Retribution (26 page)

Slowly the fears subsided in both of us. The
maternal comfort worked its magic, as the touch between us, in
whatever form, brought us back to sanity. The child-Dominic grew
up, saw what he was doing and stopped in alarm. “Isis and Astarte
forgive me,” he said as he released my nipple from his mouth.
“Don’t let me start that up again. Val could be nursing until he’s
fifteen.”

“He’ll have to be weaned when he goes to the
‘Graven Military Academy.” I said.

What had I imagined
, I asked myself,
when I had married this man from a different world? What was
there to be surprised at?
That Dominic’s beliefs about
marriage, his expectations for it, were not those of a Terran man?
Not all of Dominic’s customs could be comfortable for me; not all
of mine could be acceptable to him. No one, man or woman, can
easily reject the morality learned from birth. Dominic could not
help the thoughts he had, only the way he acted on them. In our
years of marriage, Dominic’s behavior to me had always been
honorable, his manner loving and kind—give or take the occasional
marital squabble. Yet he had just now been crying with guilty
abandon because his thoughts, the natural reactions of a man of his
class, had upset me.

Our marriage had been successful up to now
because we had compromised. And Dominic had compromised more than I
had—far more. I had done little that was difficult or unpleasant
for me, whereas Dominic had had to accommodate the completely alien
ideas of a Terran woman.

“Oh, Amalie,” Dominic said. “Our marriage has
not been such a compromise.” The word has a humiliating connotation
for ‘Graven. “And it is not unknown, even among ‘Graven, for a man
to love his wife.” He stretched his long limbs, the passing of the
strong emotions leaving him spent. Where there had been unbearable
tension there was at last only serenity and love. “I have never
felt anything but pride that such a woman was my wife, and never
more so than now.”

Dominic felt my startle as an unsettling
truth hit. My husband and I had a perfect communion. We were
husband and wife because of it. I did not love Dominic in spite of
some things, nor did I have to overlook some of his less admirable
traits. I loved him in his entirety, and it was this
all-encompassing love that allowed our communion. If we matched so
well it must be that I shared the bad along with the good. No
pieces that didn’t fit into the matching slots, no desires unmet by
echoing anticipation. I too must be a potential torturer and
rapist. I recalled the ease with which I had been drawn into
Dominic’s telepathic buggering of Reynaldo. And some part of me
must also respond to the domineering part of Dominic, as a
masochist, a victim—

“Stop it, Amalie,” Dominic said. “We
complement each other in every way. Let’s leave it at that. But
what we feel for each other is love, and only love.”

Thank all the gods for that
, I
thought.

I do
, Dominic said.
Every day I
thank the gods for you
. Our kisses made the air around our
heads crackle with static electricity.

He put his mouth on my breast again, his hand
between my legs. Our bodies were weak after our strange night and
day but our communion was strong. We lay unmoving in an attitude of
sexual fulfillment. Our thoughts did the work that our flesh was
incapable of. When the knock came at the door it was as if we had
been gently awakened from a sweet, passionate dream.

It was Isobel who brought me the shirt and
breeches, and ushered the children in to see both mother and father
laid low by crypta.

“Are you sick?” Jana asked Dominic. It was
unheard of for him to be abed in daylight.

“Just a little tired,” Dominic said. “We’ll
be up and about soon, maybe by suppertime.”

Jana studied me more critically. “Do you have
a hangover?” She tried out a new word. Jana had never seen me drunk
before. She would have been too young to remember the last time I’d
been able to let myself go so far, before I was pregnant with
Val.

Perhaps it was better to blame it all on the
drink. “Yes,” I said, while Dominic answered “No” at the same
time.

As Jana scowled at the pitiful attempt at
deception, Dominic took the initiative. “We both had a bit too
much. And we’re both paying the price of our stupidity today.”

Val climbed up to stand beside me on the bed.
He clasped me around the neck, his face within an inch of mine. “I
miss you,” he said with a ham actor’s earnestness, his hazel eyes
round and unblinking.

