Retribution (12 page)

Perhaps I should have kept this truth to
myself. But it was out now, and I refused to apologize for what
was, in the end, a reasonable attempt to survive. “No,” I said, “I
knew it was risky, and I’ll never forgive myself for putting Jana
in danger. But I was sick, and I could feel myself losing my
powers. All I knew was I had to save my children. What choice did I
have?”

I pushed back the sleeves of my gown, held
out my surprisingly unblemished arms, then felt at my face and
neck. Naomi had done too good a job. The louse bites and the sores
were all healed, my skin smooth and pinkish-white, the bath oil
giving me a healthy-looking glow. “Typhus,” I said, the word
somehow anticlimactic instead of the melodrama of the physical
evidence I had hoped for.

The mere word was enough. “Isis and Astarte
protect us.” Magali shrank back into the chair as far as she could.
“Oh, Lady Amalie!” At last she addressed me by my familiar name.
“Lady Amalie, you must have been scared to death.”

“Yes,” I said. “Literally. I had to die, or
almost, and take Val with me, to save us.” I was learning the
Eclipsian technique of narration, the mild exaggeration, the twist
of the familiar phrase, to catch the listeners’ attention.

By the time I reached the dramatic
conclusion—the warning to Dominic by referring to Apollo, the faked
death, Dominic and the miners tunneling up into the storeroom, the
way Niall had protected the assault troops from the arrows, and the
short, bloody battle—Magali’s eyes were round and staring like a
child’s. Tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped onto her
bosom.

“The poor child,” Magali said as she heard of
Jana’s near-abduction, her extraordinary act of courage and
strength with my dagger against her captor. “How brave she was!”
Magali made a heroic effort of her own, moved from the chair to the
bed, as Dominic and Niall had done, dared to put her arms around
me. “Oh, Lady Amalie. My dear lady.” Her words were caresses now,
no longer formal titles. The pleasure of Magali’s plump arms
holding me was exquisite: a mother’s warmth, a friend’s strength.
“It’s over now. All over. You’re home safe, you and the children.
It’s finished.”

“No,” I said, “that’s the problem. It’s not
over, can never be over.” I savored the closeness of the maternal
embrace, knowing I would rarely enjoy such privilege again. “I’ve
antagonized my whole household, wrecked my home. Nothing can be as
it was.”

“Yes, it can,” Magali said. “Things will come
right again in time. It’s only that you scared us. With your anger,
and your– your gift.” She made the merest sketch of the sign
against evil. “But you’ll see. No one will hold a grudge. It will
all be forgotten.”

Gently, carefully, so as not to break the
hard-won renewal of our strained friendship, I released myself from
Magali’s comforting arms. “You mean, once you tell everybody to
forget,” I said.

“That’s right.” Magali ducked her head in a
slight obeisance to offset the admission of a power of her own.
“When I say the mistress wasn’t herself, and they should not take
offense, you’ll see. People will get over their first, bad
thoughts.”

“And you can give them all the details, for
sympathy,” I said. By suppertime, I figured, at the latest, there
wouldn’t be a stable boy or a scullery maid who hadn’t heard every
last wrinkle of the story twice over and told it in turn. I
wondered again whether I had made a mistake in talking about Jana,
and what else I ought to have held back.

I have often thought that Magali, for all her
lack of
crypta
, has some kind of ability; sensitivity at
least. “No, my lady,” she said. “Not all the details. After all,
you haven’t told me everything, either. Of course, for a lady like
you, it’s only natural. Still, there may be a time when you’ll need
a woman’s ear and heart to receive the words that no man can
accept, not even your lord husband.”

We were back to the “insult.” “Magali,” I
said, “Whatever people imagine, I was not ‘insulted’, and I don’t
want people going around thinking it, for Margrave Aranyi to
overhear.”

Magali remained unconvinced. “Your lord
husband must suspect it, whether you tell him or he ‘overhears.’
It’s what a bandit would want, to possess a ‘Gravina, to defile
her—” She remembered the beginning of my story. “Like his mother!
Revenge for his own mother, poor lady.”

“Who was she?” I asked on impulse. Magali
spoke as if she had known the woman. A ‘Gravina, kidnapped, raped,
never ransomed, yet kept alive long enough to bear a bandit’s
child—people must have known. It must be an old, well-dissected
scandal.

