Retribution (46 page)

“Enough,” I said, when the second morning
dawned. “We will use Terran medicine.”

“Over my dead body,” Naomi said between
contractions.

Niall looked up from deep in the valley of
death, his eyes dark in his white face. “Do not say, or think, or
wish such a terrible thing, my love,” he said to his suffering
woman.

In the end I did it: held the knife, steadied
through Dominic’s strength, guided by Naomi’s own healing
knowledge, cut into her hard ripe belly and pulled the baby out.
Magali washed him and started his first cries before swaddling him.
Niall, weak and shaking, watched from the comfort of Dominic’s
embrace as I mended the cut with the help of my
crypta
energy, bringing the edges together again to fuse into a smooth
surface, first the empty womb, then the layers of flesh, even on
Naomi a thin band of subcutaneous fat. Only because of the cell we
had formed could I find within myself the courage and the
discipline to perform so nauseating and so risky a procedure.

Magali laid the boy in his mother’s
outstretched arms while I puked into the bathroom sink. “There’s a
fine boy,” Naomi whispered to her son, “would kill his own mother
on his way into the world.”

Sir Nicholas and Clara were with us at Aranyi
when Niall presented his son for his naming day. “Nicholas-Dominic,
my natural-born son.” He acknowledged and accepted the squirming
infant as the household shouted its approval.

“My dear,” Clara said to Naomi, “if you
prefer, I can care for him at Galloway.” She smiled at the chubby
girl in her arms, ten months old now, that had been in her belly
when we had last visited. “My youngest drinks me dry, but we can
find a wet nurse.”

Naomi stared into the dark future. “He is
mine for only a little while. Do not take one minute of it away
from me.” Whether she meant Niall or her little son, it was the
truth.

Clara put a gentle hand on Naomi’s shoulder.
“Of course you must keep him as long as you can. Only you must
promise me—”

Naomi’s eyes flashed as if to penetrate and
conquer the other woman’s mind. But it was Naomi who was defeated.
“I promise,” she swore, raising her hand and looking straight
ahead, as she had when she had seen Niall’s fate.

Two years later Naomi had an easier time
giving birth to her daughter. Sylvie, she was called.
Of the
forest
. Little Nicholas loathed the usurper, fretting and
crying, moping with jealousy. Jana comforted him with the wisdom of
eight years of bitter experience. “It’s just a baby,” she said
while he glowered at the nasty little red thing in his mother’s
arms. “Everybody has them. Like fleas on a dog.”

He was a strange, quiet boy, young Nicholas,
with his mother’s feral quality. He enjoys a special communion with
animals, can coax birds from the trees and rabbits from their
warrens to come willingly to his hands. It is said he can calm a
frightened horse or stop a charging bull in its tracks with a look
or a gesture. It is also whispered—always with a careful glance
over the shoulder, spitting to ward off evil—that when the small
creatures come to him, trusting and innocent, drawn by the spirit
of the forest sorcerer within him, he wrings their necks and puts
them in the pot for supper.

Yet young Sir Nicholas is a good master of
Galloway, for all the talk. The crops are bountiful, the herds and
flocks increase, the deep forest kept undisturbed, nor is his power
restricted to the land. Naomi’s son, tall and dark with green eyes,
has grown up to break hearts. A taciturn, reclusive man entering
middle age now, he is as slim and graceful as ever. No gray shows
in his wavy hair and he has never married. Women have come and
gone, like the birds charmed from the trees. None have stayed. He
lives surrounded by a large brood of illegitimate children, from
grown men to infants, a natural-born son or two among them.
Galloway’s future is secure, if irregular.

After Niall died, Naomi sent their son to
live with his grandparents, to learn to be master and landowner.
Niall’s parents made it clear Naomi was welcome to accompany him,
but she could no more live in a place like Galloway, confined to
the small manor house, few people requiring her healer’s skills,
than a hawk can thrive where it cannot stretch its wings in the
hunt.

