"Hope Triumphant IV: Mother"  Highlander Fanfiction  (May 2003) by Parda
Rated PG15 (icky flashbacks) Not my universe, not my characters., no money made.  Some ideas in this are borrowed with permission from Sandra McDonald, though modifications have been made.

Hope Triumphant IV

MOTHER
 
WARNING: Work in Progress, Rough Draft. No ending.
 
SONG OF THE EXECUTIONER

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2600 
Another planet
======================
 
"MacLeod is dead."
 
The words dropped from Methos's lips and echoed in the stone chamber at the top of the tower, ripples of sound vanishing to silence, leaving nothing.  Cassandra had heard those same three words from Methos before, over six hundred years ago, in another chamber, on another planet, in another life.
 
This time, the words were true.
 
"Stop," she said to the vidscreen.  Methos's face froze, his mouth slightly open, his neatly braided hair lying over his left shoulder and showing dark against the aqua of his embroidered tunic.  His gold-flecked eyes were immensely weary, sad, and old.  She looked at his image until it dissolved into blackness.
 
Cassandra stared at the empty hole of the screen and felt nothing, only a frozen aching sorrow.  The first time she had heard those words, she had lain on the floor in anguish and despair, and she had wept.  This time, she could not even cry.  She had no tears left to give.
 
Cassandra rose from her desk and went to stare out the window at the pair of flame-trees in the courtyard below.  She had helped to plant those trees nearly three hundred years ago, when the Sisterhood had first come to ?? and started this school.
 
<Add details about the planet and the trees to establish scene.>
 
The trees were beautiful, now at the beginning of the six-month spring, but it did not matter.
 
Duncan MacLeod was dead.
 
~~~~~
 
 
Connor came to see her, as she had known he would.  His hair was long now, as it had been when she had first met him, though he wore it in a simple braid down his back instead of loose.  He was dressed in the style of his home-planet Caledonia--a shimmering blue and gray thigh-length tunic over black leggings, supple leather boots trimmed with Caledonian whale-fur, a cape that fell in a swirl of darker blue from shoulder to hip, his katana at his side.  The style and the colors suited him, but he looked tired, and somehow older.
 
She did not speak, but led him directly to her bed.  The joining was fierce and desperate, a futile effort to fill the emptiness.  Afterwards, she held him in her arms and wept the tears he would not shed, wept the tears that had come back to her.  The sorrow had thawed now, flooding through her, drowning her.
 
It was four days before Connor spoke of Duncan, and even then, Connor did not mention his dead student's name.
 
"I always thought I would die first."  His voice was hoarse, an unused voice.  His back was straight and his head unbowed as he stared into the courtyard.  His eyes were haunted.  It was the thought of every parent, every teacher--the elder dies first.
 
With Immortals, the difference in ages might be centuries or millennia.  With Connor and Duncan, the difference had been only seventy-four years, but Connor had found Duncan as an abandoned infant and held him in his arms.  Connor had loved Duncan as a student and a son, a brother and a friend, for over a thousand years.  Now Duncan was dead, and Connor was alive--and alone.
 
Cassandra joined him at the window.  The flame-trees were red with fruit, in the short summer, *sun high in the sky.  She was over four thousand years old, and she had long ceased wondering, or even thinking, about the order of death.  She and Methos were the oldest Immortals left now.  Fewer than a hundred remained, on all the forty-two colonized planets. So many had been lost to the Game, their Quickenings stripped from their headless bodies and consumed by their killers.  So many had died.
 
The gongs were struck, and the courtyard filled with chattering, laughing girls, dismissed from morning classes and on their way to the mid-day meal.
 
"Quite a crowd," Connor observed, avoiding the reality of the death again.
 
"Yes," Cassandra said.  There were over five thousand students at this campus alone, and there had been nearly three hundred thousand graduates from the schools over the last six hundred years.  She thought the Lady would have been pleased.  Cassandra motioned to a girl of seven Earth-years climbing the tree.  "That dark one, there on the branch, is Sara's descendant."
 
Connor peered more closely at the girl.  Sara had been his daughter, many years ago.  Or rather, Sara had been his wife Alex's daughter by artificial insemination, for all Immortals were barren.  "How many greats go in that great-granddaughter?"
 
"Twenty-seven," Cassandra answered promptly.  "And that tall one, there by the fountain, has twenty-five."
 
Connor's eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he stopped looking at the girls to look at her.  "You keep track?"
 
She kept track of many things, but she most certainly kept track of all of Sara's descendents.  Over five percent of the school's graduates carried some of Sara's genes.  Nearly two percent were descended from Sara's twin brother Colin.  The geneticists studied the gene maps of all students carefully, and they studied the MacLeod descendants more carefully than most.  Cassandra merely nodded, then said casually, "You and Alex have over eighty thousand descendants now, that I know of."
 
The eyebrows rose and fell in a rapid shrug, and Connor grunted in surprise, then turned to look out the window, silent once again.
 
The girls were gone.
 
