The Shattered Chain (35 page)

She drew the loop of ribbon into a tight coil around her wrists, began to coil the loose end around her other arm. She said, “Margali, did you want a child at all? Why did you not have one? You are not barren, are you,
breda?”

“I did not want a child at once,” Magda said. “We were traveling together; I did not want anything to separate us.” It had been a bitter quarrel; she looked away from Jaelle, unwilling even now to relive that painful moment.

Jaelle reached out to touch her hand lightly, saying, “I did not mean to pry.”

Magda shook her head. “Afterward, when we agreed to part, I was glad I had no child, to remind me always. …”
But would we have separated, then?
The touch of Jaelle’s hand suddenly heightened the awareness, the contact, and she found herself thinking,
Is she pregnant? Does she think she is, does she want to be?
But all she sensed from the touch of Jaelle’s fingertips was … loneliness, fear.
I thought Jaelle was so happy.

Magda knew that from this touch she could use her awakened ESP—what Rohana had called
laran
—to find out if Jaelle were pregnant. The thought suddenly frightened her. She did not want to pry that way, to use this new skill to intrude. She let go of Jaelle’s hand as if the narrow fingers had burned her, and found her hand caught in the ribbon Jaelle had been winding and unwinding about her wrists. Caught off guard, she demanded, “What in the world are you
doing
with that thing?”

Jaelle stared down at it, in sudden shock. She wrenched it loose, and flung the ribbon across the room, with a look of horror and loathing. As if, Magda thought, she had found a poisonous snake coiling about her wrists!

“Jaelle! What’s wrong, sister?” The affectionate term came readily to her tongue now; but Jaelle’s moment of vulnerability had vanished again behind a barricade of flippancy.

She said, “Old habits! A puppy you don’t housebreak almost before his eyes are open will still be wetting the floor when he’s an old dog. I’ve had this habit since I was a little girl; Kindra told me that it was just a nervous habit, and that I’d outgrow it. But I haven’t, see?”

Magda knew, there was more to it than that, but she knew she could not ask questions; knew it with that indefinable inner knowledge she was beginning to trust. Instead she asked something she knew to be safer.

“Jaelle, are you pregnant?”

Jaelle’s green eyes met hers, just a flash, and then looked away. She said, and sounded almost desolate, “I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.” Quickly she jumped off the windowseat, barricading herself again. “Come on, let’s find one of those silly women of Rohana’s and ask her if she can mend your outfit, and make her happy by thinking she is superior to a Free Amazon!”

Watching the girl as she bundled Magda’s torn traveling clothes together, Magda thought,
She’s so young and vulnerable! If Peter breaks her heart, I think I’ll want to kill him!

What was going to happen to Jaelle? For that matter—if this involvement was serious and lasting, as Magda was beginning to guess—what would happen to Peter? Could he really sacrifice his career for a woman? And for one who was not, by oath, even free to marry?

It was easy to talk about the inevitability of liaisons, love affairs, even marriages between members of separate peoples on Empire worlds. Magda had thought of them as inevitable statistics, before this. But it was different—completely different—when you knew the people involved, and guessed what they meant in purely human and personal terms. No statistics could give you even a clue to that.

Is this my fault, too? By refusing Peter, did I bring this on both of them?

Chapter

FIFTEEN

The winter drew on; the snow lay deep over Ardais. To Jaelle this was a precious interlude, a time separated from anything else in her life, before or after. For the first time since her thirteenth year, she lived surrounded by ordinary women; she wore women’s clothes, shared in the life of the household, and spent her days with women who did not live by the terms of renunciation and freedom of the Amazon oath.

She had tasted this life—but briefly, and unwillingly—when she was fifteen. Rohana had insisted that she must know the life she was to renounce, before she made that renunciation irrevocable.

But I was too young; I could not see it clearly.

And now it is too late. All the smiths in Zandru’s forges can’t mend a broken egg, or put a hatched chick back into the shell. I can never, never be one of them, not now.

I do not think I want to be. But I am not sure, not now. …

And there was the Terran, her lover. …

Like any young woman in the grip of her first serious love affair, it seemed to her that he filled her whole sky. The Guild-house and the life there seemed very far away. She knew this was only an interlude, that it must end, but she tried to live entirely in the present, neither remembering the past nor thinking ahead to the future, but simply savoring each moment as it passed.

But there were times when she woke in the night, held close in her lover’s arms, and realized that she no longer knew what she was doing, or who she was, or what lay ahead for either of them. None of the thousand uncertainties could be answered in words, or even asked; so she would turn to him in desperation, holding herself close to him, demanding the one thing she could be sure about, the one certainty they shared. She had ceased to be cautious. She no longer cared to conceal what was between them. She knew that sooner or later this would precipitate a crisis, but in some indefinable way she felt that even this would be a relief from the terrible uncertainty.

And then, one night, when she woke, she heard around the towers the soft dripping of rain and running of melting snow, and knew that the spring-thaw had begun. Now reality would close again over their enchanted isolation; and whether anything would remain, she could not even guess. She dared not even weep, for fear of waking him. She knew he would have only one comfort to offer, and now even that was no comfort at all, before the knowledge of the inevitable.

