The Tenth Power by Kate Constable Page A

wrap the body.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘Nothing done properly, no oils, no shrouds! Our High Priestess to be laid to rest in a bedsheet!What has become of us?’
    ‘Let me help,’ begged Calwyn. ‘Please!’ She took a deep breath. If Marna had known, then Ursca should know too. ‘No harm can come to me. I – I am not a chanter any more. I lost my powers of magic half a year ago, in Merithuros.’
    Ursca stared at her, and put out a hand to steady herself. ‘Oh, my dear child,’ she said softly. ‘My poor dear child. The snow-sickness?’
    ‘No. Not that.’
    ‘That Merithuran’s work then, no doubt!’
    Calwyn smiled weakly. ‘No, Ursca. I tried a chantment that was greater than my strength. It wasn’t Samis’s fault. It was my own.’ As she spoke the words, she knew that they were true, and a small part of the bitter weight she carried lifted from her. ‘Please, Ursca. I’m not a priestess, or even a novice any more, but I loved Marna. Let me help you.’
    Ursca hesitated. Then she said, almost to herself, ‘Yes, it’s fitting you should tend her. If you’d stayed, you would have been the one to light her pyre and scatter the ashes beneath the blazetree.’
    Calwyn felt sick with fresh grief. Traditionally, it was the successor to a dead priestess who lit her pyre. Lia had said the same: that Marna had intended Calwyn to follow her as High Priestess. If Calwyn had stayed in Antaris, everything would have been different. After her initiation, Calwyn would have replaced Tamen as Guardian of theWall; Calwyn would have been governing Antaris now, notTamen. If Calwyn hadn’t run away with Darrow, there would have been no sacrifices to the Goddess, and Marna would have died in her own bed, surrounded by those who loved her. Perhaps she would never have caught the snow-sickness. Perhaps there would be no snow-sickness, if Darrow had not come.
    Calwyn put the thought from her mind. It was too late now for regrets.Tenderly, she and Ursca washed and dried the High Priestess’s body. Trout and Mica sat quietly in a corner of the loft, sensing that this moment was not for them to share.
    While Ursca dressed Marna’s body in the dark blue robes of the High Priestess, Calwyn combed out the thin, tangled hair and plaited it smooth. Then she fixed it with pins from her own hair, so that Marna looked regal again, as Calwyn remembered her. As she slid the last pin into place, she had never felt so lonely. Ursca wept as she worked, but Calwyn was too numb to cry.
    They wrapped the old woman’s shrunken body in a sheet, leaving only her peaceful, serene face exposed. After dark, Gilly would drag the body on her sturdy sledge to the village of Anary, where there were people who would help them. Marna would be buried with the common folk in the Anary graveyard.
    ‘That our High Priestess should lie there, not in the sacred valley where she belongs,’ mourned Ursca, then shook herself. ‘The Goddess’s light shines there as much as anywhere else within theWall, I suppose. And there are worse things to cry over, these days.’ She darted a look at Calwyn, who turned away.
    Ursca and Lia and the others who had hoped so much from her return would surely feel betrayed, now that her secret was revealed.With a heavy heart and aching eyes, Calwyn bid Ursca farewell, and went to sit with Trout and Mica.
    ‘You all right, Cal?’ Mica slipped an arm around her friend’s waist. ‘When my grandma died, I felt like someone ripped my heart out.’ Mica’s grandmother had been murdered by slave-traders; Calwyn was touched that the younger girl regarded her loss as equal to her own.
    ‘I’m sorry, Calwyn,’ said Trout awkwardly. ‘At least you spoke to her before she died.’
    ‘Yes.’ Calwyn hugged her knees and stared across the loft to where the white-wrapped body lay. ‘A little. But there was so much left unsaid, so much knowledge lost forever. She told me there’s a Tenth Power – can you imagine that? But now