~~~~
  
Five more days, and then Connor spoke of the death again.  "Amanda told me.  She--"  He left the bed abruptly and went to stand in front of the fire.
 
Cassandra knew, without being told, without jealousy, that Amanda and Connor had gone to bed, had tried to console each other, in the same way as she herself and Connor had done.  And she knew that it had not worked then, either.  There was no consolation.  Duncan was dead.
 
She went to stand beside him, pulling her fur-lined robe close about her.  The chamber was chilly, for the nights were always cold on ??  The only sounds were the crackling of the flames, and the barely-heard call of the jowata bird from the flame-tree outside, welcoming the dawn.
 
"Amanda didn't know when, or who, just that ..."  Connor cleared his throat, then shook his head impatiently.  "How did you hear?"
 
Cassandra did not want to answer, but she would not hide anything from him.  Never again.  "Methos sent me a vidmessage," she admitted.
 
Connor seized on that, as she had known he would, a starving wolf anxious to kill.  "Did Methos know who it was?"
 
"I don't know.  I didn't watch all the message."
 
He stared at her.  "You didn't--?"
 
Cassandra shrugged.  What difference did it make, really, who had killed Duncan?  He was dead.
 
It made a difference to Connor.  The wolf was intent on the hunt.  "Where's the vidmessage?" Connor demanded.
 
She did not want to watch.  She handed the vidchip to Connor and left the chamber.
 
~~~~~
 
 
He came to her an hour later, as she curried her mare Maeg in the stables by the pale blue light of dawn.  She knew Connor had merely been biding his time with her, letting the grief subside to a manageable level before he began the hunt.
 
He was ready for the hunt now.  "Ever hear of Lis na Trag, from ?? ?" he demanded from the other side of the stall door.
 
Cassandra nodded, continuing to brush the side of Maeg's neck with light, even strokes.  Cassandra kept track of Immortals, too, and she had heard this name.  Trag was a young one, a little over four centuries now, about the same age Duncan had been when Cassandra had first gone to him.  Trag was not evil, not demented.  He had just been playing the Game and this time, this round, he had won.  The luck of the draw.  The roll of the dice.  The fall of a head.  The Game.
 
It did not matter.  Duncan was dead.
 
Cassandra moved to Meag's shoulder and brushed harder. The strokes were still even, now long and soothing.  Chestnut hairs floated about them then settled to the straw below.
 
"I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon, on the first ship off-planet," Connor told her.
 
She nodded again, but said nothing, and Connor left her there alone.  Cassandra finished brushing Maeg, but she did not go riding that day.
 
~~~~~
  
That night, she sang to Connor in bed, as she always did before he left, a song of words and hands, of touches and music, of love.
 
That dawn, she woke to the call of the jowata bird, and the warmth of Connor close behind her.  His legs were intertwined with hers; his arm between her breasts held her tight to him, and their hands was clasped together.  She nestled closer and kissed his hand, and Connor murmured and pulled her to him, caught and floating between asleep and awake.
 
Cassandra lay on her side and watched the fire, only one end of the large log burning, the other end black and charred.  Some of the coals beneath the log still glowed red, but most were faded to gray and ash.
 
"What do you see?" Connor asked quietly, awake now, his voice soft at the back of her neck.  "There, in the fire?"
 
She shook her head, not wanting to answer, knowing she could not lie. "I see--you," she said finally.  The visions came to her less frequently now, but the flames still brought images of blood, and death.
 
A silence, and a sigh, then he said, "Should I ask?"
 
"No."  Cassandra did not wish him to know.  Her visions were often misleading, and she had been wrong before.
 
She turned in his arms and kissed him, long and hard, fierce and desperate.  "Make love to me, Connor," she asked, tracing the edge of his cheek with her fingertips, the stubble there rough beneath her hand.  "Before you go."
 
"Aye, love," he answered in the Gaelic, the language of the land of his birth.  "I will."  He took her hand to his lips and kissed it.  "I want to."  Then he kissed her, just as fierce, just as desperate.  "I need to."
 
And he did.
 
~~~~~
 
 "Connor," she said, later that morning, when the fire had died, when the girls were chattering on their way to class, "Don't do this."
 
He did not turn from the window.  "I don't have a choice."
 
He did have a choice, but it was not a choice he was willing to make.  She knew she could not persuade him otherwise.  She kissed him again, soft and sweet, but she did not watch him go.
 
~~~~~
  
It was over an Earth-year later, when the flame-trees were heavy with fruit, that Methos came to see her.
 
He arrived on the space-freighter from ??Vega IV that made regular runs in that sector.  Methos wore a simple black jumpsuit of some shiny synthetic material.  The starkness drained all color from his face, left his eyes gray and flat, still weary, still old, but no sadder.  They could not possibly become sadder.
 
Methos had brought her coffee, enough to make one pot.  It was a precious gift, for the coffee plant would not grow on ??Planet, and she had not had the beverage for over a century.
 
They sat and sipped the coffee in the stone chamber, silent.  It was as much a ceremony as the Japanese tea ceremony, and she was willing to wait, to savor the taste of the beverage, to listen to the wind, to simply be.
 
