Retribution (17 page)

“No, Dominic,” I said. “I promised to be
faithful. And I’m doing that now, keeping faith. Doing what I must
to support you.”

At my words, Dominic’s mind opened to me
suddenly, as if a dam had burst. In front of all these people,
Ranulf and Magali, serving women and guards, in front of Isobel and
the children, he went down on his knees and wept. He held my hand
and kissed it.
My love
, he thought to me, the full force of
his gift nearly knocking me off my feet,
my lady wife, I know
what you would do for my sake, how difficult it is for you. Please,
obey me in this. Let me do this thing for you, my dearest
love.

There was silence in the room, almost as if
people knew what had been said.
Stand up
, I said. When
Dominic was on his feet again I answered his request, in an audible
if shaky voice. “Of course, my lord husband, I will obey you in
this, as in all things.” I defy anyone to tell me what else I could
have done.

I
t was with a strong sense
of having committed perjury to escape a death sentence that I
visited Berend, the steward. Keeping the household accounts is the
most enjoyable of my regular duties, apart from caring for the
children, and I was looking forward to catching up after more than
a month away. There was no question that Berend had managed
everything perfectly in my absence, as his was the primary
responsibility. Still, I would need to know where things stood in
order to oversee the arrangements made with the miners.

Once Berend had expressed all the
conventional good wishes for my health and my safe return, we got
down to business. “Margrave Aranyi said he promised the miners the
northern border lands,” Berend said. “But he mentioned no
specifics, and he’s been—” He frowned and stared at the wall.
“—unavailable much of the time. I haven’t been able to pin him down
or get any more precise details.”

I laughed. “No one can pin Margrave Aranyi
down. That’s my job, and I avoid it whenever I can.”
Not this
time
, I thought.

Dominic has a lordly indifference when it
comes to his vast wealth. He is an honest and scrupulous overlord,
never taking more from the land than it can well bear, and having
no tolerance for careless management or dishonest practices of any
kind. But when it comes to gifts, to marriage settlements, or
rewards for heroism, he has no sense of perspective. He would give
it all away on a whim if I asked him to, if Jana needed it for her
dowry, or if a former lover came to him in need.

We studied the large map of the Aranyi
holdings. It was centuries old, but drawn accurately to scale, and
with significant geographic features highlighted, on good-quality
vellum that was as fresh today as when the ink was barely dry. The
borders hadn’t really changed much since then. They would
occasionally shift if a family’s holdings increased or decreased
with marriage, with a bad harvest, or with a change in alliances.
The distances rarely amount to more than a few hundred acres either
way. The map would do well enough. The alternative was an aerial
survey, with the aid of a Terran helicopter. I smiled, thinking of
Dominic’s language should I propose that.

Aranyi lies at the edge of the mountains, the
northern frontier of the ’Graven Realms under Assembly rule; the
borderlands are at the highest elevation. These lands are the least
desirable: hilly, full of rocks, the thin mountain soil poor for
farming, the pastures suitable only for goats that can navigate the
steep inclines, exposed to predation from wolves and bone-crunching
vultures in the highest passes.

No one needed to remind us that bandits are a
perennial threat in the north. The prominent gentry families, the
Ladakhs and the Galloways, who owe nominal allegiance to Aranyi but
are effectively independent, spend all their available manpower
patrolling. They were unlikely to welcome a change in overlord from
Dominic who, while temperamental and sometimes demanding, was an
excellent protector, to miners, with a dubious reputation as
fighters, little interest in relations with the tenants to the east
and no concern for their well-being.

It would be an interesting puzzle to occupy
my mind. What landowners would not object to miners as landlords
instead of Dominic? What boundary lines could be redrawn without a
protest delegation of shepherds, goatherds, small farmers and
woodsmen descending on Aranyi Fortress? I could imagine a visit
from Lady Ladakh at her most formidable, detailing all the reasons
why our choice—my choice—would be a disaster, not merely for
Ladakh—she would disclaim any selfish motives—but for all the poor
Aranyi tenants, who should be our chief responsibility.

