She was ready to take him back to bed again, and to do the other thing, too, that he loved to do after his workings as before but he ignored her. Whatever the working had been intended for, it seemed he was satisfied. When he rose, he took her somewhat by surprise. The shadows stroked the long lines of his back they clasped his lean hard buttocks as, only a little while before, Keen's own hands had done.
Walker lingered for a while after his spell was done, crouching in the fading firelight. That she could reach in the furs beside her and touch him, and show him what his father did, finishing his spell, letting the feather fall spiraling into the fire, and so vanish in a flare and a brief, pungent stench. From the middle of the dream, she almost convinced herself that he would be born that he would exist. She smiled, thinking of it letting herself slip into a dream of a bright-haired infant, a son for his father, with Walker's beauty and his grace, and his gift of magic. Maybe this time, if the gods were kind-maybe this time they had made a child. One came to rest there the other slipped between her legs where she still throbbed gently from their loving.
Keen hugged herself amid the furs, clasping her arms tight about her breasts and running her hands down her belly. When the young men danced, he danced in front of them all, and all the women envied Keen, because her husband was both graceful and strong. He was beautiful, too, in the way of the People: slender and tall, fair-haired and grey-eyed, his face carved as clean as the edge of a fine flint blade. Walker was a young man, far too young, some said, for a shaman and yet he was the prophet of the tribe, the speaker to the gods who rode on the wind, the Walker Between the Worlds. Her body in its deep places, the fire in her spirit, had fed his, till he rose and left her, and went to rouse the fire and work his spell. She had given him the strength to do this thing, whatever it was-she seldom asked. He had forgotten her, as he had forgotten everything else but the magic he was making. Keen lay in the tumbled sleeping-furs and watched. It was only a small magic, a matter of fire and breath and a green plover's feather, and yet he set his soul in it, as if it had been a great working before all the tribe. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge University, Judith Tarr holds degrees in ancient and medieval history, and breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona.Įxcerpt. Judith Tarr is the author of more than twenty widely praised novels, including The Throne of Isis, White Mare's Daughter, and Queen of Swords, as well as five previous volumes in the Avaryan Chronicles: The Hall of the Mountain King, The Lady of Han-Gilen and A Fall of Princes (collected in one volume as Avaryan Rising), Arrows of the Sun, and Spear of Heaven.
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