She knew why he had come, and she did not want to know.
 
Methos finally set down his cup, and then he spoke, three simple words.  The last time she had heard those words, her heart had frozen.  This time, her heart broke.
 
"MacLeod is dead."
 
 
=====
  
Methos gave Cassandra a nine-day before he even tried to talk to her.  He busied himself by wandering around the school and watching the girls.  They seemed very serious.  He talked to the teachers.  They were even more serious, but many of them were also very interested.  There were men at the school, but not enough. Not an unpleasant week, all in all.
 
He finally went to Cassandra's room at the top of the tower.  An odd sort of place.  <add description>
 
Cassandra was staring out the window.  "I keep saying, 'Not him.'  Not Duncan.  Not Connor.  And then I think, why not him?  They didn't have any magic protection.  They weren't that special."
 
"They were special to us."
 
"Yes.  Yes, they were."  She turned to look at him.  "Are you sure that ...?"
 
"Two Immortals go in a building.  There's a Quickening.  One Immortal comes out."  Methos shrugged.  "Both Watchers confirmed it was Connor."
 
"And the other?  Was it Lis Na Trag?"
 
"No.  Connor took Trag's head a couple of months ago.  It was Trag's teacher, Lee Chung."
 
"And so it goes.  On and on and on.  I should be used to it by now.  I knew it was just a matter of time.  They kept fighting, kept looking for battles.  The odds had to catch up with them."
 
"Yeah."
 
"Not us.  We old ones know better.  How many battles have you fought in the last thousand years, Methos?"
 
"Seven?  Eight?  Maybe ten."
 
"They would fight that many in decade, in a year."
 
"Not lately. We're getting harder to find."
 
"Yes.  By my count, there are only ninety-four of us left."
 
"Ninety-one," he corrected.
 
"Ninety-one," she said softly, shaking her head.  "It was the Prize, you know.  That was why he fought.  He wanted to make sure the wrong Immortal didn't get the Prize."  Do you worry about that, Methos?  About who will win the Prize?"
 
"Why should I?  If I don't win it, then I won't be here to see what's it like."
 
"Always the altruist."
 
"We old ones know better."
 
"Yes.  Do you believe in the Prize, Methos?"
 
"What do you mean?"
 
"Do you believe in it?  That the last Immortal will have that much power?"
 
A shrug was his answer, but it was not enough to satisfy Cassandra.
 
"When was the first time you heard about the Prize?  And the Game?  Before the Horsemen?  Or after?  Who told you about the Game, Methos?"
 
He was saved by the patter of tiny feet.  A toddler came into the room, short auburn hair spiked straight up, gray eyes serious and determined.  Methos couldn't tell if the child was a boy or a girl, but he knew something much more important.  The child was a pre-Immortal.
 
The toddler gave him a suspicious glance, then headed straight for Cassandra and demanded, "Up."
 
Cassandra scooped the child into a hug.  "How's Sasha?  How's my girl?"
 
"Eat," the little girl said.
 
Methos seized the distraction.  "She's a cute one.  Your daughter?"
 
"Yes."
 
"How old was she when you adopted her?"
 
"I didn't adopt her," Cassandra said as she headed for the door, with Sasha clinging to her neck.  "I gave birth to her."
  
One year earlier
 
The morning after Connor left, Cassandra heard of the child.  She had not really been listening to the conversation at the headtable, preferring instead to watch the youngest girls, those of six and seven Earth-years.  A startled gasp from Saira, the Head-mistress of Martial Arts, brought Cassandra's attention back to those sitting at the table.
 
"A baby?" Saira asked in astonishment.  She wore a robe of  black phongir-fur over her spotlessly white gi, and her blonde hair was twisted into a severe bun.
 
"Two of the novices found her late last night in the stables, in the loft," Kiam, the Head-mistress of Languages, said.  The beads in her dark-brown braids glittered as she shook her head.  "And a good thing, too.  I don't know if the infant would have lasted the night, as cold as it was."
 
"Who could have left a child like that?" demanded Saira.
 
Mai-Li spoke sharply from her end of the table.  "It was none of the women in the Temple of Birth.  Only four are close to term, and none of them has yet given birth."
 
"But, even if we don't know who, why?  Why would a woman leave a baby?" Saira asked, and twelve of the thirteen women at the table exchanged silent and bewildered glances.  It was a question none of them could answer.  On this world, in this school, the creation of life was a celebration, a sacred duty, a joy.  They had heard of abandonment, read about it in books, but they could not truly understand it.
 
Cassandra could.  She had lived through times when giving birth was considered filthy and animal-like, a reminder of sin, a sin itself.  She knew mothers who had abandoned children because they were ashamed, because they could not feed or care for the infant, or because they feared punishment, imprisonment, or death.  Women had been killed for giving birth to children which their husbands would not acknowledge or their owners did not want.
 