I looked up from the map to see Berend
watching me. When I nodded permission he asked, “Is it true, my
lady, that a miner saved you when the bandits were about to cut off
your hand?” Magali’s version of my story had circulated well.

“Yes, Gwynn himself, their leader.” I
explained about Michaela and the steel bracelet. “Not only that,
another one bandaged my cut wrist, so I didn’t bleed to death.” I
understood that the purpose behind the questions was not simply
avid curiosity, and I agreed with Berend’s unspoken thought. “I owe
the miners a great deal, perhaps my life.”

We bent over the map again. Berend knew the
name of every tenant, the family history of each holding. If he
couldn’t recall a detail, the books of records that lined the walls
would provide it. There was no one who would willingly accept
miners or smiths as lords, no one who would pay the rent of kids or
lambs, wheat or barley, cheese or firewood, to people who were not
Aranyi, who did not share their stores in times of hardship, who
could not sympathize with their troubles or offer them meaningful
protection. It was impossible. Dominic had promised the men what we
could not deliver.

Berend and I looked at each other helplessly.
“We don’t have to draw the lines today,” I said. “We have weeks,
while they drink and eat up the harvest, and haggle and argue, and
piss in the washbasins and shit in the bathtubs.” I tried to make a
joke of it. The miners could be here well into the autumn, and if
we hadn’t resolved it by then they’d be stuck here all winter. No
one wanted that.

“Didn’t you once mention, my lady, that you
worked on a mining survey when you were at La Sapienza?” Berend
spoke deferentially, as if to remember were to offend. No wonder he
was steward. He forgot nothing, not even a casual comment made six
years ago during a discussion of my “property” before my
marriage.

We understood each other simultaneously. “No,
we didn’t,” I said, leaping ahead several questions, “but who’s to
say there isn’t?” It was the senior telepaths who had worked on
something like a “mining survey,” not the novices like me. And the
idea of using
crypta
in place of hydroelectric or nuclear
power was not limited to locating underground ores of precious
metal. But the work that had been done suggested that these
northern mountains do contain several useful commodities. The only
problem had been practical: how to extract these ores without
destroying the environment.

I thought of one major obstacle. “Berend,
you’re brilliant,” I said, to soften the blow, “but the land
there.” I pointed to the true mountains that we’d been thinking of,
not the foothills. “That doesn’t belong to Aranyi.”

Berend blushed like a boy at the compliment.
“No, my lady,” he said. “But it doesn’t belong to anybody else,
either.”

The idea seemed disgraceful, and so tempting.
“It’s terrible land,” I said. “It’s buried under feet of snow for
three quarters of the year. There are bandits and predatory animals
and maybe even aliens.” Dominic’s mother had been an “alien,” the
euphemism for the cold- and altitude-adapted beings genetically
engineered by the first settlers. Now they were so rare they had
been relegated to the world of cryptozoology, like Bigfoot.

“No, my lady,” Berend said, laughing. “Not
aliens.” He tapped his pen on the table as he thought. “I don’t
wish to be presumptuous, but if you and Margrave Aranyi agreed to
search for minerals and identify the most promising locations, the
miners might be willing to dig in the summer months, if they were
assured that all they found would be theirs.”

“What if there’s nothing there?” I asked.

“Then we’re up shit creek,” Berend said.
Years of working with me had caused my young steward to forget his
usual prim manner of speaking on occasion. “But I can’t think of
anything better.”

“Neither can I. I’ll propose it to Margrave
Aranyi, see what he thinks.” To Berend’s anxious look I added,
“I’ll explain first why his original idea won’t work.”

I thought of more difficulties only after I
left the accounts room. The survey work at La Sapienza had required
more than two telepaths to accomplish. It would take more than just
me and Dominic to prospect for metal in the no-man’s lands to our
north. Even if Niall were still here to help, it would require at
least four gifted people to form a
crypta
cell.

Naomi was the logical choice, but I was
unsure how best to approach her. Of all the people who worked at
Aranyi, Naomi had remained a stranger to me. It should have been
the opposite. Both of us had spent years of adult life trapped in
the isolation that growing up gifted can cause. Yet, in the way of
such things, our shared disability had separated us, rather than
forging a bond. Neither one of us, I suspected, was comfortable
getting too close, initiating a communion that might bring buried
memories back to vivid consciousness and force us to relive old
unhappiness. And Naomi had a natural reserve that was exaggerated
by her occupation.

