Retribution (2 page)

Val had been overwhelmed by the extreme
reaction to so simple an observation, but he always likes
attention. He ran back to my side, hiding his face in my skirt,
peeping out again and again at all the laughing female faces. In
answer to the last question he smiled, pleased to know the answer.
“Pink,” he said. Recalling Dominic’s overheard description, he was
able to be more precise. “My mama’s nipples are dawn pink.” Val
watched in bewilderment as a roomful of sober, kind women convulsed
in shrieks of raucous laughter.

Lady Melanie Ndoko entered the room then, no
doubt glad to have missed the latest hen-house hilarity. Her cool,
detached presence lowered the mood, even where I, as the
highest-ranking woman, had been accepted as an unthreatening wifely
comrade. At Melanie’s raised brows of inquiry, Drusilla explained
the joke.

Lady Melanie grimaced with distaste. “I doubt
Struan has ever seen me naked,” she said, laughing to soften any
sense of criticism. “I turned him over to a wet nurse the day he
was born.” She cupped a hand to her small bosom as she spoke,
implying that Struan had done well by the arrangement. She was all
aristocratic politeness, careful never to betray a hint of
condescension or ‘Graven arrogance.

“I’m hungry, Mama,” Val said, now that the
conversation had turned from him. “I’m hungry, and I can’t wait
till supper.” I had been trying to cut back on his nursing as a
prelude to weaning, keeping him on a stricter schedule based on
meals. But a week of living in a different household, with the
inevitable disruptions of any large gathering, had led to the
relaxation of my intended routine. Most of the other women were
nursing a child as we spoke, and I couldn’t expect Val to resist
the power of suggestion.

I opened my dress at his request and held him
on my lap while the conversation continued around me. “Dawn pink,”
Val said approvingly to the offered nipple and settled down to
spoil his appetite for supper.

It had happened then. Such a small thing, but
it had been the last straw, the incident that sent me off on the
trail to Aranyi, to ambush and capture and my five days of
suffering. I looked up at the feeling of being watched and
speculated on, met Lady Melanie’s guilty look.
Such a–
housewife!
She had found the word for me, so surprising a
description it had made her lose for a moment her instinctive
sibyl’s shield.
I wonder how Dominic has survived such cozy
domesticity all these years.

It was a slip of the mind, a careless moment
in the otherwise guarded control of the trained telepath. Lady
Melanie had been genuinely puzzled at the unlikely pairing of
Dominic with me, had not been able to conceal her amazement at the
evidence of six years of successful marriage, unimaginable at the
time of her affair with the man who was not yet my husband. Only
her smile and apologetic inclination of the head as I caught her in
the act betrayed her, an acknowledgment of her unintentional
rudeness in allowing her thoughts to be read.

That was the night I spent, tossing and
turning in the lumpy bed, waiting for Dominic who never joined
me—or Niall. It had given me time to think, too much time, for
thoughts that were better left unformed.

I had been pregnant with Jana when I married
Dominic, having gone away with him after reaching a dead end in my
attempt at becoming a sibyl. Marriage to my lover, learning to be
‘Gravina Aranyi, had offset my initial feelings of failure, and the
birth of a potentially gifted child had redeemed my sense of worth.
While seminary work is most prestigious, conceiving and rearing
gifted children is the next most valuable contribution anyone—man
or woman—can make. There can be no seminary work, after all,
without gifted workers.

Being thrown into Lady Melanie’s company had
stirred up my old conflicted feelings. She was unmarried by choice,
because being a sibyl requires infertility, if not celibacy, so as
not to damage a developing fetus with the elevated electric fields
of telepathic activity. Seminary women either postpone having
children or marry young, leaving to raise a family and returning to
work in middle age. Lady Melanie’s affair with Dominic, and
Struan’s birth, had been an interlude for her, a break in an
otherwise absorbing career that had begun as soon as she knew her
potential as a sibyl. Struan, like any Terran child, had been cared
for by nursemaids, not by his mother.

