Paladin of Souls (26 page)

The merry glint returned to Liss's eye in response to her wry tone.
"That's
so. And yet... it made it all seem sadder, somehow."

Ista could only nod agreement.

*     *     *

IT EASED ISTA'S HEART TO HAVE LISS'S PLAIN, PRACTICAL ministrations again, readying her for bed. Liss bade her a cheerful good night and went off to sleep in the outer chamber, within call. She left the candle burning again at Ista's bidding, and Ista sat up on her pillows and meditated on the day's new revelations.

Her fingers drummed. She felt as restless as when she had used to pace round and round the battlements at Valenda Castle, till her feet blistered and the soles parted from her slippers and her attendants begged for mercy. That had been an opiate for thought, though, not its aid.

For all that it seemed a string of accidents had brought her to Porifors, the Bastard had claimed she was not here by chance. The gods were parsimonious, Lord dy Cazaril had once remarked to her, and took their chances where they found them. He had not pretended it was a positive feature, god-gnawed man that he was. Ista smiled in grim agreement.

How were prayers answered, anyway? For prayers were innumerable, but miracles were rare. The gods set others to their work, it seemed. For however vast a god might be, it had only the width of one soul at a time to reach into the world of matter: whether door, window, chink, crack, pinhole . . .

Demons, for all that they were supposedly legion, were not vast, possessing nothing like the infinite depth of
those
Eyes, but they seemed limited similarly; except that they could chew away at the edges of their living apertures, and so widen them, over time.

So who here must she reproach for praying for her advent? Or perhaps not for her, but just for help, and sending her was but a nasty jape of the Bastard's. She had absolved Lord Illvin when she'd thought him senseless, but if Goram spoke truth, he had periods of ... if not lucidity, arousal, after all. And Goram himself had certainly made supplication of her, with the work of his hands if not words. Someone had laid that silent prayer of the white rose across Illvin's empty plate. Lady Cattilara plainly ached with the pain of her longing for a child, and her husband . . . was not what he seemed, either.

Foolish beyond hope to send a middle-aged former madwoman running down the roads of Chalion to fetch up here, and for what? Failed saint, failed sorceress, failed royina, wife, mother, daughter, failed . . . well, lover was not a role she'd ever attempted. Less even than failure, in her hierarchy of woe. At first, upon discovering Lord Arhys's relation to dy Lutez, she'd guessed this for a tribunal on the gods' parts, for her old, cold murder and sin confessed to dy Cabon back in Casilchas. Feared that she was slated to be dragged though all that stale guilt yet again:
Fetch a bucket of water for the drowning woman!

But now ... it seemed her self-involved expectations were mockingly thwarted. Not herself, but another, was the center of the god's attentions. Her lips puffed on a bitter laugh. And she was merely being . . . what? Tempted to meddle?

Tempted, certainly. The Bastard had plainly primed her with that salacious kiss of His. His questing tongue had sent a most cryptic message, but that part of it she had received clearly, body and mind.

What point, to wake that sleeping appetite here, now? What point ever? No dishes had been served up in tiny, backwater Valenda worth salivating over, even if the curse had not paralyzed her as much below the waist as above it. She was hardly to be faulted for failing her feminine duty to fall in love
there.
She tried to imagine dy Ferrej, or any other gentleman of the Provincara's entourage, as an object of desire, and snorted.
Just as well.
Anyway, a modest lady always kept her eyes downcast. She had been taught that rule by age eleven.

Work
, the Bastard had said.

Not
dalliance
.

But what work? Healing? Enticing thought. But if so it was not, it appeared, to be effected with a simple kiss. Perhaps she'd just missed something on her first try, something obvious. Or subtle. Or profound.

Or obscene?
Though she had little heart for a second attempt. She briefly wished the god had been more explicit, then took back the wish as ill phrased.

