I brought the leather pouch to the fireside. As if the night had suddenly turned cold, I shivered visibly. Karsten noticed the change. “Good lord, Jessex, what’s wrong?”
“I swore to my mother I’d never show this to anyone.” Opening the pouch, I let the locket fall onto Kirith Kirin’s palm. “When she gave it to me she was very afraid, the night before I left the farm. The next morning she made me and Uncle Sivisal leave as soon as the sun was up, and she told us to get to Arthen as fast as we could if we valued our lives. She never said so, but she was thinking about the necklace. She knew something terrible was going to happen. I think this is the cause.”
Kirith Kirin’s face drained of color. His grip tightened on my shoulder and he pulled me so close to him I could hardly breathe. Imral noted the change and asked, alarmed, “What’s wrong?”
Kirith Kirin shook his head and passed the locket to Imral. He and Karsten studied it by firelight. They sat back, stunned.
“This is the Bane,” Karsten said. “Mother of heaven, Jessex —”
Imral turned the locket in the light. The radiant stone caught points of fire in its facets. “I saw it when she made it, here. Kentha said it would return to us. So did the Diamysaar. Had you shown the necklace to them, Jessex?”
I shook my head emphatically. “No, never. I’ve kept my word to my mother just as I said I would. But one time Commyna saw it in my thoughts, though she never pressed me.”
Kirith Kirin touched his lips to my forehead. “You haven’t broken faith with your mother.”
“No, indeed you haven’t,” Imral said firmly. “I doubt she knew what it meant to send this stone back into Arthen. I wonder if you know yourself.”
“I know what the Bane is,” I said. “Drudaen Keerfax gave it to Kentha when they were lovers —”
I stopped short, watching Kirith Kirin. He nodded. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. In the same ceremony that you and I just went through. She gave him a similar gift and he later used it to kill her after he had broken faith with her. Do you know the rest of the story?”
“She had born him a child in the Woodland. She killed the child and buried the gem in its grave —”
Kirith Kirin noted every change on my face. Imral said, “This answers many questions.”
“You mean you think she never buried the gem.”
“Or the child.” Imral turned to Karsten. “You were right all along.”
“He means I never believed Kentha would kill her baby,” Karsten said. “Not when she went through fire and ice to have it in the first place.”
I was washed white and numb. Imral handed me the locket and I studied the light within the gem, the strange writing inscribed on the back of the setting. “If she didn’t bury the child, what did she do with it?”
“With him,” Karsten said. “His name was Aretaeo, I think. Don’t you understand? In Mordwen’s true dream, the one that brought you here, your lineage on your mother’s side is given, but not in the usual way: child of Sybil daughter of Fysyyn, Fysyyn child of Aretaeo. Aretaeo false child of Matvae.”
“False child” is the phrase we use when the different-gendered parent does not acknowledge the child. So that a son would be referred to as the false child of his father’s wife when the real mother would not or could not acknowledge parentage. A thrill ran down my spine. I spoke so quietly I could hardly hear my own voice. “Grandmother knew this. When she was in her last sickness she told me her father’s mother was a witch. Not Matvae but the real one, she said. She wouldn’t tell me what she meant. I guess my mother knew, too.”
Imral studied the stars for a time. “I suppose it would be unmerciful to waken Mordwen and Pelathayn even for news like this.”
“The secret’s kept these generations, it can keep a few more hours,” Kirith Kirin said. He studied my face a long time, and I studied his for any sign of change.
We sat quietly for some time listening to the fire. The necklace took heat from my palm and burned. It was hard to realize what I held, what it meant. This was the gem that Drudaen feared, the legend of which had kept him out of Montajhena since the breaking of the Towers. This was the reason he had killed my family — his own kin, as it turned out. When two lovers change gifts in this way, they make a vow that will never change. The gift is the sign of that. When one of them is a magician, to give a stone as that gift is to give a part of oneself, and such a thing in magic can always be used. There’s no defense against an object that carries such a vow. But even with my magic senses freed, I felt no stirring within the stone, no sign of whatever force it contained that could be used to harm Drudaen. In setting the stone into the metal, Kentha had bound the stone’s connection to Drudaen in some way. I studied it again, particularly the runes on the back. “What is this writing? Do you know?”
Kirith Kirin took the locket and fingered the engraving. “These are priest-runes from Cunuduerum. Kentha was learned in their language.”
I touched the gem again, breathed on it and listened. Not even a murmur of song emerged from its heart. “The writing disguises whatever power is in the gem. I don’t know what use it will be to me.”
Kirith Kirin took the locket and tied it in the leather pouch again. “Don’t worry about that now. Time will show you what to do.”
Silence as we watched the fire, the shimmer of heat over the roch-stones. Small sentences were traded. Kirith Kirin promised me a tour of Inniscaudra in the morning. Imral noted that the Army should arrive in Illaeryn soon; I told him the soldiers were at the edge of Illaeryn already and ought to reach the Three Hills by day after tomorrow. From the High Place I heard nothing of note. I let my thought linger there, drinking comfort, till Kirith Kirin stood and pulled me up by the hand. “We’re going to bed,” he said, and we did.
9
I brought my pack with me and followed Kirith Kirin into one of the rooms that opened onto the terrace. We were only a few hours from dawn. In the room, Kirith Kirin lit a tube-shaped lamp of a type I did not know, that cast off bright light better suited to early evening. Kirith Kirin dimmed it and the room took on a more pleasant aspect. The room was large and sparely furnished. Carved and painted screens hid a wash basin in the corner. Someone had already drawn a pitcher of water.