But none of those reasons were true in this place, at this time.  Cassandra had deliberately created a school and a society where birth was sacred, where women were honored, where children were cherished.  And where had the child come from, if not from one of the Sisters?  There were no settlements nearby, and there had been no visitors at all, except for Connor, and he was most definitely not the mother.  So, who ...?
 
Cassandra set down her ruby-fruit untasted.  The voices of the teachers and the girls faded into dim noise as she remembered other voices, other times:
 
- The timid slave-girl Livia, in a grove of olive trees near the Tiber River, "I heard they found a baby, Mistress, on the steps of the Temple of Diana."
 
- Old Brigid, the witch of Donan Woods, her sharp eyes the hard blue of winter-skies, "Found a newborn babe just t'other day, left nearby the path, here in the forest."
 
- Connor in the village of Glenfinnan, handing her an infant, relief plain on his face, "Some village girl must have given birth in your shed.  I found the babe in the straw when I came back."
 
- Agnes, as the waves curled onto the sand on the isle of Lesbos and a young girl ran shrieking and laughing along the shore, "My husband found her, in the gardens, a few years back."
 
Cassandra broke into the conversation abruptly and asked Mai-Li, "Is the baby in the Temple now?"
 
There was a short pause as the other women stared at her rudeness, then Mai-Li answered, "Yes.  Helga and Gristiche gave birth a few days ago, and they're taking turns nursing her, along with their own."
 
Cassandra pushed her chair back and stood, ignoring the startled glances of the other teachers.  Mai-Li followed her out the door of the Dining Hall, and Cassandra reluctantly slowed her pace to accommodate the smaller woman as they walked across the courtyard to the Temple of Birth and Rebirth, just past the Sexuality and Healing Hall.
 
"Where?" Cassandra asked, and Mai-Li led the way under the gently curving arch, through the long hall to the central circular atrium.  The garden in the atrium was bright with imported Terran flowers and ?? chukka plants, soft with the patter of the fountain and the chimes of the soul-catchers hanging from the trees.  Four novices in the green robes of junior students scattered the ashes of the dead around the roots of a holly?? tree, and the cold scent lay dusty above the redolence of fruit.
 
The new mothers were in one of the rooms that looked out into the atrium.  Sunshine from the four windows brightened the large, airy chamber, and shone on the handwoven colorful rugs and the paintings on the walls.  Helga and Gristiche were sitting in comfortable chairs and breastfeeding, while Midora, awaiting the birth of her own child, held a sleeping infant in her arms as she stood by a window.
 
Cassandra went straight to Helga and stared down at the child she held.  The baby's hair was dark, and one tiny fist lay curled on Helga's breast as the infant nursed.
 
Helga glanced up at Cassandra and smiled.  "She's almost done, Lady," the young woman said.  "Do you want to hold her?"  

Cassandra did not trust herself to speak.  She nodded, then waited while Helga gently took the baby off the breast, using her little finger to break the suction.  Cassandra reached for the baby and held her close.  The little girl's eyes were open, a dark, wondering blue.  She was tiny and beautiful, soft and warm, helpless and trusting.
 
One day, she would be an Immortal.
 
Cassandra took the child into the hall and motioned for Mai-Li to come with her.  "I want a full genetic reading done on this child," Cassandra started.
 
"We've already begun," Mai-Li said, obviously somewhat affronted at Cassandra's directive.  "As we do on all babies."
 
"Yes," Cassandra agreed, "but there need to be some extra tests done.  Check her against the other Immortals in the data base."  Cassandra was in that data base, and so was Connor.  Cassandra had been collecting blood and tissue samples from Immortals for centuries, and there were over two hundred Immortals on record.  
 
Mai-Li looked at Cassandra sharply and nodded.  "So that's how you knew which one was the foundling."  Mai-Li studied the baby more closely, then shrugged.  "She looks like any other baby."
 
