Hart's Hope

What should I do? asked the priestess, terrified.

But the water evaporated at last, leaving thin trails of salt upon the stone. It was. not for her to do anything, only to watch, only to know.

Some of the wives saw the fear in her face as the priestess looked across the water to the wizard fisherman and the hut where the babe already crawled in the sand.

"Should we drive them away?" asked one.

"Wizards come and go as they like," said the priestess. "The Sweet Sisters do not ban, they quicken what they find in the world."

"Should we leave, then?" asked another.

"Do your men come home with empty boats or full?" asked the priestess in return. "Does the wizard do you good or ill?"

"Then why," asked another woman, "why are you afraid?"

And the priestess caressed the quartz crystal at her throat and professed not to know.

At last the priestess could bear no more. She got onto her feeble raft and poled her way across the placid water of the bay until she beached before the wizard's hut. The fisherman's daughter was playing with her child in the cool afternoon of early spring. She looked up curiously at the priestess who picked her way along the kelpy sand. The babe, too, looked up. The priestess avoided the baby's eyes—a ten-month child is not to be caught in the gaze of a stranger—and so stared instead at the mother. She was younger than the priestess had thought, watching her from a distance. She might have been the babe's sister. Her eyes were hot and challenging, cold and curious, and for the first time it occurred to the priestess that the mother might be more dangerous than the child. But it was the wizard she had come to see, not the women, and so the priestess of the Sweet Sisters went to the door of the hut, pushed aside the flap, and went inside.

"I need a good day on the sea," said the priestess. "I rarely travel."

"You witches, who use the dead blood, you don't ever seem to have much life in you at all."

"Out of death comes new life," she answered. "And out of living blood comes old death."

"May be true. I don't much care, actually. You women never teach us your rite, and you may be

sure it's a fool who teaches a woman ours." She looked around the hut and saw that it was better equipped with books than with the tools of

fishing. "Where do you mend your nets?" she asked.

"They never break," he answered. "Child's play."

"The child must die," said the priestess.

"Must she?"

"A ten-month child is too powerful to stay in the world. You must know that."

"I've never studied the lore of births and bindings," confessed the wizard. "There's not much use

a man can make of it anyway. I'll look it up, though, now that you've mentioned it."

"I've come to do it for you."

"No," said the wizard.

"You ca

"I do not intend to use or not use the blood. I don't intend the child to die."

"My tears stayed forever on the pumice."

"It's not in my right to decide. The father of the child extends his protection over the girl and over

her little one. Both will live." "A wizard who draws the fish up from the sea, and you let the father of the child keep you from

acting for the safety of the world?"

"The child's mother loves her."

The priestess saw that he did not mean to listen to her, and so she said no more and left. As she came from the hut she looked to where the childmother and the ancient child had been playing. They were gone. And then the girl's voice came from behind her, and the priestess knew that she had heard all that was said indoors.

The priestess considered the question, and shuddered. "No," she said, and walked quickly away. And all the way across the bay she cursed herself for coming to see them: for the girl had asked the question that no decent-hearted woman would ask, and the priestess feared the girl was wise enough to know that her answer was a lie. There were living bloods that a woman could use, but no woman who was not a viper ever would. Let her not use them, she prayed all night, washing her hair again and again in the tidewater that lapped against her skirts. Forgive me for having raised the possibility in her mind, and undo my day's work.

The Careful Wizard

Warned by the witch, Sleeve watched the babe more carefully. He had had little to do with children in his life, and so he had not kept track of how quickly the infant was learning things, how bright her mind seemed to be, until now. And now he began to find the passages in his books and pore over them, trying to learn what it was that the witch so feared. The hints were vague and obscure, and Sleeve grew more and more frustrated with his books. They spoke so little of women's magic, for only men wrote and read these works. The ten-month child—they dreaded her, it was plain, and called for the child to die at birth, its blood poured out upon mouldering vegetation. But why the child was so dangerous they did not bother to explain, not in so many words.

All the while the child grew. In spite of his fears, Sleeve found himself liking the little one; even more surprising, he liked Asineth as well. She was not just enduring captivity, but thriving in it. Her habit of fishing with him bare-breasted was a

"What will you name her?" asked Sleeve.

"Let the father name her," she answered coldly.

"He never will."

"Then let her go u

"Is it fair to punish the child because you hate her father?" asked Sleeve. Then he heard his own words, realized that it was a question Nasilee's daughter might well have asked him, and left the conversation alone after that.

The visit from the witch undid him, really, though no doubt the woman thought her mission a failure. Sleeve had been growing contented there on the edge of the sea. Even though Asineth almost never spoke to him and the fishermen shu

What he never noticed was that Asineth spent all morning every day inside the hut, reading whatever he had read, studying also to learn women's magic from the books that were written to men. What he never guessed was that she knew enough of the Sweet Sisters' lore that things that meant nothing to him meant much to her. Every book began with a page of warnings to guard these secrets, especially against the prying eyes of women—but Sleeve was careless of women, since only men had ever tried to steal knowledge from him. It did not occur to him that Asineth could understand what was written there.

On a day late in summer, when the child was nearing her first yearday, Sleeve finally understood a passage that had long eluded him. It was while he was on the boat, feeling the rhythm of wind and current with his feet, his buttocks, and his arms; suddenly he trembled with discovery and nearly capsized himself as the jib went flying. Only one person had anything to fear from a ten-month child, and that was the child's mother. Sleeve turned about at once and tacked back into the harbor, right among the fleet of fishermen who scrambled to maneuver their boats out of the way. They asked him for no explanation, and he did not offer any. True, the infant had done no harm till now, but now that Sleeve knew the truth he would not delay in taking precautions. It would not do to report to Palicrovol that Asineth had died because Sleeve had to finish his day's fishing before getting back to save her life.