Wedding (11 page)

It was another week before it hit me that I
had committed myself to Berend, as I had to Katrina and Magali, as
I had to everyone at Aranyi. Except to the one person who made it
possible. To Dominic. We did not know if we could love each other
fully, as husband and wife, or if Eris’s madness had ruined things
between us forever. We did not know if ’Graven Assembly would allow
us even to call each other husband and wife. Dominic may have
thought he had asked me to marry him by giving me the glass comb,
but I had never accepted what I had not known was being offered. As
far as I knew, I had never been asked.

When Dominic comes home,
I told
myself,
we will work it out.
Each night I thought joyfully,
When Dominic comes home
.

D
ominic had been gone a
month before it happened. The
crypta
war had ended with
Eris’s destruction. As the weapon was shattered I had known the
communal relief experienced by every gifted person: the oppressive
weight lifted from the consciousness, the sense of menace gone.
Through my communion with Dominic I experienced something of the
conventional battle of swords and close combat that followed, his
exultation at the release of tension and coiled energy that soon
soured with the carnage he could not avoid. But he had prevailed
easily, had come through it unscathed in body if more withdrawn in
spirit.

Not until all this was over did I feel it:
that I held the force of the lightning goddess in my hand, that I
wrestled her for control and was overpowered. I woke screaming from
the after-dinner nap, my entire left arm in agony. Internal flames
shot through me, traveling up the serpentine trails of the nerves
from fingers to palm to wrist and beyond, searing the fleshly
channels to the brain.
Help me!
I cried.
Oh gods, help
me!
I sat up, holding my arm out in front of me as the fire
consumed it from the inside, the flesh unmarked at first, then
slowly charring, pieces of skin detaching and curling at the edges
like burning paper.

My sword hand
, I thought.
It will
be difficult even to kill myself now
.

I had never used a sword. It was Dominic who
had the thought, Dominic whose hand and arm were destroyed, Dominic
whose agony and dark misery had brought me into communion with him.
My own hand and arm were intact, although the pain crippled me for
weeks until I learned to manage it, hiding it at first by saying I
was tired, eventually discovering by experimentation how to turn
down the physical communion between Dominic and me, just enough so
I could sleep at night and eat.

My love
, I thought to Dominic.
Show
me where you are and I will come to you
.

No
,
Lady Amalie
, a voice came
to me, cool and authoritative. The witch, Naomi.
I will go to
him. I am the healer for Aranyi.

But neither one of us was permitted to go to
him. Eleonora, and Josh, and Viceroy Zichmni himself sent word to
us: Dominic was in no danger; we were not to make more of this than
it warranted, were not to call attention to Dominic’s disability.
It would only revive the rebels’ cause. To be defeated, yet to have
incapacitated their enemies’ greatest warrior, would give them the
status of martyrs and holy terrorists.

I could not go to him, but nothing would keep
us from empathetic communion. Nothing but Dominic himself. At first
I attributed the mental block to the great love he bore me, that
wished to shield me from his suffering even at the cost of denying
himself comfort. As I tried repeatedly over the next couple of days
to resume our mental connection, and found myself baffled by the
wall Dominic erected around himself, I was reminded of the barriers
I had encountered in him earlier, while I was at La Sapienza. It
was as if this wound were something shameful, like his failure to
become a seer or his abusive behavior as Commandant of ’Graven
Military Academy, and must be locked away from all examination,
even his own memory.

By Terran standards it was nonsensical. One
hand damaged. So what? It could be repaired or replaced, if not as
good as before, certainly good enough for life on Terra. But we
were not on Terra, and Dominic was ’Graven. If
crypta
marks
the man as ’Graven, skill with the sword makes him a man. Not all
’Graven are equally gifted; not all men attain Dominic’s level of
swordsmanship. By some combination of both skills, ’Graven men
maintain their positions in the ruling class. Sword and prism are
used with the same hand. With his left arm useless, Dominic could
wield neither effectively, the two tools from which all his status
derived.

