Dawnflight by Kim Iverson Headlee Page B

believed the spirits of children walked the earth, their bodiless voices creating special music: the whisper of the brook, the sigh of the willow, the wail of the wind. A bleak eternity indeed.
    For this reason, the death of a child was beheld as a tragedy, like the late spring frost that kills the flower before it can bear fruit. A Caledonach child was never mourned quietly, and the family never mourned alone.
    Not so with Dafydd’s wee son.
    Feeling tears well in her eyes, Gyan wiped them away. She couldn’t fathom the calmness of Dafydd and his family in the face of their loss. Didn’t they realize the bairn’s spirit would never know rest? Or did they believe in a kinder fate, one that offered eternal peace even to children?
    Could this god of Dafydd’s grant such a wish? For the sake of the child and his family, she hoped so.
    Dafydd, Katra, Mari, and young Dafydd disappeared through the gates. Gyan watched even after they were well beyond sight. The bairn’s death triggered the memory of the night of the prophecy in all its brutal detail. For the first time, she fully comprehended how much power the memory—and the prophecy itself—held over her. It was not a welcome feeling.
    She shook her head to banish the scene. Letting a handful of mere words control her life was absurd. The High Priest didn’t say when she would die. Each day, then, deserved to be lived to the fullest. Beginning with that swordfight Per wanted.
    But before she could move, a sharp crack and a startled outcry caught her attention. She traced the sounds to the building the slaves had been rethatching. A man atop one of the ladders had lost his footing when the rung supporting him broke. The ladder lay on the ground, useless, while the man clung to the thatch and his fellow workers scrambled to bring another ladder to bear. Too late; he lost his grip and fell. The ground cut off his scream.
    Without realizing where the command had come from, Gyan found herself sprinting, not toward the accident as Per had done, but to the infirmary. At the first physician she saw, she stopped only long enough to blurt out what had happened, and ran off. Only by the sound of an extra pair of pounding feet did she know the physician was following her. But, as Cynda had predicted, Gyan’s accursed sickness spawned an overwhelming urge to cough. When she halted, hands to knees and gasping, the physician stopped beside her, but between coughs she waved him on. The spasm passed, and she continued walking as briskly as she dared.
    By the time she reached the scene, her cough was under control, but the crowd wasn’t. She couldn’t believe the number that had gathered in such a short time, children and animals included, and they were leaning forward and writhing and wriggling and standing on tiptoe and shoving and yapping and anything else they could think of to improve the view. Even many of the priests had come to investigate. Of the physician there was no sign; presumably, the people had had sense enough to let him through. Seeing the fallen slave from her position behind the mass of bodies was impossible. But if he were alive, he wouldn’t remain that way much longer if the crowd didn’t back off to give him air.
    She cleared her throat and, in the best command voice she could muster, ordered everyone not directly involved to return to his or her duties. Obedience was not swift at first, but as people realized who had spoken, they began, reluctantly but respectfully, peeling away like layers from an onion. She stood her ground, arms crossed and expression stern, until the only folk to remain were Ogryvan and Per, the priest Vergul, the slaves of the work party, their Caledonach overseer, a woman slave with three children, and, of course, the physician and his patient.
    Gyan recognized the slave as Rudd, one of the most skilled of the slaves at Arbroch. Small wonder he’d been up on that ladder. He was lying on the ground and very much alive. His head was