Retribution (34 page)

“And you didn’t know, because I wouldn’t tell
you, the full extent of my damaged genetic line.” Dominic found
another point in my favor.

You took the chance with Lady Melanie
,
I thought.

“I had to,” Dominic said. “I needed an heir.
And I was lucky; Struan takes after his mother. But Val, he has my
father’s red hair—”

We were back to this morning’s scene,
Dominic’s fears for Val’s sanity. Better to plant some sensible
ideas in Dominic’s head than allow him to go on worrying, seeing in
Val a budding maniac waiting to blossom into the full flower of the
“Aranyi curse.”

“Madness isn’t one simple genetic trait, like
red hair or blue eyes,” I said. “You can’t look at an infant and
know that he’s doomed to insanity. Val is just a baby. An
intelligent, precocious baby. And he has a baby’s fears, for all
that he can talk rings around a child twice his age.”

I told Dominic about the ambush, about
Reynaldo snatching Val out of the carrying pack from Isobel, how
the bandit had slapped and shaken him. “Val’s afraid to travel.
He’s acting very sane. He thinks that traveling leads to bandits,
and he won’t willingly expose himself to such danger again.”

“But calling me ‘shithead’ and ‘fucking
asshole.’ If I had used words like that to my father…”

“That’s my fault,” I said. “You know how he
picks up language.”

“Yes, not only do I see his mother’s face
when I look at him, I hear her sweet, ladylike expressions when he
opens his mouth.” Dominic laughed at my mix of indignation and
chagrin. “Amalie, I promise that however I felt when I learned of
his impending arrival, I can’t help but love him now—your child, as
Jana is mine.”

Our kiss of reconciliation broke off abruptly
as Dominic saw the clearing skies and midmorning light peeping in
at the window. “Erebos take me! We’ll never make it to Galloway by
dinnertime.”

“No,” I said. “Dominic, you go. Go now,
alone, at your own pace and you won’t be so very late.”

Dominic groaned. “I need you with me. You and
Jana and as many household women as we can muster. Niall and Sir
Nicholas, and every man at Galloway will meet me at the border with
swords drawn if I go alone. A marriage proposal doesn’t come from
one man, and a man at feud does not travel alone in the land of the
man he has wronged. Without my family accompanying me I’ll be a
marauder, and they’ll welcome me like one, with an armed
posse.”

“I’m sorry, Dominic” I said, “but I can’t go.
Val won’t be able to travel for some time.”

“Then leave him, Amalie. Isobel will take
good care of him. It’s only for two or three days. And the gods
know it will be kinder to Galloway.” He flashed a quick smile to
head off my wrath.

I had no time for foolishness. “I can’t leave
him, Dominic. He’s only a baby. He can’t be away from his mother
all that time.”

“Of course he can.” Dominic touched a hand to
my breasts. “He doesn’t need your milk any longer. He’s going to
become independent, Amalie. Not all at once, but little by little.
He’ll be fine, with Isobel and Magali and the other women to spoil
him for a couple of days.”

It took me the rest of the day to give in
while Dominic fretted and paced, while a messenger was sent to
Galloway on a swift horse to explain to our waiting hosts that we
would arrive tomorrow instead and while I talked to Val, trying to
assuage his fears, getting only “I hate bandits” and “I hate Niall”
in response.

The next morning, my chest constricted with
grief, I led a smaller party into the stable. Jana couldn’t keep
the wide smile off her face at the knowledge that she would go and
Val would not, that the baby had been left behind, that I had
chosen her and her father over the cuckoo in the nest.

Isobel was equally pleased to learn that she
would stay at Aranyi. She tried harder than my daughter to conceal
her joy, the days alone with Pavel, and partially succeeded. She
could school her face but not her thoughts. “Stay as long as you
need, my lady. I can look after Val. We’ll have a grand time
together, young master,” she said, kissing Val’s face.

To the very end Val didn’t believe I would
really go without him. His wails made me turn around and head back
to him until Dominic took my hand and thought to me.
Amalie
,
y
ou must make the choice, whether you will be Val’s mother only,
or ‘Gravina Aranyi, mistress of the entire family
.

I turned again toward the stable, walked
blindly ahead, deaf to the howls of my son. Katrina accompanied me
in silence. She had heard many cries of abandonment in her head,
thinking of her own children who had not seen their mother in
weeks. She had no sympathy to spare for a woman who was only to be
parted from her child for a few days. In a blur of tears I mounted
my little mare and rode out into the morning mist.