Dominic was more than a swordsman, more than
just a physical being, I argued to myself, since Dominic would not
let me through to him. He was a leader in ’Graven Assembly, a
magistrate at Aranyi. He had proved himself years ago, had no need
to be constantly on guard against the challenges of lesser men. His
crypta
was unaffected; only the active use of the prism
would have to be curtailed. He could live very well without the use
of his sword hand, except that he would have to be a careful,
deferential man, who had always been a commander, with a lordly
indifference to the opinions of others.

I hesitated to offer consolation that would
be demeaning and humiliating. What could I say? That everything
that makes you a man is gone, but you’ll have me. That your life is
ruined, but you have a child coming who will live after you. I
could hear his deep voice in my mind, answering as I would in his
place:
Bullshit. Help me to die, and free us both.

What would I do if he asked me that? If there
was no way to restore the full use of his arm and hand, the kindest
thing might be to help him end his life. But I didn’t think I was
capable of doing that. And then I would have to die, too. I
couldn’t live without him—I had learned this much on that first
terrible morning in the travelers’ shelter.
The child
, I
thought. I couldn’t, wouldn’t kill myself if it meant killing her.
And I wouldn’t kill myself later and leave her motherless and
fatherless.

I was drawn these days to the portrait
gallery, a long, airy room hung with more artwork than in all the
rest of the castle, which had few decorations, mostly woven wall
hangings. Generations of Aranyi were immortalized here in paint on
canvas. Now I studied Dominic’s only likeness, an amazing picture
of a young man I had never known and yet who seemed as familiar as
memory. Dominic at twenty was softer, more diffident looking than
his mature self. He wore his new officer’s uniform proudly, his
pale eyes gazing somewhere past the viewer’s into a future he
wasn’t quite ready to face. That future was here. What would he
make of it?

I had laughed at myself, falling in love with
Dominic all over again as I saw the wealth of his realm. Wouldn’t I
love him just as much if he were poor, if he had no property and no
name? And I had answered myself practically. The man I loved was
not Dominic-nobody from nowhere. He was Dominic-Leandro, Margrave
Aranyi, and our communion was based on that identity. But if he
lost it all, by misfortune or treachery, wouldn’t I still love him?
Of course. In this case he had lost, not his land or his title, but
himself.
What will Dominic do?
I wondered.
And what was I
to do?

Nothing
, the answer came from Eleonora
and Josh and even from Naomi.
Wait until he is home
.

Not long afterwards, Eleonora returned,
escorted by a few Aranyi troops. She was exhausted, worry about
Dominic giving her a haggard look, a crack in the icy composure,
but with still a trace of the sibyl’s power, and joy in her work.
Telepaths from all the ’Graven Realms had worked together to smash
the Eris weapon beyond salvage; Eleonora herself had been the
nucleus of the large cell they had formed. “This time it’s truly
finished,” she told me. Dominic, Josh and the other ’Graven lords
with regular troops had finished off the insurrection, mopping up
the rebels’ allies, the smiths and miners who had not
surrendered.

“It’s not a pretty sight, seeing ’Graven
soldiers mowing down civilians armed only with hammers and
cudgels,” Eleonora said when she was rested and willing to talk.
Some of the glow went out of her face. “But once the rebels started
this, it was unavoidable.”

She would not bring up Dominic’s injury, nor
did I have any hope of getting information from her that she was
unwilling to share. “What happened?” I asked. “How come Dominic was
injured after the fighting was over? And if the Eris weapon was
destroyed, how was it able to hurt Dominic at all?”

Eleonora’s third eyelids came down, forming a
total blockade of expression and thoughts. “Please, Amalie,” she
said. “Dominic must be the one to explain, if he wishes.” She added
that Dominic would be busy for a few more weeks, while he and the
other lords worked out a political settlement.

He was active, at least, working, not sunk in
despair as I had feared. It occurred to me how ignorant of politics
I was, how this whole crisis had developed, threatening everything
that mattered to me, and I understood nothing, had made no effort
to find out. “Who were those rebels?” I asked Eleonora. “Why would
they do something so dangerous?”

