Retribution (43 page)

“It’s an emergency now,” Jana said. “There’s
bandits.”

“No, sweetheart,” Dominic said. “Not an
emergency. Just a situation. Niall and I and Sir Nicholas will take
care of it.” He took a last gulp of coffee and rose to join the
hunting party, turning his back on his daughter’s yearning
face.

The men were gone two days, all the way to
the edge of the high mountains and back. I thought of Val, left
behind all this time, crying for me as I rode off. Two days, I had
told him, maybe three. It would be five days before we were home
again. How would he perceive the time without me? Would two days
fade into three, or five? Would he accept the extended absence? Or
would each extra day without me, each lonely night, leave him
feeling abandoned and orphaned? I knew better than to speak a word
of it in Katrina’s presence.

I had one communication with Dominic during
the pursuit. Late on the first day he sent his thoughts to me. They
had found but one man, sick and dying, left behind by his comrades.
When caught and questioned he had had a strange message for his
pursuers. “The son of the sibyl escaped,” he told them with
something like satisfaction, before Dominic dispatched him with his
sword.

“Roberto!” I gasped out the name. The other
women stared at me as if I had succumbed at last to the legendary
Aranyi madness. I hunched my shoulders and turned my back. Let them
think what they would. I must help Dominic make sense of what he
had heard.

I concentrated on my memories of captivity,
the scenes I had witnessed through Jana’s frightened perceptions
while the bandits had debated their strategy.
Reynaldo had a
brother,
I told Dominic.
A brother named Roberto. Reynaldo
spoke of his brother as ‘the son of my father,’ but he must have
been the gifted woman’s son, fathered by a bandit.

Even amongst bandits there would be polite
fictions maintained about paternity—so Dominic had told me. If
Reynaldo had been accepted by his mother’s abductor, raised as a
member of the troop, he would have been adopted, treated as the son
of the man who now possessed his mother. For all we knew, she might
not have been obviously pregnant when she was captured. She could
have convinced her captor that he had fathered Reynaldo as well as
the second boy.

I could see the face of the man whom Reynaldo
had called his brother, the man who, while dark-haired, more
heavily built, had nonetheless borne some resemblance to Reynaldo.
We knew now that Reynaldo had been the son of Dominic’s father.
Roberto, the half-brother, had to have been fathered by a bandit.
It was their mother the two men had in common, through her that
they had inherited any similarity.

Dominic’s judgment was harsh and unyielding,
but I could not argue with it. Here it was, a real example of what
had worried me in captivity and after I was home. Reynaldo’s mother
should not have lived, nor her infant son. Rather than live as the
property of bandits, rather than bear the child of her incestuous
coupling, she should have used her dagger or whatever other means
she could find to end a life gone so wrong it could not be put
right. With
crypta
and training and a resolve to die,
suicide is not hard to accomplish. But she had chosen to live, long
enough to bear a second child after Reynaldo.

“Like fleas on a dog.” Sir Nicholas had
dismissed my sentimental regret at the deaths of the bandits’ women
and children after the battle. On the first day of our visit, when
Dominic and I had narrated the story of my captivity, my womanly
reservations had been brushed aside. “They’re vermin. The women
breed like rats and the litters grow up to be bandits. Good
riddance.”

Dominic had not demurred, nor would Niall
later. While Dominic and Niall, following the aristocratic code of
the ‘Graven warrior, would not have killed them deliberately, their
loss was not lamented. For all their skirts and their long hair,
the bandit women’s sex had not protected them. Dominic’s abused
half-sister, his father’s natural-born daughter, when captured by
bandits had become vermin, breeder of vermin. Whether by her own
fault or by accident it had happened to her, and she should have
died instead of continuing in her debased existence.

What if Roberto, too, had crypta?
But
I had sensed nothing from him, I was certain. Both of Reynaldo’s
parents were gifted, but only one of Roberto’s. Not every child of
a telepathic parent inherits the gift.
He was ungifted
, I
assured Dominic.
Just another filthy bandit
.