“I miss you, too,” I said. Val wriggled
between me and Dominic, intent on disrupting the partial communion
we were steadfastly maintaining. Dominic’s hand was still between
my legs under the covers. I clamped my thighs tight, trapping the
fingers that had begun working their way slowly inside me again,
and shifted Val to my other side. Val was accustomed to seeing me
every morning, to my setting aside time each day to be alone with
him, as I did for Jana, to talk and play and read. “The day after
tomorrow, we’ll spend the whole day together.”

“Okay,” Val said. He settled into my lap,
apparently assuming that this distant agenda was to be simply a
continuation of this afternoon’s activity.

Dominic signaled to Isobel who moved to take
Val.

“
No!
” Val shouted. “I want to stay
here!” He clung to me like a baboon on its mother’s back.

I kissed his wet, angry face. “I wish you
could stay with me,” I said. “But Papa and I have to be alone for a
while. We have some very serious business to discuss.”

“
No!
” Val screamed louder
than before as Isobel’s strong hands descended on him. He pummeled
Dominic’s bare shoulder and arm. “Leave my mama alone! No
business!”

Isobel was laughing as she dragged Val off
the bed. “That’s your papa,” she said, nuzzling his wrathful face.
“Being with your mama
is
his business.”

She nodded to the clothes she had laid on a
chair. “Those should do for you, my lady. Ramon outgrew them a year
ago, and Owen still hasn’t grown into them.” Her older son must be
fifteen by now, big and sturdy like his mother.

I thanked Isobel for the loan as she carried
her protesting burden out. Jana lagged behind in the room, Val’s
wailing receding down the corridor. “Why did Isobel give you those
clothes?” She was a mix of fear and envy, caught between her old
active self and her new timidity.

Her shorn hair was growing long again, thick
and full. She would be a proper little Eclipsian lady all too soon,
I thought, as I smoothed a few dark strands away from her face. “I
have to do some very dirty work tomorrow. In the dungeon. It’ll be
easier wearing breeches.”

Jana wrinkled her nose and sniffed, following
the scent to the pile of our discarded clothes from last night.
“You’re going to kill the– Reynaldo!” she said. The idea seemed to
excite her.

Dominic was delighted with her enthusiasm.
“He’s already dead, cherie,” he said, sounding regretful. “We’re
just going to take the body out and burn it.”

“Can I help?” Jana asked.

“No, sweetheart,” I said before Dominic could
say anything. “It won’t be fun, just a lot of stink and dirt.”

Jana’s face had the stubborn look I was used
to seeing when she wanted to go riding by herself or carry a knife
without Dominic to supervise. “I swore,” she said. “I told him I
owed him a death.”

“And you kept your oath,” Dominic said. “You
struck the first blow. You cut his legs.” Jana wasn’t yet
convinced. “It was because of you, what you did, that we captured
him easily.”

“But I didn’t kill him.” Jana was on the
verge of tears.

“And he didn’t kill me,” I said, loud enough
to penetrate the incipient storm. Jana blinked and turned from
Dominic to me. “When you swore that oath, you thought he had killed
me.” I spoke more gently now that I had her full attention. “It was
a noble, brave thing to say, and it made me very proud to hear you,
but—”

“You heard me?” Jana asked. “You were awake?
You heard me?” She was transformed from a grim murderess into a
happy, squealing child.

“Of course I heard you.” I opened my arms to
her and she came to me, her face bright. “I heard everything you
said, saw everything you did, the whole time. You don’t think my
crypta
is only good at home, do you?” Jana shook her head.
“Or only with Papa?” She looked from me to Dominic, then shook her
head again.

I didn’t have to worry. My exceptional
daughter, Dominic’s child, would never be a housebound, ladylike
little girl, or not for long. She was slowly regaining her
confidence, helped along by the knowledge that her words and deeds
did not occur in a vacuum, that her mama and her papa were aware of
her accomplishments. In my relief, I made as rash a promise to Jana
as I had to her brother. “Once Papa and I are finished with our
work tomorrow, things will get back to normal.”

Jana’s face became, if possible, even
brighter. “Niall’s coming back!” She jumped up and down with glee,
went to hug Dominic in gratitude.

“Cherie,” Dominic said in a sad voice. “Niall
has his own life to lead. He can’t live with us forever.”

