The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1)(35)

As Ehiru pushed open the front hanging, the smell hit him: old blood, feces, infection. Neither the herbalist’s incense nor the sachets of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling could mask the stench. There were few diseases that magic could not heal, but those were always the worst. The cottage was little more than a single large room. A tiny altar stood in one corner; a firepit took up another. The far end of the room was dominated by a small pallet, on which lay a silent, shuddering form: the tithebearer.

But she was not alone. A boy-child who could have seen no more than six floods, seven at the most, knelt beside the pallet. Beside him were bowls, wadded cloths, a plate that held some sort of herbal paste, and the incense-brazier. A child so young, nursing his mother as she lay dying?

Then the child turned and gazed at him with eyes like desert jasper gone dull with age, and Ehiru experienced a sudden flutter of intuition. The shaky, crude pictorals of the note. Not an adult’s hand at all.

“Are you the Gatherer?” the boy asked. His voice was very soft.

“Yes.”

The child nodded. “She stopped talking this morning.” He turned back to the woman and laid his small hand on her trembling one. “She’s been waiting for you.”

After a moment’s contemplation Ehiru stepped forward and knelt beside the boy. The woman was awake—but so far gone with pain that Ehiru marveled at her silence. The disease was a cruel one that he had seen before, infecting the bowels so that the victim’s own body poisoned itself trying to fight the invader. Too late by the time the first symptoms appeared. She would have been passing blood for days, unable to draw nourishment from food, burning with fever even as she took chill from shock. Ehiru had heard the pain described as if some animal nested within the victim’s gut and sought to chew its way out.

Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Ehiru passed a hand before her face but they flickered only a little. He sighed and reached up to lower his hood—then paused as he considered the boy’s presence. The child had sent for him, but probably on his mother’s request. Could a child so young comprehend the blessing that a Gatherer brought?

Yet as he looked again into the child’s ancient, soul-weary eyes, he knew this one could.

So he lowered his hood and put a hand on the child’s shoulder, squeezing gently for a moment before returning his attention to the woman. “I am Ehiru, named Nsha in dreams. I come as summoned to deliver you from the pains of waking into the peace of dream. Will you accept Hananja’s blessing?”

No response—save a faint racking shudder—from the woman. “She accepts,” the boy whispered. After a moment, Ehiru nodded.

So he stroked her eyelids shut and sent her to sleep, and crafted a dream that brought her pleasure in place of torment. When he opened his eyes to observe her last breath, her cheeks glistened with tears and her face was rapt with joy. He lifted the sheet to arrange her and to set his mark on her breast. It was beautiful against her unblemished red-brown skin. He so rarely Gathered women, and this was a young one at that.

“Thank you,” the boy whispered.

Ehiru focused on him, contemplating. “Where is your father?”

The boy only shook his head. He was servant-caste; any man who’d felt a passing fancy for his mother could’ve sired him. No relatives would be willing or able to support him. The master of the house might keep him, or release him to find a new master if he could. Then his life would continue in years of endless, mindless toil.

He held out a hand to the child. “Does it pain you?”

The boy’s eyes lifted slowly. “Hn?”

“Your heart.”

“Oh. Yes, Gatherer.”

Ehiru nodded. “I’m no Sharer, but I have your mother’s peace within me. If anyone has the right to it, you do. Give me your hand.”

The child took his hand—with no hesitation or fear, Ehiru noted, pleased. So he pulled the boy into his arms and held him and shared with him an instant of the bliss that his mother would now know for eternity. A bit of cautery; no more than that. Dreamblood might soothe wounds of the heart, but it was never right to take the pain away completely.

The child went limp in his arms and began to weep, and Ehiru smiled.

A step behind him. He rose and turned with the child in his arms and saw the master standing at the threshold of the cottage. The rest of the family and servants hovered behind him, peering in. “Gatherer?”

“If you have no objection, Sijankes-elder, I’ll take this child back to the Hetawa with me.”

The elder’s eyebrows rose. “I have no objection, Gatherer, but… are you certain? He’s only a child, too young yet to be much use as a servant.”

Only a child, and only a servant, but able to accept death and understand its blessing. Ehiru shifted the child to lean him against one shoulder and smiled as thin arms encircled his neck. As a Gatherer, he had never expected, nor wanted, sons. In spite of this, he stroked the boy’s back, and for just a moment wondered if this was how it felt to have one.

“He will serve the Goddess now,” he said.

And then he left with the boy safe in his arms, a mother’s dreamblood warm inside him, and tears of love drying against his skin.

*

Ehiru watched as Sharer Mni-inh, fingers on Nijiri’s closed lids, sighed and opened his eyes.

“You were right to share peace with him immediately. His umblikeh was a hair from snapping.” The Sharer took his hands from the boy. “He’ll recover with no permanent harm—physically, at least.”