Varrick strode to Chessa. “Come with me.”
She smiled up at him. “Did you call the rest of the Kinloch people?”
“Aye, I called them,” he said, and she heard the child’s temper in his voice.
“Good,” she said. “That stick is a handy tool to have about. I’ll tell the women to prepare more boar steaks. Also, Cleve and his men brought in more than a dozen pheasants this morning. We’ll have a fine feast.”
“It’s called aburra.I told you to come with me.”
She never let her smile slip. “I forgot. You wish to speak to me now? I’m so busy, but, ah, very well, Varrick.”
She walked beside him into the farmstead. Unlike Kinloch, there was no raised dais here, just a long room filled with the smell of roasting pheasant, baking bread and the soft smell of rising smoke, a narrow blue line streaking upward. Varrick strode to the table and climbed up upon it.
“Be careful, Father,” Cleve said. “The table doesn’t always hold itself straight.”
“Aye,” Igmal said, grinning. “Cleve didn’t cut all the legs evenly.”
Cleve poked him.
“Be quiet,” Varrick said. “Come here,” he said to Chessa.
“I hope you don’t want me to climb up on that table,” she said, and rubbed her stomach.
He frowned at her, and she would have sworn he growled.
He climbed down. He withdrew theburrafrom its sheath and handed it to her. “Take it. Take it and tell me what you feel, what you see.”
Slowly, she reached out her hand and took theburrafrom him. She cried out and brought her other hand up to help her hold it. “It’s so heavy,” she said, and quickly lowered it to the table. She still held it between her hands, but let its weight rest on the tabletop.
Varrick didn’t move.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?”
She shook her head. “Nay, it’s just very heavy, so heavy that I know I can’t hold it.
“It’s cold now, isn’t it?”
“Cold? It isn’t cold at all. It just feels like wood, very heavy wood that’s got something else inside it to make it so weighty.”
“What do you see?”
She looked down at theburra.“Circles and strange squares. The paint looks faded as if it will flake off very soon now. It looks old and strange. It’s very heavy, Varrick. Won’t you take it back? I don’t like it.”
He looked baffled, then angry. “Damn you, I asked you what you saw, not what theburralooked like.”
“Saw? I saw nothing, save the table and I’m worried that it won’t hold all the food we’re preparing.”
He grabbed theburrafrom her and shoved it back into its sheath. “It’s the babe,” he said. “Aye, it’s the babe. It’s stolen your powers.”
“What powers?” she said. “You have the powers, Varrick, not I.”
He sighed deeply and called out, “Argana, bring me a goblet of mead.”
There were still the remnants of laughter in her voice when Argana called out, “I can’t, Varrick. My hand is filled with cabbage.”
He turned slowly to see his wife of eighteen years cutting huge chunks of cabbage and laying them onto a large wooden platter. “Athol,” she called out. “Take your father a goblet of mead.”
“I’m a man, Mother, not a slave.”
