Page 181 of Forbidden

Then she could say no more.

“Why were you denied your birthright?” Erik asked.

She nodded.

“I don’t know,” Erik said. “But I suspect that it was the price of my conception.”

“That I be denied?” Amber asked.

“That you be given to the Learned woman who would suffer no man long enough to quicken with her own babe.”

Cassandra made a stifled sound.

Erik looked at her for a moment only. Then he looked back at the girl whose true paternity he had discovered when he first had regarded the problem with Learned eyes.

“Is that true?” Amber asked, turning to Cassandra.

“When you were born…” Cassandra’s voice thinned into silence.

“The prophecy,” Amber said.

Death will surely flow.

“Aye. The amber prophecy,” Cassandra said, sighing. “Emma feared it, and you. She refused to nurse you.”

Amber closed her eyes. Tears glittered among the lashes that rested against her pale cheeks.

“But I loved you from your first breath,” Cassandra said fiercely. “You were so tiny, so perfect. I believed if I could teach you enough Learning, rich life might flow.”

Amber’s laugh was sadder than her tears.

Better you had left me for the wolves.

Yet the words were never spoken aloud, for Amber had no wish to wound the woman who had taken an unwanted babe and raised her as her own.

“In the end, my lack of talent for Learning doomed your hopes,” Amber said.

“The fault was in my lack of teaching,” Cassandra said.

Amber simply shook her head.

After a moment she opened her eyes, looked at Erik…and saw her brother for the first time. Tears came again, but differently. She touched his cheek, his hair, his lips, letting the truth of him sink into her.

“The river always runs down to the sea,” Amber said, “no matter how you try to stay its true course. Let it go, my brother. Let it go.”

Before Erik’s answer came, the peregrine flew at the partially opened shutters that kept her from her master. The falcon’s shriek was as shrill as Erik’s voice was gentle.

“Never,” Erik said.

“I don’t want you to do this!”

“I know. But it must be done.”

“Nay!” Amber cried, gripping Erik’s arm with one hand.

“A gentle, sheltered girl called Duncan’s soul from darkness,” Erik said.

Abruptly links of metal chain began to chant of death, sliding one over another as the hammer moved restlessly in Duncan’s grasp.