Free The Taint: Octavia by Georgina Anne Taylor Page B

the last of her reserves of strength as her body arched again. A second infant slid onto the silk sheets, his small, winged body squirming and wriggling in an attempt to seek his mother’s breast.
    ‘My Lady, they are not Mortal,’ the Priestess said, her voice little more than a whisper as she leant down to cut the second infant’s cord with trembling hands.
    Octavia gathered her children into her arms. Although her head reeled with the violent birth and the blood loss—blood that even now flowed from her torn womb—the anguish and pain seemed to vanish as she looked down at her golden-haired twins. ‘They are perfect,’ she murmured. ‘As befits the children of a God.’
    The statement was verified in every infant feature. The twins were sublimely beautiful to behold, their heads covered with burnished curls, their skin a golden hue, wings snow-white, eyes wide and blue; they were flawless.
    Footsteps sounded outside the chamber door. The Thane of Tinne strode into the room. His greying hair was windswept, his sword still hung by his side. Warrick’s swift breath revealed the haste with which he’d sped to his Lady’s chamber. Yet as he crossed the room his eyes widened and his look of anxious expectancy changed to dismay.
    He faltered at the foot of the bed. Octavia searched his face for sign of his intent, and watched his dismay harden into jealous anger.
‘What treachery is this?’
Octavia looked away. She clutched her children to her breast.
The Priestess spoke hesitantly into the silence.
‘Sir, your Lady wife believes the progeny to be Divine...’
    ‘Do I care who sired the whelps, and to what purpose?’ the Thane responded. ‘You have betrayed me,’ he said to Octavia. ‘Your faithlessness tarnishes the honour of my title, and of my house.’
    The Thane turned and at his call his personal guard, dressed in the white and silver uniforms of Tinne, marched into the room.
    ‘My Lady wife is to be taken to the South Tower. She shall remain there until I have decided her fate.’
    ‘My Thane. It wouldn’t be wise to move the Lady now,’ the Priestess insisted. ‘The birth was too rapid. She has lost too much blood…’
    ‘Enough!’ the Thane commanded. ‘No-one will speak of this outside of this room! No-one !’
    The Priestess’s sharp intake of breath conveyed her outrage, but she remained silent as the Thane strode away.
    The guards stepped forward. Octavia rose, holding both hissing infants to her chest. A wave of weakness sent her staggering. The Priestess hurried over and draped an ermine trimmed robe over the Lady’s shoulders, yet as she made to accompany her charge, she was dismissed by the guards.
    ‘So this is the way it is to be,’ Octavia said. A single tear fell from Octavia’s pale cheek, the salty wet droplet splashing onto the upturned face of her first born twin. With a hiss and a savage swipe, the newborn voiced her angry protestation.
     
     
    *****
     
     
    The thick, blackwood door of the South Tower closed with a creak, followed by the conclusive sound of bolts being drawn. Octavia sagged against the wall. The twins mewed softly in her arms.
    As a child she had wandered at will throughout the expanse of the White castle, but Octavia had never set foot in these chambers. The South Tower had been irreparably damaged over one hundred years ago, during the Uprising, when Isle of Tinne had been purged of the taint of the Witch Kings—it was said that the Queen and her Ladies were slain within these very walls.
    The neglected Tower’s white stone had crumbled over the intervening century, and vines had overrun the sagging ruins, concealing the bloody past. The chamber was dim, the darkness relieved by the meagre daylight that crept through the questing tendrils of a vine that climbed outside the large, open arched window. This sickly green light cast its hue upon the broken furniture, the tattered wall tapestries and the mildewed portraits of long dead Witch Lords and