But as disastrous as the situation already was, could even
she
make it worse? Perhaps she was here on the same principle as young physicians set to practice their experiments and new potions on the hopeless cases. So that no blame attached to their—usually inevitable-failures.
The dying, they do have at Porifors.
A little practice piece, this tightly contained domestic tragedy. Two brothers, a barren wife, one castle . . . perhaps it was not beyond her scope. Not like the future of a royacy, or the fate of the world. Not like the first time the gods had conscripted her into their service.

But why send
me
in answer to a prayer, when you know perfectly well I can't do a thing without
You?

It wasn't too hard to follow the logic of
that
one to its inevitable conclusion, either.

Unless I open to You, You cannot lift a leaf. Unless You pour into me,
I
cannot do . . . what?

Whether a sally port was a passage or a barrier depended not on the materials of which it was made, but on its position. The free will of the door, as it were. All doors opened in both directions. She could not open the gate of herself a crack and peek out, and expect to still hold the fortress.

But I cannot see . . .

She cursed the gods methodically, in five couplets, in ferocious parody of an old childhood bedtime prayer, rolled over, and wrapped her pillow over her head.
This isn't defiance. This is shuffling.

*     *     *

IF ANY GOD DABBLED IN HER DREAMS, ISTA DID NOT REMEMBER IT when her eyes opened in the night. But regardless of the phantasms that troubled the mind, the body still had to piss. She sighed, poked her feet out of bed, and went to open the heavy wooden shutter to let in a little light. Near midnight, she guessed, by the misshapen moon's silver sheen. Well past the full, now, but the night was chill and clear. She rummaged under the bed for her chamber pot.

Finished, she eased the lid back on with a clink, frowned at how loud the noise seemed in the stillness, and pushed the pot back out of the way again. She returned to the window, intending to bar the shutters once more.

A shuffling of slippered feet sounded in the courtyard below, then scuffed quickly up the stairs. Ista held her breath, peering between the spirals of iron. Catti again, all soft, shimmering silks, flowing over her body like water as she moved in the moonlight. One would think the cursed girl would get cold.

She certainly wasn't carrying a pitcher of goat's milk this time. She wasn't even carrying a candle. Whether she clutched some smaller, more perilous vial close to her chest, or merely held her light robe closed, Ista could not tell.

She eased Lord Illvin's door open in silence and slid within.

Ista stood still at her window, staring into the dark, hands wrapped around the cold iron foliage.

All right. You win. I can't stand this any longer.

Teeth grinding, Ista sorted through her clothes presently hung on the row of wall pegs, drew down the black silk robe, and shrugged it on over her pale nightdress. She didn't wish to risk waking Liss by blundering in the dark through the outer chamber to the door. Did her window even open? She wasn't sure the iron rod holding the grating closed would move out of its stone groove at first, but it came up with a tug. The grating pushed outward. She hoisted her hips up to the sill and swung her legs out.

Her bare feet made less noise on the boards of the gallery than Catti's slippers had. As no orange glow had begun in the dark chamber opposite, Ista was unsurprised to find the inner shutters of Illvin's window open to the moonlight, too. But from Ista's vantage, easing up to the edge of the sinuous iron vines that guarded the opening, Catti was scarcely more than a dark shape moving among darker shapes, a scuff, a breath, the squeak of a floorboard softer than a mouse's cry.

The spot on Ista's forehead ached like a day-old scalding.

I can't see a benighted thing. I want to see.

Inside the room, fabric rustled.

Ista swallowed, or tried to. And prayed, Ista-fashion: or made a prayer of rage, as some claimed to do of song or the work of their hands. So long as it was from the heart, the divines promised, the gods would hear. Ista's heart boiled over.

I have denied my eyes, both inner and outer. I am not child, or virgin, or modest wife, fearing to offend. No one owns my eyes now but me. If I have not the stomach by now to look upon any sight in the world, good or evil, beautiful or vile, when shall I? It is far too late for innocence. My only hope is the much more painful consolation of wisdom. Which can grow out of knowledge alone.

Give me my true eyes. I want to see. I have to know.

Lord Bastard. Cursed be Your name.

Open my eyes.

The pain on her forehead flared, then eased.