We were alone together by our own efforts for the first time with the freedom to do as we chose. There were no more barriers between us except those within us: my ignorance and fear and his reluctance to frighten me, his reticence to touch what had not been touched before. When we had slept together in his tent the night before the ride to Jiiviisn Field, we had simply held each other and in fact had not even undressed. Tonight we had sworn to live within each other and we would do more. I stood over the water basin with water running out of the pitcher and let the rhythm of my breathing restore the calm that each moment threatened to dissolve in me.
I was a boy again, a plain ignorant child. Nothing I had learned at Illyn Water prepared me for being naked with a man. What little I had picked up in camp through overhearing barracks talk had only added to my confusion. I found myself wishing for Uncle Sivisal, who was family and who could have explained some of this to me.
Kirith Kirin took off his cloak and laid it on a table beside one of the folding screens. He pulled off his boots and I felt an unknown tide of heat rising in me at the thought that he would go on taking off his clothes. At that moment he did not, however. He returned to the basin wearing the tunic and leggings. His arms, corded with muscle, reached to lift the cloak from me. “Can one simply treat this like an ordinary cloak or does it need to be hung up?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered and tried to take it from him. He shook his head, smiling, and laid the cloak atop his own. The fabric, quiescent, merely glimmered.
I knelt to unlace the thongs of my leather boots, feeling my heart begin to pound. Kirith Kirin was unrolling a bedroll on the bare bed. When I laid down the boots he watched me and smiled. His breathing had become more audible and I thought I could see the heart beating beneath the tunic. We watched each other. He reached for me, unclasping my tunic at the shoulders.
I had never felt so naked, my nerves on fire. His hands played at the edges of my linen drawers. He ran his fingertips down my bare torso and I gasped. I touched his face. He watched me, still playing his hands along my body.
His beauty caught me in a fever, and in a rush of blood my thought dissolved, my heartbeat increased, my hands reached for the pins that held his own tunic in place. He had to help me with the unfamiliar fastenings. When the fabric fell away from him all my nerves began to sing.
I had known he was strong and beautiful but this reality was beyond anything I had imagined. In the pale light his body was like moonlight made into perfect flesh. The strong neck descended to broad, round shoulders and a deep chest. Where my nipples were pink and soft his were dark and flat. My nipples made points only when he touched them; his were already pointed and firm. Silken hair dotted the cleft of his chest and the ridge of his abdomen, descending into the loose drawers. I touched him artlessly without thinking he would feel for me as I felt for him; I was beyond planning. But when I brushed my hands along his bare flesh he caught his breath and closed his eyes, and when I continued to touch him he pulled me close.
We bathed one another standing at the basin. The linen drawers tangled around our ankles. I was familiar with my own erection but the certainty of his was awesome. Our bodies entwined with water streaming down us and we dried each other using the tunics we had shed. We walked arm in arm to the bed, a bigger bed platform than any I had ever seen, with our sleeping rolls on top of it, and in it we lay with one another, moving with a rhythm that rose up in me, I know, though I had no idea as to its origin, it came from so deep. For what teaching was needed words were irrelevant. I was awash in a world of sensation strange and wonderful as anything I had ever learned at Illyn Water. I made love to Kirith Kirin with my mouth and hands and with all my heart.
I will have offended some by saying so much. While the Jisraegen are not prudish, Kirith Kirin was and is a legend among us. One does not lightly undress him. But that night in the strange bed in Inniscaudra’s lower reaches, the legend was naked for good. The dark prince and the lighthearted youth were the same. When we were done, lying tangled in newness with the first hints of dawn in the air, I leaned up and looked at the man, the strength and beauty, the soft lips whose tension I had kissed away. Kirith Kirin lay with his arm loosely around me. His eyes were full of peace. I had used no magic art but magic had occurred between us anyway. We had said nothing to each other during this whole time but now I said, “I love you with my whole life. I always will.”
“Me too, for you,” he said, and pulled me against him.
I thought I was too happy to sleep. But his comfortable strong body drew me down into rest as easily as it had drawn me upward into pleasure. I fell asleep with his breath warm along my neck and the sound of the wind on the High Place echoing in my ears.
10
In the morning we went over all my lessons from the night before to make sure I had them by heart. Afterward we lay abed for a long time, later than I had ever slept in my life. No one disturbed us.
One does not crow about one’s good fortune if one wants to keep it; so the proverb goes. When I leaned above Kirith Kirin in that ample bed with the makeshift bed-clothing tumbled over his arms and thighs, I knew I was watching my life. Love of him burned like an ache and a spacious loneliness.
Seeing this morning sadness in my face, he drew me closer. His skin was smooth as viis. A strong heart sent its pounding into my ears. “I’m afraid to move,” he said. “I’m afraid all this will dissolve.”
“Me too. But it won’t, will it? We’re pledged now, no one can change that, can they?”
“No one. Not Queen, not Lord, not YY-in-Heaven.”
I put my finger on his lips. “Don’t blaspheme.”
His laughter shook me. “Not blasphemy. A great dare. It was her promise that brought you here. You’re mine now until I leave this world or until it breaks into pieces. I will hold my Lady Mother to that.”
His eyes were closed. The corners of the lids were wet. I touched the trembling lashes and brushed my mouth on his. “Then I’ll hold you both to it. Now, if I’m any judge the sun is shockingly high in heaven and we had both better get up from this bed before Imral scolds us for scandalizing the lords on our first morning.”
“Imral has had enough of scolding us, I think.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“You don’t bear him any grudge, do you?”