Birth: A Novella (7 page)

More than anything I want to be with her
again, to experience that joy she always felt when we were
together. “Janet!” I shout. I simply can’t, being older, call her
“Mom.”

Her rather grim neutral expression softens
at the sound of my voice. She looks up, sees me, and on her face is
the same beaming smile I knew from my earliest infancy up to my
last piece of good news before she died—a promotion at work I
inflated into something meaningful to let her think things were
okay. “Amelia, darling!” she calls. “Oh, Amelia, how good it is to
see you. I’ve missed you so much.” She reaches out to me, opening
her arms wide, and I know I can jump down into her arms, that she
will catch me.

There are footsteps behind me, someone or
something running fast. I turn around, scared. Who
runs
in
the ether? It’s Dominic, out of breath, weary and distraught. Also
young—heartbreakingly handsome, innocent and sweet like the face in
his portrait. In communion, if we have any visible existence, it is
merely the other’s view of us, but in the ether, it seems, we
project our own image of ourselves, and our minds can’t update this
picture as rapidly as time ages our appearance.

“Please, Amalie, don’t leave me.” Dominic’s
voice cracks like an adolescent’s. “If you go, I will follow. I
swear by Helios and all the gods, I
cannot
live without
you.”

I stand poised on the edge of the precipice,
trying to choose between the peace of floating down to my mother’s
waiting arms, or struggling back uphill—I know it will be hard
going—with this young man who loves me so much.
Do I love
him?
I ask myself. I know the answer. I love him more than life
itself. But right now I’m tired, so very tired, and life itself is
an easy thing to give up. It just means leaning back. I can shut my
eyes and spread my arms and fall into space. So I do.

But the fall isn’t so pleasant after all.
There’s a sickening rush of air and my stomach heaves, like when an
elevator descends too quickly, and something breaks my fall and I’m
back on the ledge. The young man is holding me and he’s crying, and
I’m holding him and crying, and I look into his eyes, and it’s
Dominic now, forty-two-year-old Dominic.

My love
, he says in communion.
My
love. You stayed with me
.

There is a soft sigh, although I haven’t
breathed. Dominic lets go of me and slumps to the floor, his skin
as white as chalk, his lips stretched in a grimace, his eyes wide
open, staring at the ceiling, clouding over like misted glass.

***

I had no reply when Dominic told me he had ended the
relationship with Stefan. I could no longer shout and shoot light
beams at him. The passion of our earlier fights had drained away
with the loss of communion, the shame of what I had done at the
tournament, the weeklong absence.

“I’m sorry,” I said, again and again. Then,
thinking over the implications for our three-person marriage, “Do
you want a divorce?”

He had stared at me as if I had turned into
something not human. “You knew when you took the oaths, Amalie,” he
said, “that marriage by the ‘Graven Rule is forever. Until death,
and beyond.” He sighed, weary of explaining things to someone who
could not understand. “We can live apart, if you prefer, but we
will always be married. When we die, and are laid in our tomb, our
flesh will still bear the brands. When our flesh has rotted and
crumbled to dust, the pattern will remain, seared into the bones.”
These facts seemed to give him some satisfaction, for he smiled as
he said it, tired, unshaven, wearing the same clothes he had gone
out in a week ago.

What about the oath he and Stefan had
sworn,
I wondered,
the oath that made them companions, not
simply lovers?

“He abjured it, not I,” Dominic said. “It is
his prerogative.” He would tell me nothing more.

During the next few days it seemed clear
that, whatever Dominic thought or felt, our marriage was over.
There was certainly no communion between us, other than picking up
the stray thought that will happen with anyone, gifted and ungifted
alike. Dominic kept more regular hours, leaving for the Military
Academy or the Sanctum of ‘Graven Assembly immediately after a
quick and early breakfast, and coming home, usually after supper,
but not so late as before. The Military Academy and the Assembly
Sanctum are part of ‘Graven Fortress, as are the family suites, so
Dominic did not have far to travel between work and home. He would
go to his room on his return, although he seemed to sleep little. I
would feel his mind churning and rumbling with an incoherent misery
before I fell asleep at night, and of course he was always awake
before me in the morning.

