Daughter of Lir by Judith Tarr Page A

others hushed her as wives should do,
protecting their husband from the ill omen. Nor did Aera make a sign against
evil. Evil was already in this place, laired in the king.
    She called Maia to take her place, which did not displease
that daughter of a war-chieftain. Maia was ambitious. She was eyeing Aera’s
position among the wives; but that, however fondly she might dream, was
unassailable. A woman needed sons in order to be mother to the king’s heir—and
Maia had only a pair of sickly daughters.
    Aera slipped through the whispering dimness of the king’s
tent, past women who slept and women who tended children, past women and girls
chewing hides to soften them, or piecing them together into gowns or tunics or
leggings. There were women spinning wool into thread, and weaving that thread
on looms, and sewing the cloth into garments for the king and his favored sons—all
in the dimness of the tent. Some of them had not seen the sun in time out of
mind.
    Aera could not live so trammeled. She passed the women’s
door, the flap that hid in a corner of the great tent. The sun was dazzling
even so early.
    When her sight cleared, she made her way to the eastward
side. The cooks were tending the fires, grinding flour, baking bread, roasting
a newborn calf for the king’s breakfast. Its mother was lowing piteously in the
king’s herd, mourning her lost child.
    Aera took little notice of them. Her eyes were on the two
figures that walked down from the world’s edge. The taller walked light and free,
wrapped in a bearskin, with his bright hair falling in tangles against the
black fur. The other, shorter by half a head, darker, broader, sturdier, trod
gingerly as if to keep his head from shattering.
    Aera smiled, watching them. Minas and Dias, brothers of the
same father, one born in the morning, one born in the dark of the night, had
been inseparable from that first day. They had not shared a womb, but they had
shared Aera’s breast, for Dias’ mother Etena had had no milk, but Minas’ mother
Aera had had ample for both.
    They never quarreled, those two, past the small squabbles of
brothers. In everything that mattered, they were as one heart. They fought in
battle together, sharing the same chariot, taking turn and turn about, now as
warrior, now as charioteer.
    The sight of them warmed Aera’s spirit. It had been a long
night, full of shadows and whispers, and dim cold things creeping round the
edges of the light.
    She hated to turn back into the tent’s darkness, but she had
duties, which she was shirking. As she steeled herself to abandon the sun, a
shadow crossed her path.
    It was Etena, swathed in black, but she had not drawn the
veil over her face. Time had been less kind to her than to Aera. It had turned
her dark hair to ashes and stripped her skin of its youth, softening and
slackening it over the sturdy bones. But she was strong, and her eyes were as
grey as flint. They cut like edged blades.
    Aera chose the same weapon as her son: the sweet brilliance
of a smile. It had no power to warm that bitter heart, nor had she expected
such a thing. But it bolstered her courage.
    “You will undertake,” said Etena, “to restrain those
puppies. The king objects to being roused at dawn by the howling of wolf-cubs.”
    Aera bit her tongue. She had learned long ago that argument
with Etena only ended in confusion. She bowed her head as if in submission.
    “There will be no more of that caterwauling,” said Etena,
“by order of the king. Go, tell them. And bid them know that if they refuse,
the king will demand an accounting.”
    Aera’s fists clenched. She was the Great Wife, mother to the
king’s heir. It was far beneath her to run errands for a mere royal favorite.
    Still worse than that was the import of the errand. The
dawn-rite had sustained the world for time beyond reckoning. The king’s
defiance of it would have consequences. The gods were not mocked.
    “I will go,” she said, soft and cool. “I will