Birth: A Novella Page 10

  My first conscious thought was panic. My children! I had put my children at risk. I looked first for Val. My son, a couple of months short of his second birthday, did not yet know something was wrong. He was half-asleep, dozing in the carrying pack on the back of his nursemaid.

  Jana, my daughter, was all too well aware of the situation. I could sense her mixture of fear and excitement at this unexpected development. Five and a half years old, she rode her own pony and managed it with the skill of someone who had been riding almost as long as she had been walking. Now she sat impassively, looking down without expression at the two advance guards lying prone in the dirt, their swords and daggers appropriated, each with a bandit’s muddy boot pressing on his neck. Jana, as her father had already taught her, made no sound and sat very still, doing nothing to attract attention in a battle she could not win.

  Forty men, maybe closer to fifty, were too many for me to overpower all by myself. I could probably kill one, maybe two, by using a carefully-controlled beam of crypta-amplified mental energy to stop the heart. Then my gift’s strength would be drained after such an effort, leaving our four disarmed guards to rescue three women and two children from the rest, almost the entire group, who would be out for blood. Our only hope was negotiation.

  We had little enough worth taking. Our horses and the guards’ forged steel weapons were our most valuable possessions. But no one, not even desperate men, could wish to start a war with Aranyi. All it would earn them was certain defeat, at great cost. While I supposed the bandits would rob us, after catching us so easily in their trap, they would know not to kill or hurt anyone, guard or maid, who could claim, however indirectly, my husband’s protection.

  Yet to a man the bandits projected thoughts of triumph: relief that the number of guards was as small as they could have wished, an edgy confidence now that the first big step of some bold plan had been taken.

  Another bandit sauntered down the embankment. He had the unmistakable swagger that marks a leader, one pleased with his men and himself. And there was something else, something I couldn’t quite see at a distance. He turned his head in my direction and the flash of silver eyelids almost gave me the heart attack I had contemplated for his men.

  Yes, ‘Gravina, the mocking words entered my mind silently and directly, one telepath to another. The Gift.