Retribution (38 page)

“It’s a pity—” Nicholas boomed at me, making
me jump. “—those musicians we had a few days ago didn’t stay. We
could have had a merry dance or two.”

“Yes,” I said. “A great pity.”

Clara stood up. “I, for one, am ready for an
early night.” She nodded to me and Dominic, giving us the
traditional freedom of the house. “You are welcome to help
yourselves to the food and drink in the kitchen and the pantry. If
you stay up after the servants have gone to bed, please make sure
the fire is banked and the lamps extinguished. But in my
condition—” She put her hand on her protruding pregnancy. “—dancing
is not my first choice.”

I too was ready for sleep after the morning’s
ride in the brisk air and the tiresome conversations. Dominic had
brought me and the rest of the household along in order to gain
peaceful entry to Galloway. Once here the rest was up to him. The
communion between him and Niall that had resurrected so fully and
spontaneously proved that my husband had every reason to expect
success despite Niall’s subsequent display of animosity. At least
Niall was not indifferent. Dominic was no longer gripped, as Niall
had last seen him, by the strange madness that Reynaldo and I had
caused. My husband was himself again, the man with whom Niall had
fallen in love. The same magic must work now as before. However
Niall might try to deny his feelings he must be bound again in the
enchantment.

I bade my husband a warm good night with as
much encouraging suggestive meaning as I dared put into it in front
of the others, and Clara and I climbed the stairs together. Katrina
helped me undress and settle into the double bed where I snuggled
under the piled furs. The small window, set high on the wall, was
open a crack, rattling in the autumn wind.

I was not yet asleep in the unfamiliar room
when Dominic came in. “Amalie.” Surely I was imagining the
whispering voice, had dropped off after all, dreaming of my
husband. “Amalie!” he said, louder and imperative, when I did not
answer immediately.

I sat up and turned up the lamp. He was white
with rage, shaking like a man with a high fever. Sweat poured from
his hair and ran down his face. His clothes were drenched with it.
I got out of bed and touched a hand to his forehead. It burned me
like a heated stone in a fireplace.

“Jesus H. Christ!” I called on an obscure
Terran god in my late-night stupor. “What happened? Did someone
poison your food?” The question wasn’t wholly facetious. It had
been known, not so long ago, attempts on the Viceroy’s life.

“He’s with her!” Dominic said, his teeth
chattering. “He’s with her now. I can feel it.” He wrapped arms
like steel cables around me and fell on the bed, dragging me down
with him. “Oh gods, Amalie, help me!”

“My love,” I said. “Who’s with who? Who is he
with?” Niall must be the “he” but who could be the “her”? I entered
communion with Dominic, expecting nothing but feverish
hallucinations, and discovered something worse. There they were,
the same kinds of impressions I used to share with Dominic when he
and Niall were together in love, but these were disturbing,
upsetting images, filtered as they were through Dominic’s extreme
jealousy and hurt. Niall and a tall, dark-haired woman sharing an
embrace, deep kisses, tongues with tongues, hands on bodies, an
urgency—

Naomi
. The woman with Niall was Naomi.
Why was that such a surprise?

“He’s
vir
, Amalie.” Dominic answered
my unspoken question. “He doesn’t want a woman but she’s forcing
him.” His body shook so violently he could no longer speak. He had
begun to undress, had unbuckled his sword belt. He pulled the sword
partway out of its scabbard and replaced it, drew it and shoved it
back, faster and faster, in a parody of the basic sexual act.

“Stop it,” I said. I took belt and weapon
from Dominic’s hands, secured sword in sheath with the safety strap
fastened and laid them in his travel bag, out of sight, as I would
to hide them from Val.