It was a way of life I could not easily have
chosen with my different temperament, and my years of marriage had
brought contentment. There was nothing I missed in my former life
on Terra or even my brief spell in the seminary of La Sapienza, not
one moment when I thought back to my old self with anything but
satisfaction at the improvement in my circumstances. Even the
important matters of the first months of marriage—of man and woman,
of love and lovemaking—had been pushed aside without much regret as
Jana was born and other concerns took precedence. In my great joy,
I had assumed that Dominic was equally happy.

Lady Melanie’s thoughts, accidentally
revealed, had made me realize, as nothing else could have, that
Dominic had not expected a second child, that the normal sprawling
Eclipsian family and placid home life had never appealed to him.
His rapture with Jana had carried us unscathed through all the
disruptions a new baby brings. I had not appreciated the special
quality of this love for his daughter, or foreseen that it could
not be repeated with Val.

Dominic had not suspected that by marrying
me, the Terran outsider, with no experience of extended family, he
would be bringing on himself the same situation he had taken so
much care to avoid. No doubt Lady Melanie’s cool sympathy and
amused understanding had been most welcome. My husband had taken
his vacation from domesticity when he had the chance. And when I
had the chance, I had attempted my own escape from the jealousy and
self-accusations brought on by Lady Melanie’s presence.

My punishment had been swift enough. And all
Dominic’s efforts for my rescue proved, if I had any doubts, how
strong his love for me was still.
Foolish to make so much of one
night,
I told myself now. Most Eclipsian wives were used to
sharing their husbands. In the not so distant past, not only was a
man entitled to a female “companion” for all the times his wife was
unavailable to him—during pregnancy and while recovering from
childbirth—but his wife, being familiar with her husband’s tastes,
and best able to judge the sort of person she could get along with,
was the one to choose her.

Any other wife in my position, I lectured
myself, would be delighted to find someone as noble and considerate
and educated as a Lady Melanie, not that so well-born a woman would
ever cast herself in such a role.
One night.
Who would
throw life and love and children away for one night?

Amalie
, Reynaldo called to me again.
Please, Amalie, you know me.

I opened my eyes to soft light. It was the
evening of my third day at the Ladakh manor. Dominic sat on a chair
beside my bed. He knew when I woke, felt the change in my mind
immediately.
Amalie,
he thought to me.
Amalie, don’t you
know me?
He thought the words, I could sense his consciousness
so close to mine, yet it was Reynaldo’s mind and voice that I felt
and heard.

I stared in horror, then shut my eyes.
“Dominic,” I said, feeling for his hand to form communion. “Don’t
send thoughts. Speak to me instead.”

“How are you feeling, beloved?” Dominic
asked, obeying me without question, clasping my hand. “What
terrible dreams were you having?”

Our bodies connected through the touch of
hands, met in communion and recognized each other. It was Dominic’s
mind alone; the enemy was gone. I dared to open my eyes. “Better,”
I answered the first question. “I’m sorry,” I added. “I’m sorry for
being so stupid.”

“You could never be that,” Dominic said. He
felt my head, cooler now, the fever down.

It had been he, I realized, his hands, which
had held mine, and wiped my brow and offered me water. He had not
left me for any length of time in three days, had taken his meals
here and slept beside me in a chair, only going as far as the
bathroom to shave and bathe. Apparently I had not known him.

“But something is troubling you,” Dominic
said.

The temptation to unburden myself, to relax,
as I was used to, in Dominic’s strength, was too great to be
resisted. “The shithead,” I said, refusing to use a name that would
give him a semblance of humanity. “The shithead keeps speaking to
me. With
crypta
. In my mind.” Surely Dominic would have
prevented that if he had known.

Dominic lowered his inner eyelids as I spoke,
always a sign of danger when indoors, out of direct sunlight, the
protective membranes turning with frightening speed from silvery
opacity to clear glass. He stood up, pacing with long strides
across the room, his hand on the hilt of his sword. The image
Dominic projected to anyone with the least telepathic ability was
terrifying. His hair stood on end, electricity shooting out and
creating a halo of blue fire. The red of his retinas’ blood vessels
showed through the pale irises and transparent eyelids like fire
engulfing the walls of a stormed castle. From my position on the
bed his great height seemed extended, his head almost touching the
ceiling. The sword he brandished at arm’s length was dripping
blood, and white fireballs of rage shot from his fingertips to
explode against the stone walls. Yet he was, in reality, merely
walking softly back and forth, his sword clean and safely
sheathed.