But though our marriage was ended, I was
certain Aranyi had become my home. If I would always be ‘Gravina
Aranyi in name, then I wanted to live in my home. And I wouldn’t
wait until after the child was born. Every day, every hour that
passed in this disconnected state was worse than any danger of
travel or weather.

“I want to go home, Dominic,” I said one
morning at breakfast. I had made a point of rising early, to catch
him before I spent another long day alone. “If you can spare me
some guards, I want to go now, today or tomorrow.”

He looked up startled from his plate, his
face growing pale. I waited for the anger and recriminations, to be
told sarcastically that he would not stand by while I ran off to
the mountains and made a fool of him again, but he still managed to
surprise me. Something changed inside him as he absorbed my
request, and he answered me courteously and gently. “Let’s say
tomorrow. I’ll wind things up here, and we’ll go together.”

“But the Assembly?” I asked. “The Military
Academy? Don’t you have to—”

“No,” he said, “it’s not important. All
they’re doing in Assembly is dithering about ceremony—debating what
titles to use when negotiating with Terrans.” His snort of contempt
was the most affectionate sound I had heard from him in weeks, not
aimed at me, but drawing me in to share his disgust at time and
opportunity wasted. “And the Academy has only a couple of weeks
left until the Midwinter break. I’ll deputize a couple of the
ablest cadets to teach the others. The responsibility will be good
for them, although they’ll be insufferable when I get back.” It was
the first time in the city that we had come close to deciding
something together, and he left the breakfast table eagerly,
satisfied at the quick conclusions he had reached and in a hurry to
carry them out.

Our journey back to Aranyi was as slow and
comfortable as our journey from it had been rushed and unpleasant.
Dominic fussed and worried over the danger to me, riding on trails
slippery with ice, that could be blocked at any time by a blizzard,
and that are too narrow and rugged to accommodate any kind of
conveyance. Despite his usual disdain, he found a sidesaddle and
showed me how to use it. He insisted on our making only short
stages each day, and arranged ahead to stay overnight at manor
houses and fortresses along the route. We could not always find a
gentry family to put us up, as we did not always cover the full
length of one holding in our slow day’s ride, but the lowliest
laborer’s cottage felt sumptuous compared to the travelers’
shelter.

At night we shared a bed by necessity. No
one had two spare bedrooms suitable for Margrave and ‘Gravina
Aranyi; no one would understand if we asked for separate
accommodations, since Stefan was not with us. The first two nights
we slept on the edges of our opposite sides, careful not to touch.
On the morning after the third night I awoke to find myself in
Dominic’s loose embrace, his hand cupping a breast. When I opened
my eyes he let go and moved away, muttering an excuse, “Force of
habit,” which was silly, as we had not slept together for a month
or more in Eclipsia City. That night we agreed that as the bed was
narrow and the covers inadequate, it made sense to cuddle. By the
time we reached Ormonde, the last stage of our journey, we were
accustomed again to the light touch of communion, the intimacy of
the bedroom.

***

I open my eyes, see Lord Roger Zichmni and Tariq
Sureddin. “Hi, Roger,” I say, speaking Terran. “Hi, Tariq.” They
must wonder why we’re all here. “I saw my mother.”

They seem to stand motionless for hours,
staring down at me. We’re in weak communion, enough for me to see
that I’m lying uncovered in a pool of blood, that they’re
frightened and exhausted. They’re standing at the foot of the bed,
both of them with their daggers out, the prisms catching the light
from the fire. Magali stands at one side. The three form a broken
circle around the bed, as Naomi, Stefan and I had done to heal
Dominic’s arm—

Dominic!
I remember now.
Where is
Dominic? Why don’t they do something?

Roger,
I think to him in the
insubstantial communion.
Help Dominic
. I try to use
Eclipsian—if not formal ‘Graven speech, then at least not
Terran—but my brain can’t do this. Everything’s scrambled, buried,
lost in the smoke and rubble of my last visions.
Roger, Dominic,
the sword...
Now I remember. “
Lord
Roger,” I say.