But they didn’t stop it. Niall and Naomi did
not stop. In the soft light of an oil lamp, in Naomi’s small room,
two long, lean bodies, the woman and the man, less than an inch of
difference in height between them, undressed and stood in silence.
They observed each other at a distance, moved ever closer, until
small, firm breasts met hard, flat chest, slim hips met narrow
loins, slender arms wrapped tightly around the new couple that had
formed. When the arms opened again it was to touch, to explore, to
taste, while they moved from the vertical to the horizontal. They
barely spoke, not even in minds, only the most primitive of
thoughts.
Open your legs, harder, now, now, now—

Dominic flopped and rolled on the bed,
experiencing it all through Niall’s projection, hating it, loathing
every minute, fighting it like a rape—not because Niall hated it
but because Niall enjoyed it. Niall was broadcasting, sending his
every sensation to Dominic, having his revenge and doing it in a
way that gave him pleasure with this woman who had something feral
in her and didn’t need conventional wooing or promises of marriage
or even—

Love
. There was love between them. Not
love as Dominic and I felt it, but affection, sympathy, shared
understanding, knowledge like a great sorrow. Dominic howled in his
agony while I held him in my arms. He moaned and cried on the bed,
sweating out his bottled-up love, twitching with every move of
Niall’s.

It ended at last, was over rather quickly in
the way of unplanned and sudden sexual arousal. Dominic lay still,
his chest heaving. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “I’ll kill them
both.”

“No you won’t,” I said. “Not in his own
house.”

“No,” Dominic said. “I’ll wait until he rides
the fences again, or brings in the herds and then—”

“Much better,” I said. “Kill him on his own
land, like a bandit attack.” I took the risk of provoking Dominic,
anything to bring him out of this murderous despondency; I had held
onto my prism-handled dagger during the paroxysms of vicarious
sexual activity.

Dominic sat up and lifted an arm as if to
strike me.

I held out the dagger. “Don’t make me use
this,” I said, seeing if I could get a laugh or at least a smile. I
failed.

Dominic hugged me instead. “What can I do?”
His voice was a sob of despair.

“Nothing,” I said, my arms around him,
rubbing his back like a sick child, kissing his neck where the
blood pulsed in his artery, pushing against my lips with such force
as if he had just fought a battle. “Why should you do anything? Did
Niall go crazy every time you made love to me?”

“No.”

“Then why?” I asked. “Why can’t he make love
to a woman without you—”

“Because,” Dominic said in a child’s sulky
voice. “Because she used sorcery on him, forced him—” My scornful
look silenced him, made him turn away from me. “Because he did it
to make me angry.”

“Then don’t get angry,” I said.
Great
advice
. If men could follow it there’d be no wars, few murders,
no raised voices. Dominic and his fellow soldiers would be out of
work, would have to find real jobs.

We didn’t sleep much that night. We were
dozing, having lain quietly side by side in the dark, letting
inertia accomplish what fatigue alone could not, when Niall and
Naomi discovered a mutual desire to repeat their earlier
performance. This time I tried a different approach. If Dominic and
I could follow them, do the same things at the same time, it would
force Dominic’s attention away from his vengeful companion and the
woman and onto us instead. It was hopeless. Niall was twenty, Naomi
much stronger and more energetic than me. They didn’t make love the
way Dominic and I did. I couldn’t keep pace and Dominic wasn’t
interested in trying. We ended up panting on the lumpy mattress,
exhausted and out of sorts.

Dominic rose after midnight, put clothes and
sword belt back on and went for a prowl. He came back an hour later
smelling strongly of the stable and of unwashed male body, stripped
and went for a bath. He was shivering, his body shaking the bed
like a vibrating motor when he slipped back under the covers.
No
hot water
, he thought to me, unable to speak through jaws
clamped shut against the uncontrollable chattering.
They turn
off the heater during the night
. Only Dominic would take a bath
in ice water rather than come to bed dirty. I warmed him as best I
could, wrapping my arms and legs around him while his frozen rage
seeped into me.

When morning came all I wanted was to stay in
bed for the rest of the day, but I didn’t dare. There might be a
murder or two, a duel, certainly a quarrel. If I couldn’t stop any
of it I should at least be a witness.

I staggered in to breakfast feeling dirty and
disheveled after a hurried, tepid bath. There was silence—pure,
glacial, angry silence. I smiled a cold good morning to everybody
and helped myself to a plate of food. I can take anything in the
morning if my ears aren’t under assault.