"She is like any other baby," Cassandra retorted, but she knew that was not entirely true.  This baby was hers.
 
~~~~~
 
It took almost two days for the genetic reports to confirm what she already knew.  The abandoned girl-child was her daughter, and Connor was the father.  Cassandra named the baby Sasha MacLeod, and visited her in the Birth Temple three times a day.
 
When Helga was ready to return to her husband and her own quarters in the Family Hall, Sasha went with her.  Helga had plenty of milk, and was willing to nurse Sasha along with her son Bjorn.  Cassandra moved to the apartment next door, and used the stone chamber at the top of the tower only for formal audiences.  She could not breastfeed Sasha, but she could be a mother in every other way, and she was.
 
Cassandra sent messages to all the planets and space-stations, to all the places Connor might be.  She sent a message to Methos, but neither he nor the Watchers knew where Connor was.  She wanted Connor to come back to her.  She wanted to see him hold his daughter in his arms.
 
She wanted him to come home.
________
 
Now Connor would never come home.  He would never see his daughter.  He would never know.  Cassandra blinked back tears and forced herself to breathe normally, to keep walking, to keep living.  She gave Sasha a squeeze as they started down the stairs to the refectory, and the little girl's arms hugged her back fiercely, tiny hands tangled in her hair.  Methos's footsteps sounded close behind.
 
The large high-ceilinged hall was nearly empty now, in the middle of the afternoon, and dusty beams of bluish sunshine sliced across the room.  Cassandra chose a small table in the corner where the children usually ate.  Methos joined them there and sat down on a cushion, looking back and forth between her and Sasha, obviously comparing their facial structure, eye color, hair.  His questions started before the food arrived.  "Has the Sisterhood been that busy with genetic engineering this last century, that an Immortal can give birth now?"
 
"No."
 
Methos leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table and staring only at her now, and Cassandra handed Sasha a spoon to gnaw on before beginning the explanations.  "It's been happening naturally for millennia," she said.  "We heal quickly; we gestate quickly.  The pregnancies last a few hours.  Like any other animal, the women hide to give birth.  Then they abandon the baby almost immediately."
 
"And the mothers don't remember any of it," he said sarcastically.
 
"I didn't," she said simply.  "Maybe as the body returns to normal and repairs all it cells, the memory cells get erased, too, or maybe blocked somehow."
 
"Why doesn't that happen with our normal healing?" Methos challenged.
 
"Birth hormones?  Many mortal women have hazy memories of labor and delivery.  We're only beginning to gather information, and we don't have a lot of Immortals to work with."  Cassandra turned from Methos and smiled at the blue-robed acolyte who was setting a bowl of chopped bawa-fruit and a round loaf of bread on the table.  The girl smiled back, then quickly brought over two mugs of hot spiced cider and a cup of water before bowing and leaving them alone.
 
Methos didn't even wait for the girl to get to the kitchen door.  "So where did the first Immortal come from?"
 
"We're sports probably--spontaneous mutations from normal human stock," Cassandra answered, placing only a few of the fruit pieces in front of Sasha, keeping the bowl well out of the toddler's reach.  The little girl had recently decided that turning bowls over and watching food fall to the floor was infinitely more fascinating than eating.   "It might still be happening.  Not all Immortals are foundlings."
 
Methos leaned back in disgust.  "This is ridiculous."
 
Cassandra shrugged and gave Sasha the cup of water.  "There are stranger reproductive strategies.  The cuckoo bird of Earth lays its eggs in other birds' nests; the yinhat of Canopia always gives birth in the same den as a graon, and then the graon rears all the young, while the yinhat hunts for them both.  And biologically, it makes sense for a female Immortal to abandon an infant.  She can't nurse the child; she has no milk."
 
"Not that," Methos said, waving his hand in dismissal.  "We could hatch from spores of mushrooms for all I care, but if women were giving birth and leaving babies about, the Watchers would have noticed."
 
"They're not omniscient," Cassandra replied, waving her own hand in just the same way.  "How many holes are in your chronicles?  How many centuries left completely blank?  We both know the Watchers missed more than they ever saw.  They weren't in our bedchambers, hiding behind the arras, or in the chest at the foot of the bed."
 
"Sometimes they were," Methos said with a crooked--yet charming--smile.
 
"And just how long did those Watchers last?" Cassandra retorted, reminding herself--once again!--to be on her guard against this man.  She added a quote in Late Earth English, a phrase straight from an ancient Watcher training video:  "A sloppy Watcher is a dead Watcher."
 
Methos gave her a grudging nod at that, and Cassandra continued more amiably, in Espanglo once again, "But you're right, the Watchers did notice.  I went through the Sisterhood's copies of the chronicles.  There are twenty-seven reports of female Immortals carrying newborns, and thirty-three more of a female Immortal being nearby when an abandoned infant was found.  In every single case, the Watcher explained it as someone else's baby.  Foundlings were hardly uncommon, you know."
 
Sasha banged both chubby hands on the table, crowing impatiently, and Cassandra quickly gave her more fruit and another hunk of bread.  She smiled at her daughter, grateful for this life, this chance to love and nurture a child, for she knew how precious an opportunity this was.  Through the ages, tens of millions of infants had been tossed onto garbage heaps, exposed on hillsides, dropped into sewers or rivers or wells, buried alive, strangled at birth, drowned in milk jugs, or sometimes, simply placed in a corner and ignored.  They died soon enough, their crying fading into whimpers and then into silence, their deaths clearly the will of the goddess, karma, joss, God's will, inshallah, fate, genetics, the night air, demons, a cat overlying the babe--the lies people told themselves to enable them to go on.  Hard lives made for hard choices, and sometimes all of the choices were bad.
 
Cassandra leaned over and kissed the top of Sasha's head, then turned back to Methos.  "The Watchers probably observed many more babies, but never recorded them.  People believe what they already know."
 
Methos apparently knew what he believed.  "Even if the women forget, and if the Watchers aren't omniscient, one of us men would have known.  Gina and Robert de Valincourt were married for over seven centuries before she died."
 