When I took the Amazon oath, I believed I had made it impossible for any man to enslave me. Yet here I lie, bound in chains of my own making! What can I do? Oh, merciful Goddess, what shall I do?

By the time the sun rose, red and dripping behind the fog bank, she had fought her way to calm, and was able to discuss their impending departure serenely. “I must cut my hair; it has grown too long here.”

Peter came and passed his hand through the silky strands, long enough now to touch her shoulder blades. “Must you? It is so lovely.”

“Nothing in the oath binds me to it,” she admitted. “It is custom, no more; to show, when we work with men, that we do not seek to entice them with feminine wiles.”

He put his arms around her, and held her close. “Must we part, then, my precious? I know you are pledged not to marry, but—is there no way, no way at all that you can remain with me? I cannot bear to let you go. Do you truly want to leave me so soon?”

She said, through the pounding of her heart, “I can remain with you for a time as freemate, if you wish.”

“Jaelle, beloved, do you have to ask if I wish it?” He held her so tightly that he hurt her, but she almost welcomed the pain.

She thought sadly,
Have I come to this?

“Don’t cut your hair,” he begged, caressing the locks at the nape of her neck, and she smiled and sighed.

“I will not.”

He did not know, and Jaelle would not tell him, that Free Amazons who elected to remain for a time as freemate to a lover did not cut their hair; by custom, close-cropped hair was a sign among them of commitment to solitude.

She was dressed and ready before him. Since they made a point of coming downstairs separately, she started down to the small breakfast room. The sun, flooding in brilliantly through the stone-arched windows, would at any other time have given her pleasure, after so many dark days. Now it only meant the end of an interlude that could never come again. She might remain with Peter, but never again in such complete isolation, mutual self-absorption; the outside world would intrude, with other work, other commitments, and she grieved for the end of their brief honeymoon.

A hand on her wrist detained her; at a quick glance she thought that Peter had hurried after her, and smiled, but the smile slid off as she realized that the hand had six fingers, and simultaneously she recognized the voice of her cousin Kyril.
So alike, so different. …

“Alone,
chiya?
Have you quarreled with your commoner lover? I should make a reasonable substitute to console you, should I not? Or did you turn to him because you so much regretted refusing me, when we were younger?”

She picked his hand off her arm as she would have removed a crawling insect. She said, “Cousin, we will all be leaving here very soon. For Rohana’s sake, let us try to remain friends, for this short time. I am sorry for all our quarrels when we were not much more than children; don’t torment me by bringing them up now that we are grown.”

Kyril pulled her against him, in a mockery of a kinsman’s embrace, and laid his cheek roughly against hers. “Nothing is farther from my mind than quarreling with you now, Jaelle.”

Shocked and angry, she removed herself from his arms. She said, almost in entreaty, “This is not worthy of you, Kyril. I am your kinswoman and your mother’s guest. Don’t force me to be rude to you!”

“And is
your
behavior so worthy?” he demanded, “when you put our whole family to shame with this bastard from nowhere?”

Jaelle struggled to keep her composure. “If he is truly a bastard of Ardais,” she said, “then the shame is in the misbehavior of his parents, and no fault to him. You were born Comyn, and legitimate, through no virtue in yourself. And as for
my
behavior—for the last time, Kyril, I owe
you
no account of my actions, nor any man living!”

He gripped her by the arms, his fingers digging cruelly into the soft flesh there. Through the touch her untrained
laran
gift—which she could never control but which, in deep emotion, thrust itself on her involuntarily—made her aware of his frustration and anger, and desire. He wanted her, crudely, sexually, and in a kind of intense, man-to-woman hostility that she had never known since—incredulously, she identified it as what she had sometimes sensed, without understanding, between her father and his women. It turned her physically sick; she thrust him away without trying to conceal her disgust. Her voice was shaking.

“Kyril, I do not want to hurt you under your mother’s roof, where I am a guest. But you have known since we were fifteen years old that no Free Amazon trained in self-defense can be—can be raped. Don’t put your hands on me again, Kyril, or—or I will have to prove it to you again, as I did then.”

She realized, in shame and self-disgust, that she was crying.

When—we—were both fifteen years old, Kyril probably meant no real harm; it was a game he was playing, a game of adolescent pride: a little kissing and fondling, just to prove himself a man and my master. But I would not play that game with him then, and I wounded his pride more than he could endure. And I made him an enemy, and he is still my enemy.

“You bastard bitch,” he flung at her, and his face was very ugly; the more terrifying because it seemed such a cruel caricature of the face of her lover. “By what right do you play the whore with this stranger, and then turn away from my touch like any chaste lady? By what right do you refuse me what you so freely give him?”

“You
dare
talk of rights?” Her tears gave way to flaming anger. “Rights? I
choose
my lovers, Kyril—and by what right, then, do you complain that I have not chosen you? I would not have you when you were an arrogant boy of fifteen bullying his mother’s fosterling, and I will not have you now when you have grown into”—she caught back the crude obscenity on her tongue—”into her unworthy son!” She turned her back on him, hurrying toward the breakfast room, knowing that he would never dare make this kind of scene before dom Gabriel. She was not overly fond of Rohana’s husband, but she knew him for an upright man who would tolerate no offenses toward a woman and a guest at his own table.