Niall and Naomi had the sense to come
downstairs separately. The rest of the family was already up. Niall
had circles under his eyes, a guilty look. He wouldn’t meet my
eyes, or Dominic’s. Naomi seemed the same as always, aloof and
serene, dressed in the homespun that suited her rangy body, her
wavy dark hair secured in the usual clasp.

There were at least six telepaths in this
house and the principal actors in last night’s little drama had
been deliberately unshielded. Sir Nicholas and Clara knew what
their son had accomplished, and they were delighted. Silently
triumphant, reveling in the news that had come to them like an
unexpected inheritance, they sat side by side at breakfast like a
honeymoon couple after their successful wedding night. They had
won, and they could not help but smirk.

The traditional pairing did not prevail at
the morning meal. Dominic sat close beside me, cutting the rind off
a succulent fruit with his dagger. When Niall came in Dominic
turned his back, sitting athwart the bench. “Not everything is so
thick-skinned,” he said, holding up a section of rind. “Some things
can be flayed alive with a dull knife.”

I permitted myself one accusing thought to
Naomi.
You planned this
. I directed the angry words to her
mind while I stabbed at a smoked fish, gouging out its dried yellow
eye.

Naomi followed a small ripe tomato rolling
around on her plate, a gift from the Aranyi greenhouse, picked it
up between two fingers and popped it in her mouth, savoring the
juice that exploded. Only then did she look up.
No, Lady
Amalie
, she said.
You did.

Clara must have trained Sir Nicholas well;
every time he opened his mouth she had only to begin a significant
thought and he would shut it, or eat something instead.

There was noise outside at the entrance,
guards’ raised voices challenging, dogs barking. A servant ran to
Sir Nicholas and whispered a message. Sir Nicholas forgot the
rules. “Darkness and damnation!” he roared, jumping to his feet.
“There are more bandits in the north!”

So much for the peace and quiet. Everybody,
or most of us, began speaking at once. Dominic and Niall stood up
at the words, their differences not forgotten, merely pushed aside.
I had a strange feeling—an intuition, a scrap of memory—and made
communion with Dominic, who raised his voice ever so slightly and
restored the silence I couldn’t have achieved if I’d busted a lung
shouting.

“What is the exact report?” Dominic said.

“Four men in Aranyi uniforms.” Sir Nicholas
made a gesture of apology to Dominic. “I’m only repeating what the
man said. He probably saw shirts that hadn’t been washed in two
generations and thought it was gray cloth. Four men accosted a
shepherd in a border pasture and demanded shelter and food.”

“Why didn’t they just help themselves?” Niall
questioned the man who had brought the message.

“They claimed they were Aranyi troops,” the
man said. He bowed to Dominic. “Forgive me, Margrave. The shepherd
swears that’s what they said. He didn’t dare challenge them, not
four against one. He took them to his hut, then escaped while they
slept and came here to report. The man’s outside if you wish to
interrogate him.”

I had recalled it now, the scene I had been
reminded of, from the communion I had shared with Dominic at my
rescue. After the battle he had chased the last bandits out through
the kitchen, into the back courtyard, where four of them had held
him off while Reynaldo had gone to the stable and attempted to
escape on horseback—with Jana.
They ran,
I thought to
Dominic.
When Ranulf and the others caught up with you the
bandits ran away. You didn’t pursue them because Reynaldo still had
Jana.

Dominic and I had a moment of dismayed
memory. The bandits had the uniforms they had taken from the guards
when they ambushed me. Three of them Ormonde uniforms, with no
‘Graven silver. But gray with black piping means Aranyi up here,
with or without silver. The bandits must have wanted to try out the
effectiveness of their disguise, requisitioning supplies like
legitimate troops instead of stealing.

The others broke in on our obvious
consternation, asking the logical questions. As Dominic answered
the men began talking at each other, then shouting, offering
various theories as to where the bandits were heading and deciding
on the quickest routes to intercept them.

It was a godsend in a way. Dominic and Niall
could go out on the hunt. In the thrill of the chase, the
excitement of the kill, they would find catharsis, purging all the
rage and bitter jealousy of the past weeks. If Sir Nicholas was as
generous as I thought, he would be satisfied with last night’s
victory and would give his son the reward of time alone with his
lover.