When the men returned, late on the second
day, they rode in with the dispirited look that bodes failure.
Niall and Dominic had blood on their tunics from killing the one
captive, beheading him and displaying the corpse in the usual
manner. “They escaped,” Niall said, echoing his father, “while we
gave them a full day and night’s head start.”

Niall nodded at his bloody clothing. “This
one must have been sick, because the others left him for dead. All
we did was finish him off after we learned what we could from him.”
He looked with lowered inner eyelids over to Dominic, spoke with
controlled nonchalance. For Niall, watching Dominic conduct the
interrogation and participating, as he must, through the intense
communion with his lover in the work of torture, had been a more
difficult rite of passage than anything he had encountered in the
Military Academy, or the bedroom.

Sir Nicholas was keeping a prudent distance
from Dominic. He had been impressed by Dominic’s abilities, had
decided that maintaining a buffer zone of space between himself and
‘Graven power was the safest course. Once or twice I saw him
looking from Niall to his forceful lover with guarded respect. If
his son could survive the ultimate intimacy with such a man, Sir
Nicholas was thinking, Niall must be pretty tough himself.

“They’re gone,” Sir Nicholas said, reverting
to his old authority in his own house. “They’ll freeze to death in
the mountains in winter, or be eaten alive by wolves and
bone-crunching vultures.”

“And good riddance,” I said, smiling as I
repeated our host’s earlier words.
It’s over
, I thought to
Dominic.
Not as we would have liked, but it is over.

It took another ten years before it was well
and truly over, another young man to kill the last of them. In
those years we learned there were worse weapons on Eclipsis than
bows and arrows, more dangerous enemies than bandits. For now,
Aranyi and its border allies could enjoy a clear horizon.

The men were tired that night. Dominic
followed Niall to his own room immediately after supper but they
fell asleep in the middle of a kiss, Niall’s head on his lover’s
chest. I heard them, snoring like sawing wood, in the brief
communion I attempted. Naomi slept in her little guestroom. I lay
alone in the large double bed of the suite, as I had in my
husband’s absence. We rose well rested, in a better humor now that
we were leaving Galloway than when we had arrived.

The family lined up to see us off, as they
had welcomed us. Sir Nicholas and Clara accepted their son’s
departure easily, seeing that, while he rode beside his companion,
his woman followed close behind. “Thank you,” Clara said to Naomi
as we prepared to mount our waiting horses. “Thank you for
Galloway.”

“When we get home,” Jana said as we trotted
along the muddy trail, “Niall’s going to teach me to ride the way
he does.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,”
Dominic said.

I saw Niall’s wink to Jana, the silent
promise. Dominic couldn’t expect to enjoy complete success in
exerting a father’s iron control over such a volatile family.

Once home, Dominic listened enthralled while
Jana related the whole stirring adventure. He heard how she had
obtained food for me, milking the goats and stealing the eggs, and
followed every move of her reenactment of the fight with the boy
who had called Niall Dominic’s whore. He applauded her blow to the
boy’s nose, couldn’t help demonstrating, with Niall’s help, a more
effective stance and combination of punches and jabs, as well as
explaining the kick to the groin and other venerable methods of
self-preservation, “just in case.”

“It seems my honor is safe indeed, with such
a protector,” Niall said, as Jana rehearsed her father’s
instructions.

Your honor was never in danger, or in
question,
Dominic answered him privately.

A few months later I experienced my proudest
moment in six years of motherhood when Jana, practicing the lessons
of Niall’s clandestine tutelage, broke her arm falling from the
side of her galloping pony. Her skirts had tangled around her legs,
throwing her balance off, as she crouched with one foot in the
stirrup.
This wouldn’t have happened
, I thought,
if she
could play in breeches
.

Naomi worked quickly to ease the pain and
knit the bone while Jana blinked back her tears. “I’m going to be a
soldier when I grow up,” Jana said. “Papa says a soldier bears her
wounds sto– stoically.”

Her
wounds, Jana quoted her father’s
exact words. It would not be easy for Dominic to change his views,
but he was working at it. If I knew my husband, he would not let
this thing defeat him. Had I not told him he was invincible?

