Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"Aaron."

"Yeah, he wanted to take Lasher, but he understood why I didn't let him. And those other two men, well, that, we could say, was self-defense...."

"And you suffer over these deaths," said Ash gently.

"Lasher, that was the deliberate murder," said Michael, as if he were speaking to himself. "The thing had hurt my wife; it had taken my child somehow, taken my child. Though what that child would have been, who can say? There are so many questions, so many possibilities. And it had preyed upon the women. Killed them, in its drive to propagate. It could no more live with us than could some plague or insect. Coexistence was unthinkable, and then there was--to use your word--the context, the way it had presented itself from the beginning, in ghostly form, the way it had ... used me from the start."

"Of course I understand you," Ash said. "Were I you, I would have killed him too."

"Would you?" asked Michael. "Or would you have spared him because he was one of the very few of your kind left on the earth? You would have had to feel that, a species loyalty."

"No," said Ashlar. "I don't think you understand me, I mean in a very basic way. I have spent my life proving to myself that I am as good as human. Remember. To Pope Gregory himself I once made the case that we had souls. I am no friend to a migrant soul with a thirst for power, an aged soul that had usurped a new body. This arouses no such loyalty in me."

Michael nodded as if to say I see.

"To have spoken with Lasher," said Ash, "to have talked about his remembrances, that might have given me considerable pause. But no, I would have felt no loyalty to him. The one thing that the Christians and the Romans never believed was that murder is murder, whether it is a human murder or a murder of one of us. But I believe it. I have lived too long to hold foolish beliefs that humans aren't worthy of compassion, that they are 'other.' We are all connected; everything is connected. How and why, I couldn't tell you. But it's true. And Lasher had murdered to reach his ends, and if this one evil could be stamped out forever, only this one ..." He shrugged and his smile came back, a little bitter perhaps, or only sweet and sad. "I always thought, imagined, dreamed, perhaps, that if we did come back, if we had again our chance on the face of the earth, we could stamp out that one crime."

Michael smiled. "You don't think that now."

"No," said Ash, "but there are reasons for not thinking about such possibilities. You'll understand when we can sit down and talk together in my rooms in New York."

"I hated Lasher," said Michael. "He was vicious and he had vicious habits. He laughed at us. Fatal error, perhaps. I'm not entirely certain. I also believed that others wanted me to kill him, others both alive and dead. Do you believe in destiny?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I was told centuries ago that to be the lone survivor of my people was my destiny. It's happened. But does that mean it was really destiny? I was cunning; I had survived winters and battles and unspeakable tribulations. So I continued to survive. Destiny, or survival? I don't know. But whatever the case, this creature was your enemy. Why do you need my forgiveness now for what you did?"

"That isn't really the worry," said Rowan. She spoke before Michael could answer. She remained curled in the chair, head to one side against the leather. She could see both of them comfortably, and they were both looking at her. "At least I don't think it's Michael's worry."

He didn't interrupt her.

"His worry," she said, "is something that I've done, which he himself could not do."

Ash waited, just as Michael waited.

"I killed another Taltos, a female," Rowan said.

"A female?" Ash asked softly. "A true female Taltos?"

"Yes, a true female, my own daughter by Lasher. I killed her. I shot her. I killed her as soon as I realized what she was and who she was, and that she was there, with me. I killed her. I feared her as much as I'd feared him."

Ash appeared fascinated, but in no way disturbed.

"I feared a match of male and female," said Rowan. "I feared the cruel predictions he'd made and the dark future he'd described, and I feared that somewhere out there, among the other Mayfairs, he'd fathered a male, and the male would find her and they would breed. That would have been his victory. In spite of all I suffered and what Michael had suffered, and all the Mayfair witches, from the beginning, for this ... this coupling, this triumph of the Taltos."

Ash nodded.

"My daughter had come to me in love," said Rowan.

"Yes," Ash whispered, obviously eager for her to go on.

"I shot my own daughter," she said. "I shot my own lonely and unprotected girl. And she'd cured me, she'd come to me with her milk and given me this and healed me of the trauma of her birth.

"That's what worries me and what worries Michael, that you should know this, that you'll discover it, that you, who want to be close to us, will be horrified when you discover that a female might have been within your grasp if I hadn't snuffed out her life."

Ash had leant forward in the chair, his elbows resting on his knee, one finger curled beneath his soft lower lip, pressing into it. His eyebrows were raised, coming together in a frown only slightly, as he peered into her face.

"What would you have done?" Rowan asked. "If you had discovered her, my Emaleth?"

"This was her name!" he whispered, amazed.

"The name her father gave her. Her father had forced me and forced me, though the miscarriages were killing me. And finally, for some reason, this one, Emaleth, was strong enough to be born."

Ash sighed. He sat back again, putting his arm on the edge of the leather arm of the chair, and he

studied her, but he seemed neither devastated nor angry. But then, how could one know?

For one split second, it seemed madness to have told him, to have told him here, of all places, on his own plane, flying silently through the sky. But then it seemed simply inevitable, something that had to be done, if anything was to progress, if anything was to come of their knowing each other, if love was in fact already growing between them out of what they'd already witnessed and heard.

"Would you have wanted her?" Rowan asked. "Would you have, perhaps, moved heaven and earth to get to her, to save her, to take her away safely, and father the tribe again?"

Michael was afraid for her, she could see it in his eyes. And she realized as she looked at both of them that she wasn't really saying all this just for them. She was talking for her own sake, the mother who had shot the daughter, pulled the trigger. She flinched suddenly, eyes shut tight, shuddering, her shoulders rising, and then sitting back in the chair, head to one side. She'd heard the body drop on the floor, she'd seen the face collapse before that, she'd tasted the milk, the thick sweet milk, almost like a white syrup, so good to her.

"Rowan," said Ash gently, "Rowan, Rowan, don't suffer these things again on my account."

"But you would have moved heaven and earth to get to her," Rowan said. "It's why you came to England when Samuel called you, when he told you Yuri's story. You came because a Taltos had been seen in Donnelaith."

Slowly Ash nodded. "I can't answer your question. I don't know the answer. Yes, I would have come, yes. But tried to take her away? I don't know."

"Oh, come now, how could you not want it?"

"You mean how could I not want to make the tribe again?"

"Yes."

He shook his head and looked down, thoughtfully, the finger curled beneath his lip again, elbow on the arm of the chair.

"What strange witches you are, both of you," he whispered.

"How so?" asked Michael.

Ash rose to his feet suddenly, his head almost touching the top of the cabin. He stretched and then turned his back, walking a few steps, head bowed, before he turned around.