The young men crouch on the floor beside the
bed, lifting something.
Dominic
. Roger carries the shoulders
and supports the head while Tariq, smaller and lighter, lifts the
feet. They lay him beside me and pull the covers over us. “He used
all his strength bringing you back,” Roger says. “You must keep him
warm while Tariq and I do what we can.” Magali watches from the
side, holding, for some reason, a baby.

Dominic, too, has been using his prism; the
dagger is still clutched in his fist. I try to close my hand over
his. My fingers can’t reach all the way around, but I form the
first level of communion with him. His outer eyelids are still
open, the silver of his inner eyelids tarnished with the dull gray
of the telepathic ether, and I fall in, pulling him after me. My
twenty-five-year-old self looks into the face of this young man she
has married, whose child she has—

Who died?
I ask.
Me or the
child?
I can’t bear it either way.

Young Dominic smiles at young Amalie.
Neither
, he says.
I did
.

No!
I say, thoughts rising in a
soundless wail.
That’s worst of all.

He laughs, although he’s too weak, and it
comes out more like a baby’s cry.
Beloved
, he says,
if
mother and child both live, that is best
.

I
was leery of staying at
the home of Stefan’s parents, who had so resented my intrusion on
their son’s great chance in life, and who had disdained me as
improper and lowborn. Now that I was in sole possession of the man
whom their son had cast off, they would have a genuine grievance to
escalate dislike into true animosity. The sun was low in the sky;
we could not reach Aranyi this day. Maybe one of their tenants
could house us, I thought, and we could avoid imposing on Lord Karl
and Lady Ormonde.

Dominic knew my thoughts. Where he would
have scolded and frowned in Eclipsia City, he now smiled and spoke
kindly. “We have no reason not to request shelter here. Stefan and
I parted as friends.”

We were welcomed with elaborate and
embarrassing ceremony, shown to a spacious suite with separate
bedchambers and bathrooms. A maid knocked on the door of the wife’s
room almost the minute after I entered, curtsied and offered her
services. I looked to Katrina, who had ridden all the way astride,
not being so far along in her pregnancy, and who had had to bed
down where she could in the smaller houses, on the floor sometimes,
or three to a bed with other servants, and decided she had earned a
day off.

The Ormonde woman seemed quite distressed
when I thanked her and accepted, and I was just starting to pick up
her thoughts to find out why a false offer had been made, when I
saw Katrina’s red face and received her own feelings of
mortification. I thanked the Ormonde woman again, then dismissed
her, saying that my own maid was perhaps well enough to assist me
after all.

“You’re supposed to say no,” Katrina said.
“My lady.”

“Then why did she offer?” I asked.

“It’s a courtesy,” Katrina said with weary
patience. “You’re their guest. But that doesn’t mean you should
shame me by accepting.”

“I thought you needed a rest,” I said.
“You’ve had to ride, and sleep on the floor—”

“That’s my job!” she shouted. “That’s what I
do!”

“Not really,” I said. “You’re stuck
traveling like this because I wanted to go home all of a sudden,
but your job is to help me with my clothes and my hair.”

“Oh,” Katrina said. All the fight went out
of her and she turned her large brown eyes, which Kojiro the guard
had so admired, to the floor. “I see. I thought—”

She had thought we were colleagues. Maybe
not friends, but surely she was more to me than just a washerwoman
and a hairdresser. Hadn’t she worried about me when I had my fights
with Dominic? Hadn’t she sympathized with me in my estrangement
from my husband, and hoped for our reconciliation? Hadn’t she
walked outside with me, without guards, and endured the humiliating
groping of men on the streets, and not complained, and not betrayed
me?

I was much luckier than I deserved, I saw. I
steeled myself for the encounter and opened my arms. “I’m
thoughtless and careless,” I said. “I only wanted to spare your
body, but I didn’t consider your feelings.”

“Oh, Lady Amalie.” She cried and sniffled
into my neck. She had no mother, I realized, having lost her to
childbirth years back. “I would go anywhere with you, suffer
anything—”