"And none of your wives ever went to the market in the morning, or visited a friend for the entire afternoon?" Cassandra countered.  "It doesn't take very long, a few hours, and I don't think it happens very often.  It wouldn't surprise me if female Immortals ovulated only once a century or so, instead of once a month."
 
Methos sat in silence, then pulled off a hunk of bread and took a bite, chewing slowly.  "I suppose you have proof?"
 
"Genetic testing."
 
"And none of us likes to get too friendly with doctors, do we?" Methos commented wryly.  "I suppose nobody ever bothered to check ... except Grace."

"Yes," Cassandra said sourly.  "I asked her about it centuries ago, and she told me she'd already investigated it and that immortals weren't related. I believed her. I didn't bother to ask anyone else."  She should have.

"And we certainly can't ask her why she lied," Methos said.  "Still ...," he began, shaking his head, "in the last six thousand years, I can't believe I didn't notice something."
 
"All of your dozens and dozens of wives were mortal," Cassandra reminded him tartly.  "How many Immortal women have you spent more than a single evening with?"  Impatience sharpened her words and honed that ancient anger.  "Besides me, of course?"
 
Methos's gaze snapped from Sasha's face to hers, his eyes suddenly intent and almost ... haunted?  Hopeful?  Cassandra wasn't sure.  Methos ventured slowly, "You and I didn't ...?"
 
She had wondered the exact same thing, of course, and with just that same reluctance.  She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
 
Methos was staring at Sasha now, but his eyes were unfocused, remembering.  "We didn't find any infants while you with us," he said finally.
 
Cassandra definitely didn't want to know what the Horsemen had done with the infants they *had* found.  Little comfort to know none of the children had been hers.  None of those children, anyway.  Roland had known that Immortals gave birth, for she had not been able to hide anything from him.
 
"Look, Cassandra," he had said to her, on a warm spring day thousands of years ago, as she sat in her small tiny-windowed room, surrounded by the weaving he had finally permitted her.  Roland snapped his fingers, and the deaf guard stepped back from the heavy wooden door, allowing entrance to a stooped white-haired woman who held a small bundle wrapped in cloth.  "I found this abandoned infant earlier today," Roland told her, then glanced at the baby before he went back to watching her.  "It's a pre-immortal, I believe."
 
"Yes," she agreed, wishing she could hold the baby, yet not daring to move.  She could just barely sense the faint hum of pre-Immortal, a whisper of a touch at the back of her neck.
 
"Odd, that they just seem to ... appear, wouldn't you say?"
 
Cassandra shrugged helplessly.  No one knew where Immortals came from, and she'd stopped wondering about it.  She didn't wonder about anything anymore.
 
"Have you ever seen an infant Immortal before?" Roland asked with avid curiosity.
 
"No."  Cassandra hadn't seen any infants for three--or was it four?--years.  Roland hadn't let her out of the house for five.
 
"No?" Roland repeated, and then he smiled slowly.  "No."  He came over to kneel by her side and take her hand in his, a gentle touch.  His gray eyes were concerned, helpful, loving.  "Would you like to keep it?  I know you've been lonely."
 
"We could--," she began eagerly, smiling at him, hoping, praying ... but in the next instant his eyes darkened with cold anger, and his fingers tightened around hers.  Cassandra froze, not daring even to breathe.
 
"No," he said softly, sincerely regretful, his eyes loving and concerned once again.  "I shouldn't expect so much of you.  We both know you're not fit to be a mother.  Don't we, Cassandra?" he asked with a soft patting of her hand, and she knew what he wanted to hear.
 
"Yes," she agreed immediately, the word thick and heavy on her tongue.  She would never give birth to a child, and that was for the best.
 
He nodded, well-pleased with her--for now.  "Put it on the floor and get out," he ordered the slave-woman, and the swaddled infant was laid in the corner.  It whimpered and started to cry.  Roland nodded to the guard, and the door was shut and bolted.  Cassandra knew that sound well.
 
"Roland ...," she ventured, her hands twitching with the urge to comfort the child, but Roland drew his sword, a cold slithering of metal.  "No!" she cried, and leapt toward them, reaching for the baby, but Roland whirled and thrust the blade straight into her heart, then shoved her off his sword and onto the floor.  "Please," she whispered through the bubbling blood in her mouth, but Roland had already skewered the child against the wall.
 
She revived to find herself gagged and bound, as usual, but this time there were two other Immortals in the room.  Roland took his time with the baby, experimenting and investigating, and Cassandra closed her eyes.  She couldn't close her ears.  Finally, Roland grew bored and took the infant's head with a blessedly merciful slice.  She kept her eyes closed during the Quickening and during the rape that followed, but she couldn't close her eyes during her dreams, and she could never forget those anguished, pitiful wails.
 
The next time Roland brought her a stranger's infant and asked her if she wanted to keep it, Cassandra pretended indifference and just kept chopping the turnips for their midday meal.  "No, I don't want to be bothered taking care of a baby," she told him, then added a happy smile and a loving caress on his arm, hoping to persuade him.  "I don't need anyone else.  I have you."
 
Her ploy didn't work.  "Well, since you don't want it ...," Roland began, taking the knife.
 
"Some other woman might be willing to raise it," Cassandra suggested quickly, trying to keep the desperation from her voice.
 
"So it can grow up to come after our heads?" he retorted, reaching for the child.
 
"No!" she called out, coming after him, but Roland's knife was instantly at her throat, and his other hand was wound tightly in her hair.
 
"It's best this way," he told her, then insisted she agree, the knife slicing deeper into her skin with each word.  "Isn't it?  *Isn't* it?"
 
"No," she spat at him, struggling, and the knife plunged deeper still.
 
Roland tortured that baby for five days before he finally beheaded it, and he kept her chained to a wall and watching the entire time.  Three hundred years later, when he had found another infant and asked her, "It's best this way, isn't it?" Cassandra had nodded numbly and agreed.
 
Three of her children slaughtered by a madman, and most of the others dead as well.  Roland had hated children, even--or especially?--his own.  Cassandra reached for her mug of cider and closed her eyes as she wrapped her hands around the comforting warmth, willing her fingers not to tremble, refusing to relive those nightmares anymore.  She inhaled the spicy bitter fragrance of fermented apples and bava, then sipped and swallowed several times before she felt ready to open her eyes.  
 
