queen Auda does not believe the child is hers, you know.’
    ‘You’d better not let the nomad woman hear you call her that; nor the King, either,’ her friend said hastily. Then, intrigued: ‘So, whose can it be, then?’
    The other shrugged.
    ‘The nurse is a pretty thing,’ the Erolsen girl mused, ‘and very foreign-looking, too. And they do say Ravn would not choose himself an Eyran bride at the Allfair because he had had his fill of northern women.’
    ‘Like yourself, you mean, my dear.’
    She gave the matron a keen look, her dark eyes like pebbles. ‘You are well aware of why he would not take me,’ she said angrily, a flush starting on her cheek.
    The large woman smiled knowingly, then patted her on the hand. ‘Of course, my dear: your father. Of course. But now you say it, I wouldn’t be surprised. He always had a prodigious appetite for female flesh, our Ravn: how long could such a wan