“Why, my lady,” Magali said. “How would I
know?”

If she did know, she was concealing it well.
Her mind gave off only vague impressions, thoughts that were formed
long after the sparse facts had been absorbed. It would have been
about thirty years ago, I supposed, when Magali was still a child.
If the adults then had known, they had not shared their information
with her. Her parents, like many of that generation, were dead
now.

“Whoever she was,” I said, “she acted
dishonorably.”

Magali looked blankly at me, her earlier
harsh judgment seemingly forgotten.

I took a perverse pleasure in returning to a
subject best left unexamined. “She must have been ‘Graven,” I said,
“for she had a prism-handled dagger. And she had good reason to
take her own life, but she waited. She lived for years, to bear a
bandit’s bastard and care for him.”

The anger returned, renewed and redoubled. “I
hate to disappoint you,” I said with a contemptuous snort of
laughter, “but even if this whole household, if everyone on
Eclipsis, thinks I was raped, I will not stick a knife in my
throat, not while I have my children. They mean more to me than
‘Graven honor. You can insinuate and suggest and force me to ring
the bell for help, but I refuse to kill myself.”

“Nobody wants that,” Magali said. “Please,
Lady Amalie, forget such thoughts. I said that, what was wrong,
because of Katrina. When she came back from Lady Ladakh’s, wearing
borrowed clothes, nothing of her own, right down to her shift,
Marcin claimed his wife had been defiled and he was divorcing her
and taking the children.”

Dominic had said that I would have little
thanks for my good deed, preventing the physical rape by subjecting
the women to the public shame. I had not understood at the time.
“But the children!” I said. “Does he have to take the children?
Maybe Margrave Aranyi and I can—”

“No, Lady Amalie,” Magali said. “You won’t
help matters by interfering. It’s different for ‘Graven, we all
know that. But for the rest of us, a man has his pride. Marcin
feels his wife has been damaged, and he can’t live with her
anymore. Be grateful Margrave Aranyi isn’t like that.”

“I am,” I said, well aware how Dominic had
tempered his ingrained attitudes to accommodate my differences.
Magali’s report of Katrina’s misfortune was like a warning, a
parallel version of my story. “It’s as if I brought all the trouble
home with me, to spoil my life forever.”

“But that’s exactly what you did,” Magali
said. “Bringing that– that—” She found the same word for Reynaldo
that Dominic and Niall used. “—that shithead into this house.” She
muttered words of incantation. “Better to kill him and have done
with it.”

I could accept the chiding from Magali better
than from Lady Ladakh. “You’re right,” I said, ashamed at my
stubbornness, using the same excuse. “It’s revenge. Margrave Aranyi
and I want vengeance. And death seems too quick and easy, not
punishment enough for what he did.”

“Any mother would agree,” Magali said. “But–
but I think, when the other one is gifted too, what Margrave Aranyi
is doing, it’s wrong. It interfered with Naomi’s healing. And it–
it’s evil.” She was speaking for the entire household.
Niall
knew
, she was thinking.
Niall knew enough to get out while
he could
.

I sat up straight, shocked at her perception.
“You’re right,” I said. “And it will stop, now. I’m going to ask
Margrave Aranyi to end it.”

Magali acknowledged my promise with a
nod.

And the bastard’s going to die eventually,
no matter what we do
, I couldn’t help thinking to myself. It
reminded me of what Magali had just said, about Naomi. “Who’s sick?
Wilmos– is he recovering from his wound?”
Please
, I begged
the nonexistent deities.
Please don’t let anyone die from my
stupidity. Not now.

“Wilmos is fine,” Magali said, gratified by
my concern for her son. “He talked Naomi into not healing the scar.
Can you believe it? He thinks a jagged cut on his cheek will
convince people he’s a swordsman and duelist like Margrave Aranyi.
‘Not with your baby-face,’ I told him.”

I shared Magali’s obvious pleasure in the
episode, delighted to hear her hearty, sensuous laugh again.