W
e made good speed on our
journey. Clara, Lady Galloway, was only just in time to greet us at
the gate of the manor house. She was a tall, spare woman,
strong-boned and handsome, heavily pregnant, with lines of
weariness etched into the corners of her mouth. She was younger
than me, I realized with a jolt, still on the good side of
forty.

I had last seen her and her husband, Sir
Nicholas, at that Midwinter festival when Dominic and Niall had had
their fateful meeting. Not pregnant then, tall and slender like her
son, Clara had danced with the exuberance of a young girl, twirling
and skipping, smiling into the equally handsome face of her
husband. The intervening years had not been as kind to her as to
Lady Melanie.

Clara curtsied to Dominic and me when we had
dismounted, her belly dragging her down off balance, spoiling what
would otherwise have been a graceful, balletic movement. Dominic
stepped forward, caught her hand to steady her and smiled into the
face that bore a strong resemblance to her son. “There’s no need,”
Dominic said, “no need at all, for you to welcome us so formally.
It is we who should honor you for your hospitality on such short
notice.”

The woman shivered at the touch of Dominic’s
gloved hand. She had the telepath’s sensitivity to physical
contact, her powers heightened by the chemical changes of
pregnancy. She looked up into the face of her son’s former lover,
smiled at the kind words, but could not help feeling something of
the passion that lay, coiled and waiting, to lash out and wrap
itself around her only boy. Her eyes flickered over to me and the
other women, seeking reassurance from our feminine presence.

“Is your little boy better?” Clara asked. Val
had been the excuse for our day’s delay in arriving. “I hope it was
nothing serious.”

“No, thank you for your concern,” Dominic
answered for me. “It’s a chronic condition.” He stared blandly
ahead after making so provoking a remark but relented at Clara’s
obvious concern. “The terrible twos. He was born with them, and I
suspect he’ll still have them when he’s ninety-two.”

Clara laughed dutifully. Her gift was strong
for someone not of pure ‘Graven stock, her thoughts readable, I
suspected, only when she chose them to be, as now. Beneath her cool
politeness I sensed a great bitterness.
To have sons to spare,
to make jokes about. That is luxury indeed.

Grooms led our horses to the stable and we
walked toward the house. Jana was hopping with excitement, her head
darting in all directions like a chicken watching for hawks.
“Where’s Niall?” she asked again and again.

Clara’s light brown eyes flashed with a glint
of laughter. “I’m sorry. Niall’s out riding the fences. He started
yesterday, said it couldn’t wait.” She made her son’s excuses
lightly, as if our visit were purely a social call. The lines of
fatigue around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes deepened
for a few seconds, yet somehow made her look younger, a mischievous
girl trying to stifle high-spirited giggles. Here she was in the
flesh, the woman the musicians had reported, who had winked at her
son when the empty promise of marriage was extended and our visit
was proposed.

Dominic and I exchanged glances of
comprehension. The principals in a blood feud always try to avoid a
meeting unless they want to risk fighting the fatal duel. That was
why Niall had gone home to Galloway, why Dominic could not travel
here alone. Riding the fences—traveling slowly, on horseback, along
the perimeter of a holding, checking for breaks and gaps or signs
of incursion—was not a job undertaken on the spur of the
moment.

If Dominic had ulterior motives in offering
marriage, so had the Galloways in appearing to believe the reason
for our visit. We could come, but Niall would not be here.
Dominic’s offer had not specifically mentioned Niall, and a
marriage, as everyone kept pointing out, was made between families,
not individuals.

Jana, unaware of all these adult
complications, could not so readily understand. “But Niall knew we
were coming,” she said. “We came to see him.”
Not you
, the
unspoken implication was clear.

“You’re no diplomat, I see,” Clara said,
finding within herself a drop of sympathy for the child who showed
her feelings so openly and had no part in all these layers of
deception. “He might come in for supper tonight or tomorrow. He
likes a hot meal after days of cold rations on the borders.”

“Welcome, welcome!” A booming voice assailed
us as we entered the house. Sir Nicholas, Niall’s father, bounced
over to us like a large, friendly dog.