It tore Naomi apart, losing her lover and her
son so close together, although, like Lady Melanie, she did not put
on a display of grief. She had been mourning Niall from the
beginning, preparing for the sacrifice she knew would be required.
When the time came to give up her son she was drained. She had made
her promise, to Niall and to Clara, and she kept it.

Naomi’s daughter, Sylvie, became the new
center of her mother’s attention, as she learned the art of
healing. Sylvie was a happy, mischievous child, more at home in
Aranyi Fortress than in the forest her mother loves. Naomi,
white-haired and gaunt, no longer haunts the corridors of Aranyi
but has retired to a cottage deep in the woods where she can live
out her last years in the solitude she prefers. It is Sylvie who
does the healing, with a light touch and a friendly manner that
bring people from all over the realm to thrive under her care.

Sometimes now, forty years and more after my
captivity, I see tears in Dominic’s eyes when he looks at Sylvie.
Like all old people, Dominic’s memories are often more alive to him
than the present, and it is undeniable that Sylvie has the look of
her father. In her light brown eyes there is that same quick
intelligence, and the animation of her face when she speaks recalls
Niall’s elegance and wit. I have wondered, once or twice, who
fathered her one child. Sylvie’s daughter is tall and dark with an
alien look about her. But so are they all, Naomi and her
descendants. And Niall had dark hair, was tall and slim. How else
should she look, the next in the line of wise women?

Dominic is not the man to be unfaithful.
Having chosen his partner, man or woman, he will not stray. His one
slip with Stefan taught him that. Never has he betrayed me.
“Amalie,” he swore to me once, “the brand on my arm means as much
to me as yours should to you. I suffered it because I am wedded to
you, and I will have no other woman.” It is the same for him and
Justin Ladakh. They are as married as any two people can be. If the
memory of a first true love, cut short by death, recurs more
frequently to Dominic in his later years, neither Justin nor I can
complain of his devotion.

Those few years we had together, Dominic and
Niall and Naomi and I, whirled by like a few days in a
crypta
cell, a lifetime passing in the space of hours. Of
all the long years of my marriage they stand out the brightest and
the best. At night, in the sleeplessness of old age, I go over the
events that began so badly and yet led to that happy time. If I had
stayed at Stefan’s, not let my jealousy consume my good sense, not
been captured—why then, I realize, Niall would not have left
Dominic, not gone home. He would not have accepted Galloway’s need
for an heir, would not have come together with Naomi, would not
have left behind something of himself in his son and, especially,
in his daughter.

And if we had not pursued Niall to his home,
I think, lying in the dark beside my husband, or alone in my own
bed, if Dominic had not convinced his companion to return—then
Niall might be living still, the master of Galloway that he loved,
although without his lover at his side.

“He chose it, Lady Amalie,” Naomi said before
she retired to the forest. “Never doubt that he chose his fate.”
Naomi was too careful, her love for Niall too profound to have told
him more than any man should know of his future. I suspect that
gifted as he was, the raw force of Naomi’s vision could not always
be shielded from him. Niall faced the same choice as Achilles and
he decided the same way, preferring the short life with Dominic to
the long life without. He lived the time he had in the way he
wanted and died at the side of his lover and comrade in arms, cut
down by a faceless enemy with an impersonal Terran weapon.

Niall’s bones will not lie with Dominic’s as
he requested after their duel, when he quoted Patroclus’s speech.
He lies, as he must, at Galloway with his ancestors. At Aranyi a
representation of his fine features—the cool, light-brown eyes, the
sharp nose and humorous mouth—hangs at the end of the portrait
gallery. Dominic keeps a miniature copy in his clothes chest, a
reminder of the beauty that was blasted away in a second by an
exploding bullet, aimed at no one in particular, that hit so rare
and exquisite a target. And while Dominic still wears the silver
ring on his left hand, the mate to one that adorns a finger now
reduced to bone, our memories are all we have of Niall’s evanescent
radiance, his quick mind and supple grace.

I think, in his heart, Dominic knows that if
he strayed from me once to father a child with Niall’s daughter, I
am glad of it. Isis and Astarte bless their union, and their
child.