Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(104)
Author: Anne Rice

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.

“Listen, we cannot answer each other’s questions this way,” he said. “But what I can tell you now is I am glad the female is dead. I am glad it’s dead!” He shook his head, and placed his hand on the sloped back of the chair. He was looking off, hair falling down over his eyes, rather wild now, so that he looked especially gaunt and dramatic, and rather like a magician, perhaps. “So help me, God,” he said. “I’m relieved, I’m relieved that you tell me in the same breath it was there and that it is no more.”

Michael nodded. “I think I’m beginning to see.”

“Do you?” asked Ash.

“We can’t share this earth, can we, the two tribes so apparently similar and so utterly unalike?”

“No, we can’t share it,” Ash said, shaking his head with emphasis. “What race can live with any other? What religion with any other? War is worldwide; and the wars are tribal, no matter what men say they are! They are tribal, and they are wars of extermination, whether it be the Arabs against the Kurds, or the Turks and the Europeans, or the Russian fighting the Oriental. It’s never going to stop. People dream that it will, but it can’t, as long as there are people. But of course, if my kind came again, and if the humans of the earth were exterminated, well, then, my people could live in peace, but then, doesn’t every tribe believe this of itself?”

Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be strife,” he said. “It is conceivable that all tribes stop fighting each other.”

“Conceivable, yes, but not possible.”

“One breed doesn’t have to reign over another,” insisted Michael. “One breed doesn’t even have to know about the other.”

“You mean that we should live in secret?” Ash asked. “Do you know how quickly our population doubles itself and then triples and then quadruples? Do you know how strong we are? You can’t know how it was, you have never seen the Taltos born knowing, you’ve never seen it grow to its full height in those first few minutes or hours or days or however long it takes; you’ve never seen it.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Rowan. “I’ve seen it twice.”

“And what do you say? What would come of my wanting a female? Of grieving for your lost Emaleth and seeking to find a replacement for her? Of troubling your innocent Mona with the seed that might make the Taltos or might make her die?”

“I can tell you this,” said Rowan, taking a deep breath. “At the moment I shot Emaleth, at that moment there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that she was a threat to my breed, and that she had to die.”

Ash smiled; he nodded. “And you were right.”

They were all silent. Then Michael spoke.

“You have our worst secret now,” he said.

“Yes, you have it,” said Rowan softly.

“And I wonder,” said Michael, “if we have yours.”

“You will,” said Ash. “We should sleep now, all of us. My eyes hurt me. And the corporation waits with a hundred small tasks which only I can perform. You sleep now, and in New York I’ll tell you everything. And you will have all my secrets, from the worst to the least.”