Methos was watching Sasha eat, or rather, he was watching her squeeze a piece of bava in her fist and suck the green juice from between her fingers.  Cassandra said evenly, "I don't know about the men, but judging from what records we have now, it may be that females don't become fertile until they're over a hundred.  If so, I was sterile when I was your slave."  His eyes flickered minutely at that last word, a Methosian wince, but Cassandra didn't tell lies anymore, and she wasn't about to mince words about that episode of her life, not with him.
 
"Is Sasha Connor's daughter?"
 
"Who else?"
 
His eyebrows lifted.  "The Sisterhood isn't exactly famous for its chastity or monogamy, Cassandra.  Rather the opposite, in fact."
 
"True enough," she acknowledged.  "But some of us are celibates, and I've been monogamous for centuries."
 
"As far as Immortals go, yes," he agreed, with an easy certainty that betrayed his access to the Watcher chronicles.  "But do the fathers have to be Immortal, too?"
 
Cassandra's hand paused in its reach for the bread, then she broke off a piece of the loaf and took a bite, thinking of the possibilities there.  "I don't know," she admitted.  "I just assumed ..."
 
This time, Methos lifted only one eyebrow, and he added an exasperated shake of his head, a silent reproach to sloppy research.  "Did you tell Connor?"
 
"I didn't even know.  She was born after he left.  I tried to contact him, but--"  But Connor would never know.  He would never come back.  He was dead.  Connor was dead.  Cassandra ignored Methos and stared at the table beneath lowered lashes, marshalling her breathing and slowing her heart rate, because she was *not* going to cry in front of that man.

"Duncan was your son?" Methos asked, but then answered his own question. "Of course, who else was in the Highlands of Scotland? And Connor was his father."
 
"Yes.  And his brother."
 
"Ramirez was Connor's father."
 
She nodded. "In more ways than one."
 
"How many children have you had?"
 
"Twelve, that I'm certain of.  They're all dead now except for Lisette. And Sasha, of course."

"You're sure they're dead." He didn't sound sure.

"Yes. The Watcher kept chronicles on the adults, and I saw Roland kill the infants—"

"All of them?" Methos interrupted.

"Yes, all of them," she repeated grimly. "He made me watch.  Tell me, was it you or was it Kronos who taught him that technique?"

"Roland was a slave-seller, Cassandra," Methos said impatiently. "He already knew it when he came to us." He leaned forward. "How many children did you see Roland kill?"

"Three."

"All boys."

It wasn't a question, and Cassandra suddenly knew why. She had to close her eyes again.

"There used to be a chronicle on him," Methos was saying. "The last time I saw it was when Charlemagne was on the throne. Roland was living in Carthage; he raised a preimmortal from infancy, then married her when she turned fifteen"

Cassandra knew what that woman's life had been like, and how she had died.  "And eventually, he took her head."

"Yes. And again in Egypt and then in--"

"Stop," Cassandra pleaded, for now she was imagining what that little girl's life had been like, all those little girls' lives, all her daughters. How many had there been?  Those three?  Or more?

"All done!" Sasha announced, mashing the final bit of bread into a paste between her fingers, and Cassandra gratefully seized the chance to do something other than think.  She wiped the sticky face and hands and kissed her daughter twice before setting Sasha free to roam about the room and crawl under the tables and over the cushions.

Methos was watching the little girl's antics, and Cassandra summoned centuries of practice and set aside her emotions. She had her own trail to follow, a trail she suspected Methos had already blazed.  She waited for Methos to look at her before she asked:  "Even if a father did find out, and then told the mother, would they raise their own child, knowing their own presence would attract other Immortals?" she asked, quiet and reasonable, not at all accusatory, not threatening.  "Would they expose themselves and their children to danger that way?  Would they even tell anyone?"
 
"Maybe not," Methos agreed, thoughtfully taking a sip of his cider.
 
Another step in the same direction, so Cassandra pressed on.  "And who would believe them?  Often, people don't want to hear the truth.  Secrets are hard to keep, but sometimes, they can be even harder to share."
 
Methos stared moodily into his mug, a man who has nowhere left to go.  "Yeah."
 
Cassandra exhaled slowly and silently, knowing the two of them had reached a point of no return.  She leaned back on a cushion and evaluated the man across the table, that charming, deadly, intelligent, enigmatic man.  "The Horsemen started the Game, didn't they, Methos?  They invented the Prize."
 
Methos didn't look up, didn't blink, didn't show any surprise at all, and by this Cassandra knew it was true.  Finally, he sighed and smiled half a smile, then pushed aside his cider mug and crossed his arms on the table, leaning forward slightly, looking suddenly very tired.  "How long have you known?" he asked.
 
"I've never really believed in the Prize," she said.  "I didn't know who started the Game, or how or when.  But a few years ago, Connor mentioned Ramirez's teacher, Tjanefer."
 
"Tjanefer," Methos repeated slowly, as if he were tasting the word.
 
"I knew him before he became an Immortal, when we were in Troy," she explained.  "I told him what he would become, but I didn't tell him about the Game or the Prize because I'd never heard of them.  Connor said Tjanefer heard about the Game for the very first time a century or so after Troy fell, from two Immortals who called each other 'Brother.'  One of those Immortals was a large man who used an axe.  So, I started to wonder.  And then today, when I asked you who had told you about the Game, and you didn't answer ..."  She shrugged, and Methos shrugged as well.
 
"As you said," he told her, lifting his mug in an ironic toast, "people don't want to hear the truth, and secrets can be impossible to share."  He drank deeply and set down his mug, a forceful movement that wasn't quite a slam.  "I did try, you know.  They wouldn't listen."
 
Cassandra wasn't really listening to Methos, either. She stood and started to pace as the colossal stupidity of the entire mess finally sank in.  No wonder Methos wasn't worried about the Prize; he knew it didn't exist.  Connor had died for nothing. All of them had died for nothing--Ramirez, Duncan, Serena, Grace ...  All dead, dead for nothing.
 
Methos added, more to himself than to her, "I tried to stop it."
 
Cassandra stopped her pacing.  "Do you want to stop it now?  We know where we come from.  We can decide where we want to go."
 
