Jack Whyte - Uther

He was a frightening man, Leir the Druid, with empty, loveless, even lifeless eyes. Jonet would watch him closely as he sat alone, staring into the distance, even in a tiny, lightless room, muttering to himself in strange and meaningless words. At such times, she knew, he was oblivious to who and where he was. And even though she had no proof that such a thing was true, she knew beyond doubt that he would kill anyone who disturbed him then. He would snuff out their lives without remorse and without pity, simply for having brought themselves to his attention when he wished to be alone. That, she was convinced, was what had happened to his wives.

Of course, Jonet knew, too, that no one would ever dream of voicing aloud any thought that Leir might be a murderer. He was far too powerful for anyone to take the risk of thus offending him. Jonet seldom thought about such things, but she had not the slightest doubt that he would kill her, too, if she were ever foolish enough to bring herself again to his attention.

So, on that day of the advent of the ninth wife, Jonet moved quickly away from her home into the forest before she could be noticed. She went almost without forethought, unaware that day that she would never return to her home village. With her she carried, as she always did, her small travelling pack containing the line sharp knife she had stolen the year before from a neighbour's house, together with a length of strong, stout twine she had pilfered months earlier from a visiting peddler and three barbed iron fish hooks she had found stuck into the clothing of a long-drowned man whose corpse had washed up on the bank of the river close to the southern end of the village when Jonet was eight and long since inured to the sight of violent death. The fish hooks had been rusted, but she had known their usefulness and had salvaged them carefully from where they had been securely fastened into the left foreshoulder of the dead man's tunic. She had then cleaned them patiently and carefully, rubbing them delicately with a fragment of a broken, fine-toothed file that she had found outside their local smithy's two years before.

Once safely away from the Druid's house that day, she walked less quickly, but still covered the ground at a good pace, trying not to think of the Druid or what his return entailed, forcing herself to dwell on enjoying the peaceful warmth of the day and listening to the singing of the birds until she gauged that she had walked ten miles, perhaps more. She was truly beginning to believe herself alone and safe when she heard and instantly recognized the discordant, squabbling voices of the boys who goaded her constantly, and so she ran from the path to hide from them, cursing her own stupidity. She had thought herself far enough from home to be safe from her tormentors, but they were ranging as far afield as she was this day, and the realization of that made her think about how everything in her life was tied to the starting point that was the village into which she had been born. Wherever she could go, anyone else from the village could go too—if she could travel as far as she had this day in the space of a single forenoon, why should she be surprised to find the village boys in the same place? The boys reached her hiding place, though they did not discover her, and there they settled down to rest and while away the afternoon, playing their noisy games and boasting and squabbling among themselves while Jonet crouched above them, high in a huge old elm tree.

By the time the boys eventually left, evening was approaching rapidly, dusky blue shadows were beginning to gather among the trees, and Jonet had made several important discoveries. The first of those was that it was already too late for her to return home that day, unless she wanted to run and catch up with the boys from whom she had been hiding all afternoon. The second was that it was almost too late for her to find a suitable stream and a spot where she could fish for something to eat that night. But the third discovery was momentous, and it involved the new awareness that if she failed to return home she would be able to start the next day's journey from wherever she had spent the night—far, far ahead of anyone else starting out that morning from her village. Her heart swelled and pounded with excitement as she made the next mental step towards acknowledgment that if she were to do the same the following day and the day following that, she would soon be so far from her village that no one, not even the Druid, would be able to find her.

Jonet travelled for several days—she soon lost count—and gradually, as she put more and more distance between her and the village, she became suffused with an easy, unaccustomed sense of well-being. Then one day while she was creeping through deep woods to check a snare she had set for rabbits, she came face to face with herself in a woodland pool.

Jonet had never thought to see herself so perfectly reflected anywhere, but the stark, bare, incontrovertible reality of what she saw struck her to the very soul, so that she could say or do nothing other than stare, immobilized and helpless, at her own face, noting and memorizing every flaw and imperfection.

Her eyes were small, and they were dull, lacking any spark or twinkle of originality or verve, and even she could see that they were set too close together on either side of the bridge of her nose. She bent her face closer to the pool, searching for a demarcation line between the blackness of her eyes' centres and the muddy brown darkness of their irises, but the two areas blended together so that each eye seemed to be no more than a deep, black hole set in a muddy, brownish expanse of white. Above the eyes, her brows grew together in a thick, heavy bar, with no visible line of separation. Her entire face seemed to hang slack and heavy, and her full lips appeared to dangle pendulously as she leaned forward on stiffened arms, staring down at herself.

Slowly, as she hung there looking at herself, a great ball of grief and sorrow welled up inside her, weighty and palpable as a physical growth, threatening to cut off her breath. And then she was on her feet, running headlong through the thick woodland, completely blinded by tears so that she ran with her eyes closed, her face whipped and lacerated by twigs as she increased her speed, miraculously avoiding trees and boulders until she reached the precipitous edge of a deep, rain-scoured ditch and plunged out and down, head first, stunning herself and driving every vestige of wind from her lungs with the jarring impact of her fall.

For some time after that, she was utterly confused, fluttering between consciousness and oblivion. She had landed face down, and the pain in her chest, born of the inability to breathe, was an agony the like of which she had never known. After a time her breathing began to return to normal, so that she was able to release the cross-grip of her arms on her own chest and to straighten her back and shoulders without increasing the pain that racked her. All of those ills were physical, however, and she could cope with and adjust to them. What caused her real concern and confusion was what seemed to be happening outside and beyond the cocoon of sudden, crippling pain that had enveloped her. There she saw, through eyes swimming with outraged tears, a boy looming over her, a strange face intent with . . . what? Something. Anger?

When next she opened her eyes, briefly, the face was gone and she was apparently alone, squirming in solitary agony. But then someone turned her over, and she felt strange hands—large, male hands—on her legs, pulling them straight and spreading them. She kicked out wildly, spitting and screaming because she knew what that portended, having seen it happen many times to others. But her flailing kicks were smothered effortlessly by stronger arms. And then there was another pair of arms about her shoulders, crushing her and pinning her arms to her sides as someone, some third person, knelt over her. Cold water splashed against her face and a cool, moist cloth wiped her eyelids free of whatever had been blinding them so that she could see.