Free Changer of Days by Alma Alexander Page A

sunlight,” she whispered. “To see…the sky.”
    “Senena…”
    But Senena’s eyes were lucid, and oddly triumphant. “I am not his,” she said, finally seeming to understand the motives which had led her to befriend Anghara. “He will not raise a dynasty out of a son of my body…Come back to Miranei, Anghara…Reign for me in Roisinan…”
    Her eyes remained open, but her spirit was suddenly gone—they were empty, windows of pale glass. And Anghara reached again, for something she remembered—something she had once done as if by right—the presence of a God, and the glory of his gifts. But there was nothing there, nothing but emptiness and white pain which bent her double once again over Senena’s body.
    Come to me now, al’Khur! I am an’sen’thar…I wear your gold…
    But through a veil of pain his voice came back to her: Another whom you might have wished to save will come to me before we meet again…I see suffering…
    And another voice, from years later, the voice of the oracle which had given her a cryptic rhyme at Gul Khaima: Beneath an ancient crown the unborn die. The Crown Under the Mountain. Senena’s unborn son. And Anghara’s own helplessness.
    “I am blind,” she whispered, finding in the hour of Senena’s death the courage to name something she had known for a long time but avoided facing. “He has taken the Sight from me. I am blind.”

4
    A nghara wept as though her heart would break, as though all the world’s sorrows were contained in the still body which lay before her—broken promises, divided loyalties, shattered lives. When Kieran slipped an arm around her shoulders, the slight pressure of his hand an invitation to rise, Anghara lifted a tear-streaked face up to him and shook her head violently.
    “We can’t just leave her!” she said, and her voice was hoarse from crying.
    “Let them find us here, and we all join her in Glas Coil before this day’s noon,” said Kieran. “We will burn a wand of incense for her soul in a temple as soon as we may, for she was a friend to you, and a great lady…but for now, Anghara, come, it is past time we left this place. Or it will all have been for nothing. And Senena herself would have wanted you to win free. Come.”
    He thought she might resist still as he helped her rise, for her shoulders were rigid beneath his hands, but she had bitten down on her sorrow and held it all ruthlessly in check as he bent to gently close Senena’s eyes. Charo had already arranged the little queen’s limbs in a more seemly fashion underneath the merciful concealment of the enveloping cloak, and now Kieran, murmuring a prayer of passage, reached to pull the cloak up to cover her face. Anghara had shut her own eyes, and tears welled unchecked from underneath her closed eyelids, spilling through the long eyelashes and down her cheeks. When Charo came round to take her arm, and the gentle pressure of Kieran’s hand guided her to take a first step down the staircase awash with the blood of dead men, Anghara went where they led her, submissive to their will.
    They had done the impossible—and it had all seemed, in retrospect, to have taken a ridiculously short time. Luck was still with them as they left the scene of the carnage; there was a sense of violation in the courtyards of the keep as Kieran and Charo, supporting Anghara between them, slipped through—but the keep still knew nothing of the vile deed, or who had done it. However, there were more than the usual number of the guards at the open gate, and they seemed uneasy about something. Kieran had stopped just out of sight, behind a jutting corner still deep in morning shadow; he and Charo watched grimly as two of the guards stopped a handful of servants on their way to the city marketplaces and rummaged through their bags.
    “They’ll never let us through,” said Charo.
    But Kieran was remembering something—throwaway words, quickly forgotten in the gathering power of the night before,