“No,” Magali returned to my question. “It’s
the other one, the young Ormonde guard. He got it in the guts, poor
boy. Naomi did what she could for him at first, but—”

Naomi, distracted and disconcerted by the
force of Reynaldo’s gift, had exhausted herself treating me, and
was renewing her powers now in a long sleep that might last a day
or even two. The wounded Ormonde guard, suffering from a
complicated, serious injury, must wait for Naomi’s return to
consciousness.

I remembered the handsome face of the boy,
thought of the unfairness of things, his and the other guards’
enforced helplessness during the ambush, and how they had been
required to make amends by taking places in the front line during
the attack, for a “failure” that was more mine than theirs. “Maybe
I can help him,” I said.

I unsheathed my dagger and held the prism in
the handle up to the light. It was late afternoon now, more orange
and red than blue, better for empathy than for medical science.
Still, some kind attention might be all he needed. Magali watched
fascinated as I lowered my inner eyelids and bent the light into my
eyes, changing the angle to find the best mix of wavelengths. My
control was uneven, but my strength was returning.

Activating the telepathic area of my brain
drew me into the forces at work in the rest of the house, thoughts
and emotions whispering seductively. From the dungeon came voices,
husband and bandit, victor and victim, oddly commingled. I could
eavesdrop on Dominic, seemed unable to avoid the scene of torment
once I became aware of it. There were no real words, just feelings:
of pain, of delight in the pain, of longed-for death, of fear and
suffering. I moved in closer, could not resist joining my mind with
my husband’s.

As I connected with Dominic’s consciousness I
was nearly shattered by the force of his transformation. He had
shut out all his humanity, his compassion as husband and father,
his tenderness as lover. Only the cruelty remained, the innate
intelligence and ability all dedicated to the task of inflicting
pain.

This man was– not Dominic. This man was a
demon. This man might very well expect his wife to kill herself
rather than return defiled to her home. For this man, love was
agony, desire torture, sex punishment. Family and household were
merely possessions; all soft emotions had been buried too deep to
reclaim. What had Lady Ladakh warned of: playing god? This man had
become god. Inexorable, remorseless, disposing of people and their
lives as if they were animals.

No, Amalie
, the demon sensed me in his
mind, recognized me by name, thought a reply to my judgment of him.
Not animals. Animals have no moral choices to make. They are
incapable of doing wrong. It is because this piece of filth is not
an animal that I must deal with him as he has deserved.

I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or
terrified that the demon knew me. But I stayed in the inadvertent
communion, determined to find the man beneath the monster.
But
what of you?
I asked.
What becomes of you when you take such
power on yourself? And what of me?

Amalie!
Reynaldo and Dominic together
shouted my name.
Aaamaliiee!
The howling I had heard before
became a roaring, deafening clamor that beat against my eardrums
from both inside my head and outside. It escalated into waves of
vibration until I thought the whole household must run screaming
out of the castle. The walls seemed to shake; I expected any minute
to see stones tumble down, the towers and battlements collapse as
if an earthquake had struck.

My focus blurred, wavered, broke up. I closed
my hand around the prism, blocking the angled rays of light. The
sounds diminished, were stilled. The walls of my room stood
motionless, solid and massive, every building stone in place. I
sheathed the dagger and laid it gently on the bedside table.

Magali stood against the far wall, back
pressed into the woven panel depicting the goddess Astarte.
“Please, my lady,” she said, her voice reduced to a whimper. “End
it. End it now.”

“What did you see?” I asked. “Or hear?”
What if I had brought some of that evil into my own
room?

“Nothing, thank all the gods,” Magali said.
“It’s what
you
saw and heard. Look!”

She held a mirror in front of me but I could
barely recognize the face that stared back. My inner eyelids were
almost translucent, the color of smoked glass, the pupils behind
them dilated huge and black like pools of oil beneath a polluted
lake. They had never before done anything but change from
protective milky-white to empowered silver when my gift was active.
My skin was ashen, my mouth open in a silent scream, my hair wild,
standing up from my scalp.

“You see?” Magali said. “You must get that
shit out of the house.” She saw the sun midway down the afternoon
sky and took her chance to escape. “I’m sorry, my lady. It’s late,
and I have so much to do before supper.” She almost ran from the
room, closing the door firmly behind her in the vain hope that the
horrors within could be contained by a heavy barrier of wood.