Jana pushed away from Dominic to stand in
front of me, the prosecuting attorney confronting the hapless
criminal with her crimes. “You
said.
You said Niall would
come back at harvest time.”

“Sometimes,” Dominic said, looking daggers at
me, “we want things so badly, we say what we wish instead of the
truth.”

“And sometimes,” I said, “we don’t want
things badly enough to do what we must to get them.”

Jana looked from Dominic to me, not
understanding. “I want Niall to come back very badly,” she said.
“I’ll do what I must. I promise.”

Dominic was speechless with hurt for Jana and
rage at the situation.

“You always do what you should,” I said to
Jana. “It’s other people who have to do things. And harvest season
has only just begun. I said he’d be back by the end of it.” I had
given us a month to put things right, maybe another week or two
beyond that if the weather held.

Jana went off, not happily, but with some
hope, in search of her beleaguered nursemaid and discontented
brother.

“How can you do that to her?” Dominic asked.
“Promise her something that can’t be? How can you be so cruel?” The
communion was wavering, flickering with Dominic’s fury.

“It’s not impossible,” I said. “All you have
to do is go to Niall and explain—”

“Amalie, if that were all it took, he’d be
here. We wouldn’t be discussing it.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You haven’t
tried. You haven’t even thought of him.”

Dominic’s face went white. “How the fuck do
you know what I’ve been thinking?” He heard the question, turned
red and laughed. It was an ugly sound, but from grief, not anger.
Our communion had not completely broken. Dominic had removed his
hand from between my legs, but our thighs still touched under the
covers, our arms and shoulders brushed as we shifted in the bed.
There was little he thought about I didn’t know, little he felt I
hadn’t sensed also.

Dominic had let Reynaldo die a month ago. And
what had been his reward for this reluctant act of mercy? The
moment he came upstairs from the dungeon, prepared to cleanse
himself, literally and symbolically, he had learned the real cost
of his surrender to brutality—that Niall had left him. The strange
crying I had heard that night was Dominic giving vent to his grief.
When I went in to comfort him, the unwitting transformation I had
already started in him had scared us both into suppressing all
strong emotions. After that first episode Dominic had hidden all
his natural feelings of sorrow and loss behind thick mental
barriers, for fear of provoking another appearance of the
“abomination.”

I truly had not understood. All I had known
was that, with Niall gone, the equilibrium of our marriage was
unbalanced. I had wanted us to get back to the good days, to the
way things were before. But with Dominic and me nursing our
unspeakable thoughts, living increasingly separate lives, too
fearful of what we might liberate to risk initiating full
communion, we were living on an unstable slope. It had needed only
a little push, something to get the first pebble rolling, to start
an avalanche. And I had thrown a massive rock down that hill,
surprising Dominic with the musicians’ attempted performance of the
Iliad
, a painful reminder of the loss of his companion.

But we had survived. Now we could start to
rebuild. “Well, Dominic,” I said, “think about it now. Explain it
to Niall just the way you explained it to me.” I put my hand on my
chest in a magnanimous gesture. “Blame it all on me, I don’t mind.
Niall isn’t one to hold a grudge. Just make sure you’re alone with
him. Once you two form communion you’ll both be as hard as the
proverbial first customer in the brothel before you get halfway
through all that stuff about the Aranyi mind.”

“Amalie,” Dominic said in the way that
portends a lecture, “you know very well that Niall made the
situation quite clear when he left.” My last frustrating
conversation with Niall was vivid to both of us through the
communion. “What I did to him is grounds for a blood feud, a matter
of honor between men. I can’t simply go to Galloway, mouth a few
sorry pleas for forgiveness, and expect him to simper and say
‘that’s all right then,’ like a wife whose husband lost his
temper.”

Men. So proud and so stubborn
. “What
if you at least tried,” I said. “Why can’t you at least go to
Galloway and try?”

“That would be a declaration of war.” Dominic
was near the end of his patience. “Why do you think Niall went
home, instead of to the city? Because that’s the only place where
we won’t meet by chance. If I deliberately set foot on Galloway
soil I’m announcing that I admit the basis for the feud. Niall, his
father, any of his male relatives, would be within his rights to
challenge me.”