“I warned him,” Dominic said, coming to a
stop near the head of the bed. There was the hint of a smile, a
leaping of flame behind the inner eyelids. “He will pay dearly for
such an insult.” The words came out through lips that barely moved.
He was excited in an anticipatory, almost sexual way. The fact did
not displease me.

Dominic drew his dagger and returned to the
chair at my bedside, sitting straight and still, using the prism on
the dagger’s handle to bend the fading daylight into his eyes. He
touched Reynaldo mentally while his
crypta
formed a series
of rapid images: first the notched blade of a dull knife, then a
flaming torch, next a many-tailed whip with leaded knots, and
finally a skewer, the tip glowing red from being heated in the
fire.
That was stupid, disturbing ‘Gravina Aranyi
, Dominic
said.
Every stupid thing you do will increase your pain. We will
try the effects of all of these implements, see which you enjoy the
most, and which the least
.

I reached for Dominic’s consciousness,
feeling carefully before entering so dark and forbidding a place as
it had become, yet responding as always to my husband’s arousal.
Dominic-Leandro
, I thought to him,
my love, take me with
you—

The knock on the door shook me out of the
strong physical reaction I was not yet ready for. I lay back
against the pillows, the blood pulsing in my head and neck. Lady
Ladakh, seeing me awake, my husband leaning over me, tried to back
out, but I called her over to thank her for all the care her
household had given, to me and my children, our wounded men, and
earlier, to the guards and the women at the time of my capture.

Lucretia, the dowager Lady Ladakh, was a
formidable woman, of medium height and sturdy build, close to my
age, with a commanding air that came from years of acting as both
lord and lady of a substantial holding strategically placed at the
northern frontier of Aranyi’s area of influence. Her husband had
died young and she had brought up three sons and a daughter on her
own. With all her responsibilities she could be forgiven if she
seemed sometimes distant or brusque, but she possessed a
fundamental kindness that shone through luminous, widely-spaced
gray eyes and lurked in the smile of a sensitive mouth.

“Margrave Aranyi, ‘Gravina Aranyi,” Lucretia
said, bowing in acknowledgment of my words, “you and your family
are always welcome in this house. If I have at any time given the
impression that I wish your stay with us to end, it is I who should
apologize.” Her words were oddly formal. Although Dominic was their
nominal overlord, here in the mountains so long-established a
family as the Ladakhs need not observe the kind of obsequious
behavior that would be expected in the south. I sensed coldness in
her, a constraint foreign to her nature. She would be glad to see
the last of us, for all her hospitality.

Had she picked up some of Dominic’s and my
violent thoughts?
It would be unlike her so to forget the good
manners required of the gifted.

I struggled to sit, my head swimming.
Lucretia couldn’t wish us gone any more than I wished to be home.
With a quick glance at Dominic I suggested we could leave today.
“The main trail is wide enough that a litter can be carried by four
men.” I looked out at the lengthening shadows. “It’s still light.
If we leave now, we can be back at Aranyi before midnight.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Lucretia said,
“letting you travel after dark.” It took all her good manners to
force the words out. She couldn’t wait for us to leave.

Dominic squeezed my hand. I stole a sideways
glance at him. He looked normal again, or almost. His skin had an
unhealthy sheen, a glaze of sweat, but it could be the exhaustion
of wakeful nights catching up with him. I hoped Lucretia could not
gauge my husband’s mood from his eyes, as I could.

“‘Gravina Aranyi is right,” Dominic said, “in
spirit, if overzealous. We have imposed on you far too long. But
given my lady wife’s fragile condition, with your permission we
will spend another night. I can only add my thanks to hers and
apologize for all the inconvenience we have put you to.” It was a
humble speech for him, yet it came out easily. Unlike Lucretia, he
was not saying something he didn’t mean.