“You should know,” she said with a brittle
laugh. “They’re your people. Terrans.”

I saw I would get no answers from her, and
with no holonet news, no computer networks to turn to, I had no
choice but to lurk in her mind if I could. I disliked lurking in
general: letting my thoughts drift slowly, quietly, in the
direction of the other’s mind, waiting for the moment, when sleep
is imminent, or while she is reading, that I could penetrate
without being discovered and pick up what was near the surface or
not shielded. Eleonora’s power was frightening—like Dominic’s, but
disciplined by thirty years as a sibyl, and not softened by
love—and so I learned little.

It was a class war, I think, led more by
Terran sympathizers than real Terrans, people who wanted to open
the Protected World of Eclipsis to trade and settlement. Dominic’s
system, the rule of ’Graven, was reviled on Terra as paternalistic
and overbearing, keeping the people in poverty and ignorance under
a pretense of benevolent despotism. The rebels had assimilated the
Terran outlook just far enough to advocate the overthrow of the
landowning ’Graven leadership in favor of the theoretical equality
of the market economy. In their ignorance of the reality of the
consumer society, they welcomed everything that Dominic hated and
feared: industry and credit, stocks and investing, all based on
selling Terra’s products and services, the new “necessities” to
satisfy previously unknown needs that would be invented and
publicized through relentless advertising.

They would replace one hierarchy with
another, one with no place for the losers in the new competition of
supposedly equal opportunity, with no socialism to insure
protection for those with bad luck or bad genes. But I am no
politician and no historian. I knew only what I had seen of the
Terran world by living in it, and what I was seeing now of the
’Graven system.

I had made my decision months ago in ’Graven
Assembly, when I had burned my Terran identification, thrown in my
lot with Dominic and his peers. Back then, all I had wanted was not
to endanger his world; I had guessed that the ’Graven lord, like
any rare species, was threatened most by loss of habitat. These
rebels, whether right or wrong in the abstract, were death for
Dominic, and my choice, as I had told him in my apartment, could
only be personal, not political. My sympathies lay all with
Dominic, with his cause and his interests, as they were mine now. I
was becoming Lady Amalie, if not ’Gravina Aranyi, and the real
communion with Dominic, and the
crypta
that had created it,
made his way of life not an option but a condition of my
existence.

After her resentful comments about the
rebels, due more to her concern for Dominic than her dislike of me,
Eleonora’s manner changed, becoming friendlier, almost accepting.
There were times when I suspected she sensed my sympathetic pain
from Dominic’s injury, although she would not embarrass either of
us by mentioning it. She noticed, but made no comment on the way
everybody referred to me as Lady Amalie, and she merely raised her
eyebrows when I excused myself after breakfast to go to my
bookkeeping with Berend. She took little interest in the running of
the house; my good relationship with Magali had not displaced
Eleonora from an intimacy that had never existed. She was as much a
guest as I was. Although she had been born here and spent her first
years as Lady Eleonora Aranyi, her career as sibyl had lasted twice
that long. For thirty years she had been only a visitor—welcome and
honored—but her home was in a seminary.

As Midsummer approached, the ’Graven
Coalition hurried to finish the political work of peacemaking, and
the household labored to provide a suitable homecoming for
triumphant heroes. It had been half a year since that unfortunate
Midwinter celebration at La Sapienza. Preparation had been going on
for days, activity I had not noticed in my worry over Dominic.
Musicians had arrived and extra food had been coming in by the
wagonload, all awaiting the return of the realm’s lord and the
greatest festival of the Eclipsian calendar.

I couldn’t imagine anything worse for
Dominic—wounded but hiding it, exhausted from pain and depressed at
loss of ability—forced to preside over a gargantuan meal and what I
could not help thinking of as an orgy the minute he arrived home.
Surely, it seemed to me, the exact day mattered little here, where
frequent minor holidays and seasonal observances break up the
monotony of the eight-day stretches that have no weekends. I
decided to consult Eleonora first. Couldn’t we put off the festival
for a day or two, I asked, give Dominic a rest and a chance to be
healed?