Well of the Damned

Chapter 12





Aldras Gar, the sword whispered in his mind.

Hands grabbed him. Claws snapped the rings of his mail and dug painfully into his flesh. He screamed. Ritol lifted him over its head and hurled him again into the rocks.

He landed so hard, he heard something crack. Pain exploded in his side. “Daia,” he whispered. The pain lasted only an instant before blackness engulfed him.



Gavin awakened with a start and found himself in his own bed. His sword, the finely crafted and enchanted blade he’d received as valour-gild for saving the drowning wife of a blacksmith, leaned against the wall to his left. The gems in its hilt were dark. He heaved a sigh and relaxed back into the mattress and pillow to still his pounding heart. Ritol was gone. He’d banished it from this land, and everyone was safe.

“You’re awake,” Feanna said.

With elbow bent, Gavin propped his head on his palm and watched his wife from their wide, four-poster bed as she stepped into the tub. Her robe dropped to the floor. Though rain pattered softly on the windows, the morning sunlight kissed her silky, bronzed skin with a radiant glow. She was a lovely figure of a woman with curves in the right places, and a delicate, womanly muscle tone — not like the battlers he kept as guards, but like a woman who’d spent her life working for what she needed. He appreciated that she wasn’t overly modest about her nudity and didn’t try to cover herself while she bathed.

Something had changed in her. It wasn’t so significant a change that others would notice, but over the three months since they were wedded he’d become intimately familiar with every inch of her, and he knew something was different. He unfocused his eyes and looked at her with his hidden eye.

The mystical, hidden eye was roughly between his eyebrows over the bridge of his nose. Everyone had one, but few ever learned to use it. With the help of the mage who’d enchanted his sword, he’d learned to find people at great distances, identifying them by what he called their haze — the unique, egg-shaped bubble every living being had.

Feanna’s haze had an unusual ring of white hovering around the brilliant golden-yellow bubble, which he suspected had something to do with her empathic gift. In the center of her haze, he glimpsed something new — a tiny bubble so pale-white it looked almost clear. It was so small and fleeting, he immediately lost sight of it. Unsure whether he’d imagined it, he rose, still naked, and knelt by the side of the tub. Her handmaiden, Eriska, averted her eyes and blushed, but Gavin barely noticed her embarrassment. He put his hand over the spot where he’d seen the peculiar bubble, just above her navel and beneath the surface of her bath water.

“Gavin, what are you doing?” Feanna asked, a laugh in her voice. She scooped the scented water in a cupped palm and lifted it to her shoulder to let it wash down her arm.

He shut his eyes and examined her with his hidden eye again while he felt for the tiny bubble with his haze. Almost indistinct from Feanna’s haze, it had a delicate softness to it, like eider down. “Your haze — it’s different. There’s something—-” He gasped when he realized what it was. “You’re pregnant!”

Her smile fell away, and she stilled. “Don’t trifle with me, Gavin. I couldn’t take it. I skipped my last menses, but that’s happened before.”

“I’m not trifling with you.” With his haze, he tentatively touched it again, so gently. Yes, this had to be the newly formed haze of a baby. He grinned as the realization sank in. “I’m going to be a papa.” Exhilaration and joy threatened to burst through his skin. Leaping to his feet, he thrust his fists into the air. “I’m going to be a papa,” he shouted.

Feanna began to cry, covering her face with her hands.

Gavin fell to his knees beside her once again and took her wrists to gently pull her hands away. “Aw, sweetheart. What’s wrong? Don’t you want this?”

She nodded and cried harder. “More than anything. I’m so happy,” she managed to say between sobs. She put her wet arms around his neck and held him tightly, desperately.

He laughed again and kissed her cheek soundly several times. She released him, laughing and crying in the tub. He couldn’t remember the last time he was so happy. “A papa.” He leaped to his feet again and shouted, “Papaaaaaaaa!” By now, he was fairly sure the news was spreading through the palace, starting with his own manservant, Quint, waiting outside with the clothes and boots he would wear that day, or the battler standing guard at the door. No doubt the whispers were at this very moment igniting excitement and relief throughout the palace and soon the city — an heir would be born to ensure the kingdom didn’t go another two hundred years without a monarch.

“Are you sure, Gavin?” she asked, standing. “We can’t announce this news if you’re not absolutely certain.” Her grinning handmaiden handed her a towel and helped her step out of the tub, and she began to dry herself.

“I am. Completely, utterly,” he said, unwilling to admit to that sliver of doubt in his mind. He’d never sensed a woman’s pregnancy this way before. It could have been something else, he supposed, but what? An illness? A tumor? No. No. Those possibilities he pushed from his mind. A baby it was, and that was that. His baby.

He took his wife, mostly wet and wrapped in a towel, into his arms and spun her around so that she squealed with both fear and joy. They laughed together and kissed, and after Eriska had stepped out of the room and shut the door behind her, he took Feanna to the bed and made love to her.

“Can you tell whether it’s a boy or a girl?” she asked later, lying in his arms.

He shifted, moving her gently aside. “Let me try again. Hazes aren’t male or female, but when I use the healing magic, I can feel if the person’s a man or woman.” Sitting cross-legged beside her, he placed his hands on her belly and shut his eyes. His hands began to warm, but they didn’t heat up the way they did when he was healing an injury. There was movement under her skin, like the flow of a river, but it went in both directions — her blood, maybe. He identified the female nature of her body, which permeated every drop of blood, every speck of tissue and bone, and focused on what it felt like and how different it was from his maleness. There was more he could sense if only he had more strength in his magic.

Excited, he used his hidden eye to find Daia and the orange, swirling tendril in the center of her egg-shaped haze — a conduit with which he could access his full potential for power. As usual when she sensed him trying to connect with her gift, she extended her tendril and strengthened his magic.

Returning his concentration to Feanna and the life within her, he let the sensation envelop his hands, felt it carry his awareness, his thoughts, through her body to the center where it fed this new life. It was so small, no larger than his thumbnail, but big enough that he could sense the life flow within it. “It’s a boy,” he whispered, unsure how he knew but certain it was the truth. His son. He was feeling his son, connecting to him.

Something changed. Something shifted within the tiny baby forming within her, and he knew. His son had reached with his own tiny haze to touch Gavin’s. “Feanna,” he said in a whisper. “He’s aware. He knows me.”

A surge of emotion swept through his body, his arms, and his hands. It was too powerful to contain, and he let it flow into her belly. Gavin knew at that moment he had never loved anyone more than he loved his son. His vision blurred, and he blinked it clear, feeling water trickle down his face. His son, so tiny yet so powerful, able to bring a grown man to tears with the intensity of his own love. Slowly, gently, he pulled back, spent yet fueled by what he’d just experienced.

“What is it?” she asked, touching his arm.

Gavin could only shake his head while he grappled with the notion of what had just happened. Now he understood the bond between mother and child. It started with the connection of their hazes early in the pregnancy and grew stronger over time. He was both jealous of what Feanna would develop with their son, and terrified he would never again experience what he had today. “I— I love him so much,” he said in a whisper, laying his hand gently on her belly. “I can’t describe it. My heart aches not to touch him.”

She pulled him back down with her, and they lay together for another hour, whispering of their happiness and awe in the wonderment of such beauty and love.