She saw a couple of the old ghosts, first, hovering in air: not curiously, for no spirits so faded and cold could hold so coherent an emotion, but drawn as moths to a light. Catti's hand, then, impatiently swishing through the air, driving them off as one might brush away annoying insects.

She sees them, too.

Ista set aside the implications of this for later reflection as her vision began to fill with that milky fire she had seen in her dream. Illvin was the source of it, a flickering incandescence that ran the length of his body like spilled oil ignited by a brand. Catti was much darker,

solider, but the details of her face, body, hands, slowly took shape and certainty. She was standing by the far side of Illvin's bed, and the rope of white fire was running out through her twisting fingers. Ista turned her head just enough to follow it, out the door, crossing the court. Without question, its liquid movement was away, not toward, the supine figure in the bed.

He was dressed again in the practical undyed linen robe, though his hair was still neatly braided. Catti reached down, plucked free the knot of the belt, and laid each half open, from shoulder to ankle. He was naked beneath except for the pale white strip of a bandage encircling his chest just below the heart, the hidden well from which that pale fire gushed and drained.

Catti's face was chill, still, nearly expressionless. She reached down to touch the bandage. The white light seemed to wind around her dark fingers like wool.

Of one thing Ista was certain: Cattilara was not the gate for any god. God light, in all its hues, was unmistakable to the inner eye. And Ista knew only one other root for such sorceries.

So where is the demon?
Ista had not felt its malign presence before; what she had mainly felt in Cattilara's company was irritation. Enough to mask that deeper unease? Not entirely, it seemed in retrospect, even if Ista had misperceived her recurring clotted tension around the marchess as base envy.
Partly misperceived,
she corrected with grim honesty. Ista marshaled all the clarity of vision she could, widening her inner eye to take in all the living light that rippled in unhappy disorder around the room.

Not light: darkness, shadow. Floating under Cattilara's breastbone, a tight, dark violet knot, turned in on itself. Hiding? If so, not quite successfully, like a cat in a sack that had forgotten to pull in its tail.

But which was the possessor, which the possessed? The term
sorcerer
applied, confusingly, to both spiritual states; for all that the divines claimed they were theologically distinct, from the outside there was little practical way to tell them apart.

I can tell, it seems. But then, I'm looking from the other side.
Cattilara rode this demon, not the other way around; it was her will that prevailed here, her soul that was ascendant in that lovely body. For the moment.

Cattilara ran one fingernail down Lord Illvin's torso from the hollow of his throat to his navel, and beyond. The fire seemed to intensify in its trail, divert downward as if flowing through a new channel.

She eased herself onto the bed beside him, leaned in, and began to methodically caress his body, from the shoulders downward, from the ankles upward, recentering the fountain of light over his groin. Her caresses grew more explicit. The gray eyelids never flickered, but other parts of Illvin's body began to respond to this focusing of attention. Alive he was on one level, flesh if not mind. Visibly.

Are they lovers, then?
Ista's brows knotted. For all the efficient expertise, that was the most unloving touch Ista had ever seen. It sought to stimulate, not gratify, and took no satisfaction for itself. If
her
hands had the privilege of tracing that ivory skin over whipcord muscle, that darker velvet sensitivity, they would not be rough, abrupt, clawed with tension.
Her
palms would be open, drinking delight. That is ... if she ever had the courage to touch anyone. The passion here was anger, not lust.
Lord Bastard, your blessings are being wasted in that bed.

Catti was whispering. "Yes. That's right. Come on." The busy fingers worked. "It's not fair. Not fair. Your seed is thick, and yet my lord's has turned to water. What need have you for it? What need have you for anything?" The hands slowed again. Her eyes glittered, and her voice dropped still further. "We could ride
him,
you know. No one would ever know. Get a child all the same. It would be half Arhys's at least. Do it now, while there's still time." Had that dark knot beneath her breastbone fluttered?

A little silence, then her voice hissed. "
I don't want second-best.
He never liked me anyway. All his stupid jokes I could never get. There is no man for me but Arhys. There will never be any man for me but Arhys. Always and forever."