~~~~~
 
Nearly an hour later, Methos finished his last slice of bread.  "It'll never work," he told Cassandra.
 
Cassandra opened her mouth to object, but Sasha, finally grown tired of climbing over cushions, came over and clambered into Cassandra's lap.  "Sleep!" announced the child, and Cassandra cuddled her close and stroked her long brown hair, while Sasha watched Methos through serious and heavy-lidded eyes.
 
"Then we need to find something that will.  There are only twenty-two female Immortals left," Cassandra pointed out.
 
"Twenty-one," he corrected grimly.
 
Cassandra's hand never paused.  "Who?"
 
"Michelle Webster, Amanda's student from the 1900s.  Lost her head six months ago."
 
Cassandra glanced down at the toddler in her lap, then went on, "At least Amanda's still alive, and Ceirdwyn, plus four or five other old ones.  The rest are young, less than a thousand.  We'll invite the women here and tell them about the children and about the Game."
 
The little girl's eyes fluttered and closed, and Cassandra seemed prepared to sit there the rest of the day.  Methos shook his head.  "Cassandra--"
 
"I will not sacrifice any more of my children on that bloody altar of a worthless Prize. How many more have to die?  Duncan is dead.  Connor is dead.  And for nothing!  Nothing."
 
Nothing.  Methos knew it well.
 
"It has to stop, Methos.  Now.  The women aren't going to last much longer.  A century, if that."
 
"So you tell the women. Then what?"
 
"We're too few to be a viable colony of our own.  The women are welcome to stay at my schools.  The schools are all on Holy Ground; the children will be safe here."
 
"Holy Ground doesn't mean anything, Cassandra."
 
"It does as long as they think it does."
 
"And how long will that be?"
 
She ignored him, forging ahead with her plans.  "And before people ask why we don't age, we transfer to another school."

"And the men?"
 
"Those who wish to can stay.  There's always work to be done."
 
"And those who don't wish?"
 
"If they know the truth about the Game, and they don't want to stop playing, then we execute them, as criminals.  Men or women."
 
"Who gets to take the head?"
 
"Volunteering for the job, Methos?" she asked with acid sweetness.  "We can use remote-controlled guillotines, so no one will take the Quickening."
 
"Got it all thought out, don't you?"
 
"I do not want Connor's last child to grow up with the Game."
 
"You can't stop it, Cassandra."
 
"Because you couldn't?  We have something else to offer them now, Methos.  Children.  We'll ask the women to come."
 
"They won't believe you."
 
"I'm not going to be the one to tell them about the Game.  You are."
 
"They'll kill me."
 
"So?"
 ~~~~~~~~
<to be continued>