V
al wouldn’t speak to me for
days. “Welcome home, my lord.” Val repeated Isobel’s greeting to
Dominic but was silent at her welcome to “my lady.” When I tried to
kiss him he turned his head away, pushing at me with his little
hands.

“He never thought you would go, Lady Amalie,”
Isobel said as she put Val down and he hid behind her skirts. “He
thought you were just teasing. The first night, when you didn’t
come back, he cried until morning. After the second night he gave
up.”

There was a stifled sob as Katrina, her hand
over her mouth, ran into the house. Five days had done this to Val.
What had five weeks done to her children?

“He’ll get over it,” Isobel said. “He’s only
a baby. He’ll forget all about it.”

“I am not a baby,” Val said, looking up to
Isobel, avoiding eye contact with me. “I’m the young lord.”

He did get over it eventually, although with
Val I could never be sure he had forgotten. My effusive delight at
his first defiant words to me—”shithead” and “fucking
asshole”—confused him sufficiently that he stopped using
obscenities for months. I vowed to myself we would not be separated
again and we were not, not until he was old enough to choose it for
himself.

Lady Melanie had no difficulty parting from
her son when she entered Netrebko Seminary as a member of the
senior cell. By Midsummer, Struan had been formally adopted heir to
Ertegun, in the distant south of the ‘Graven Realms. Dominic
defended his former mistress’s decision. “I went, younger than
that, to school with the Christian monks.”

I bit back my retort, remembering how
bitterly Dominic had spoken of his school years. Struan’s childhood
would be easier than his father’s. Edwige, ‘Gravina Ertegun, would
be a devoted mother, grateful for a full-blooded ‘Graven son in
place of the many she had lost at birth. It was an admirable
solution Dominic had proposed for the boy’s future. When he came of
age, Struan would be Landgrave, lord of a wealthier, more
influential domain than if Val had not displaced him at Aranyi.

“Just because Lady Melanie did not weep and
carry on,” Dominic’s sister, Eleonora, said as we discussed it
during the Midsummer feast, “does not mean she didn’t feel the
separation keenly.” I stared over her head as she spoke. Eleonora,
to her own distress, was childless. She could not begin to know the
pain she dismissed so casually, was merely pointing out one more
area in which I fell short of Lady Melanie’s ideal. I would not
assist her with any more words of mine.

The
crypta
cell we had established at
Galloway ran smoothly at Aranyi, meshing like fine machinery.
Working in a telepathic cell was a delight, one I had given up hope
of knowing after my failure at La Sapienza. Yet here we were, a
miniature, incomplete cell, but functioning just the same.

Yes, I acted as the nucleus, but it was my
own small dagger and prism I used, not a powerful seminary tool. I
stood in the center, fusing the energy from the others with my own
into one large force, which I directed to accomplish our purpose.
Of the four of us I was by far the weakest in body, but with the
power of my
crypta
, my seminary training, I was the only one
who could forge the individual gifts into a group. Dominic tried
once. It was an amazing experience, like body surfing in an ocean
the size of a planet, riding waves like mountains, but it wasn’t
controllable. “You have a woman’s pragmatism, Amalie,” Dominic said
when we emerged onto the dry land of separateness, adjusting to
steady ground again under our feet. “You must be our sibyl.”

The nucleus works hardest in any cell. Always
it was I who had to drop out first as my lower level of energy was
the first to be exhausted. Surrounded by three strong people,
permeated by their love, I stretched my resources to their limit.
We used the constraint on our time to our advantage, learning to
focus quickly, not wasting precious minutes on random bursts of
exploration.

The discipline was essential, as we had an
audience. Despite Dominic’s and my blasé acceptance of the miners’
request to observe, it was hell at first, their beady eyes on us,
as Dominic and Niall and Naomi joined hands around me and we made
the circle of four into one consciousness. It was like having an
observer in the bedroom, not a loving, unobtrusive spectator, as I
had been in the past with Dominic and Niall, but a leering,
prurient, heavy-breathing voyeur, one hand on his own member, ready
to bring himself to real climax at the same time his actors
simulate it in their performance.