I sent a thought of consternation to Dominic,
who ignored me—oblivious, or pretending to be. At a party, above
the hubbub of music and hundreds of guests talking and laughing,
Sir Nicholas could be an easy companion, his voice well-projected,
full and strong. One never had to risk offense by using
crypta
on a fellow telepath or nod wary agreement to unheard
remarks, wondering what one had committed oneself to. Up close, at
an intimate gathering, the noise was an assault.

“Margrave, ‘Gravina,” Sir Nicholas bowed in
our direction. “Welcome to Galloway. Always a pleasure to have
company. And who’s this big, bonny lass?” He beamed down at Jana,
seemingly delighted at the appearance of a large restless child.
There were others, Niall’s younger siblings, a whole houseful of
girls, from a demure, nubile maiden of sixteen to a rambunctious
toddler between two and three years old.

“I’m Jana.” My daughter curtsied, recognizing
the advantage of staying on the good side of so important a person
as Niall’s father. “Thank you, sir, for your hospitality.” She
recited the words with the practiced sincerity of an actress
speaking her lines before an audience that knows the play by
heart.

Jana’s perfect manners were greeted with a
guffaw of good-natured scorn. “None of that,” Sir Nicholas
bellowed. “No southern mincing and kowtowing here. We’re all
highlanders together. Speak plainly and look each other in the
eye.” His smile took any potential sting out of the rebuke. He had
the delicate skin of a redhead although his hair was dark, and his
face had the rosy glow of a well-fed, athletic man. Attractive in a
hearty, masculine way, he lacked his wife’s sensitivity. “A
pleasure, a pleasure,” he said to each guest in turn, guard and
maidservant alike.

Only now that we were all in the house, the
‘Graven and their offspring welcomed, were the rest of the
introductions made. I could feel the wheels of Sir Nicholas’s mind
grinding away, the cogs not catching on anything, as he took in
Naomi’s height and the prism-handled dagger at her waist. “Another
bonny lass!” Naomi must be well into her thirties, I estimated,
based on Dominic’s story of her arrival at Aranyi almost fifteen
years ago, but she had the preternatural youthful appearance of
those with the alien genome. Any age from sixteen to forty would
have been believable.

As I praised her skills as healer, Sir
Nicholas’s face betrayed a slight irritation. He had thought she
was an Aranyi relative by the look of her. Clara was more subtle
than her husband, appraising her unusual visitor mentally while she
bustled about calling servants to take our cloaks. Something about
the tall young woman pleased her, for her mischievous smile
returned, thinning her lips and crinkling the corners of her
eyes.

It occurred to me that Niall’s parents took
Naomi to be the subject of our specious marriage proposal: an
Aranyi woman offered to Niall as a prospective mate, a way to make
peace between Dominic and Niall while coupling them as kinsmen. My
eyes shut in dismay at all the misunderstandings I began to
foresee.

Naomi, never talkative, seemed downright
rude, murmuring the most minimal of answers to her hosts’ friendly
questions or acting as if she hadn’t heard—clearly impossible given
the volume with which Sir Nicholas addressed us. She was probably
just shy or, more likely, unpracticed. For all her abilities, her
only exposure to society had been the years living and working in
Aranyi. Her entire life before that had been spent in a one-room
cottage deep in the old-growth forest. Her mother, a similarly
gifted wise woman, had been her sole companion. Even at Aranyi
Naomi had never been one to mix in company. While she enjoyed
dancing, and had often spent long nights out on her own adventures,
she had avoided the routine conversation and the rituals of social
gatherings.

Sir Nicholas recovered his aplomb, calling up
his daughters one by one to meet their guests. My head whirled with
too many female names. The eldest was, inevitably, Nichola,
followed inexorably by young Clara, then Elspeth, Iris and Jean. I
gave up. If it ever mattered, I could get a girl’s name out of her
mind, or ask her. No one dared take offense at so trivial a thing
as ‘Gravina Aranyi forgetting a child’s name.

I was almost as pleased to hear as Sir
Nicholas was to tell that Nichola was already betrothed, and I
noted that the next daughter was a tomboyish thirteen-year-old,
three full years away from legal marriage. However desperate
Dominic might be to form a connection with Galloway, taking one of
Niall’s sisters for his “companion” was not a likely possibility.
Sir Nicholas no doubt thought so too, as he presented his brood
casually, with no attempt to push any of them forward, unconcerned
by Dominic’s patent lack of interest.