The healer occupied an uncomfortable place in
a ‘Graven household. Neither servant nor family, Naomi was as
gifted in her way as any ‘Gravina, but she came from no recognized
family and, like any commoner, had no last name. She was the
daughter of a forest wise woman who was rumored to be part alien,
part sorceress. Of her father nothing was known or said. Apparently
the line ran to girls. Mother to daughter they passed on their
gift, offering their services to Aranyi when convenient, returning
to their distant cottage when life in the castle no longer suited
them.

Naomi had come to Aranyi shortly after the
old Margrave’s death, Dominic’s father. Dominic had told me Naomi
had shown up at the gate one evening, asked if it was true that the
Margrave was dead, although the loud wailing of the household women
had been proof enough. She had requested an audience with Dominic.
Once alone with him Naomi had formed communion, joining with
Dominic so neatly and unobtrusively it was as if they had shared
only a momentary dream. Then she had withdrawn, smiled
mysteriously, inquired whether Aranyi needed a healer, and had been
shown to the spacious second-floor room she had occupied ever
since.

“She groped me,” Dominic said, laughing
self-consciously. “Not crudely, nothing unpleasant, but she touched
me, with her mind, in the most suggestive ways a woman can touch a
man, and when I did not return the– compliment– she offered her
services as healer.”

“Perhaps she was looking for a father for the
next daughter in her line,” I said. It was probably the way these
solitary gifted women had always existed in the hostile world to
which they couldn’t completely belong: searching for a compatible
man, bearing his child, insuring they got a daughter—a healer would
be able to manage that—and requiring nothing more of him, no
assistance, no acknowledgment. They would not be bound to him,
neither wife nor companion nor mistress, would remain free to live
where and as they chose.

Dominic rejected the idea. “She could have
had my father’s services any time,” he said, in the disparaging
tone he always used to speak of the man who had been a father to
him only in the biological sense. “She wouldn’t have to ask. I
don’t think he left a female virgin in the household over the age
of eleven.” He shut away his thoughts of his father, returned to a
less distasteful subject. “No, I think she simply wanted to know
what kind of man I was. When she saw I was truly
vir
, not
likely to show the least interest in the female servants—that’s
what decided her.”

“It’s possible,” I said, somehow protective
of the woman and her sensibilities, “that she hoped you wouldn’t
always see her as just a servant. She might have wanted a better
man to father her child than your father was, someone decent, whom
she could respect.”

“Matchmaking for me, Amalie?” Dominic turned
suddenly belligerent. “Listen to me. I am no stud animal, to sire
thoroughbreds on every gifted woman who wants a ‘Graven brat. I
have ensured an heir for Aranyi, as is my duty. But don’t, even as
a joke, propose me for every childless female in need of something
to fill her womb.”

I had not dared tell him then that I was
pregnant with Val. Instead I apologized for my thoughtlessness,
remembering that Dominic had been made to feel like breeding stock
all his life, not only by his father, but by ‘Graven Assembly, and
by the self-perpetuating requirements of the Eclipsian aristocracy,
in which boys as young as sixteen could be betrothed by their
parents to girls they would not meet until they stood side by side
on the eclipse platform of their new home to burn the letters of
their combined family name into their arms. Later, when the fact
could no longer be concealed, Dominic had taken the news of Val’s
impending arrival quite calmly.

While I reminisced I had arrived at Naomi’s
door, having recollected with a guilty conscience my promise to
Isobel about Pavel. I shelved my worries over the miners’ reward in
favor of examining the wounded guard. Better that, I decided, than
trying to unload worthless land that wasn’t ours on people who
deserved better. Perhaps, in the shared work of healing, I could
establish the beginnings of friendship with this guarded woman,
sound her out on the idea of joining Dominic and me and, with luck,
Niall, in a
crypta
cell, the most intimate relationship
telepaths can enter into, apart from marriage.