Wedding (18 page)

Oh,
I moaned again.
What’s wrong
now?
My lower body bucked and squirmed, trying to reconnect
with his hand that stayed just out of reach.

You must ask politely,
he said.

It was not all his idea. He was getting it
from me, discovering a mutual thrill in pushing the boundaries of
his dangerous character.

Please, Dominic,
I said.
Please do
that some more.

Are you sure?
he said, teasing,
pausing to struggle out of his boots and open his breeches.

Yes, please, Dominic. Please.
I was
near tears, both laughing and crying. Never had I known such
excitement, never had I had to beg a man to go faster instead of
slower.

We had found our way, by trial and error,
mostly error, but we had found it. In full communion, Dominic still
holding me in his strong grip of
crypta
, I had to request
each next step. If I didn’t beg he would cease his lovemaking
altogether and watch me writhing spread-eagled on the bed, gasping
and sighing.
You must ask,
he would say, implacable.

As the game escalated, he dictated more of
the terms: I must request things in the right order; I must use
formal speech. Every time I reached the edge of climax he would
find another reason to withdraw, leaving me captive and untouched
for longer stretches to plead and moan. It brought us down before
ascending the next peak, extended the delicious torment. He would
not allow the final release for either of us until I recited some
mysterious formula, but he would not tell me what it was.

I offered to take him in my mouth since he
refused to take me below. “Please, Dominic-Leandro,” I said,
certain that speaking his full name, with the recognition of our
intimacy it implied, would spur him to action. “Please, my
Dominic-Leandro.”

My Amalie-Katrin.
Caught between
temptation and disapproval, he was unable to conceal the quickening
heartbeat and heavy breathing of his arousal. He had held himself
in control all this time from experiencing my pleasure, but he
could not contain his desire much longer.
No, my love,
he
answered my request.
That is not the way of an honorable man
with his wife. Acknowledge what I am to you, and relieve us
both.

My lord husband
. Thought or spoken,
these were the magic words;
please, my lord husband,
the
only phrase that satisfied him. It made him very happy to hear it,
and I soon learned it made me very happy to say it. Each time I
called him by that title, his gratification was visible in his face
and discernible in his touch. The spell did not lose its power with
repetition, instead bringing from him a more concentrated attention
with each utterance, until I was so close to orgasm I could not
produce the words with mouth or thoughts, and he had to pull them
from my mind half-formed.

When he entered me at last and brought us
both to climax, I screamed so loud I was sure people would think a
murder was being committed. But all around us, in the fortress’s
many rooms and corridors, people cried out their pleasure, and no
one heard us above the rest. And when he was inside me, thrusting
with the great force of his love, I could think only of our
connection that I hoped would never break, the rope of
crypta
that tied us, made me in truth his lady wife that he
called me in answer to each pleading request of my lord
husband.

W
e slept in light communion,
the foretaste of married life to come, Dominic’s body curled around
mine, a larger parenthesis enclosing a smaller one. He slept like a
cat, on the edge of wakefulness, his breathing soft and regular.
Dreams filtered out through his open mind, scenes from the recent
conflict—telepaths forming a cell around Eleonora, the nucleus in
the center; an army of men rushing toward us in ragged lines,
undisciplined but fierce and determined, armed with hammers and
pickaxes. Before the awful image of the Eris weapon appeared,
Dominic’s thoughts jumped away, to his memory of me in my
crypta
test. In his dream I stood naked before ’Graven
Assembly, not defiled by the Terran clothes of reality, fleshy and
proud like the goddesses on the wall hangings, using my prism for
the first time with supreme confidence. Dominic had seen a deeper
truth of my gift than I could have known then, confronted by so
many new concepts and surrounded by people who looked like
strangers but had turned out to be family—irritating and
frightening sometimes, but my own kind.

I woke in the dark to the unaccustomed
physical communion. Dominic was awake and alert in an instant at my
slight shift of position, always the soldier primed for action.
What is it?
He would not risk speaking aloud.
What’s the
matter?
His thoughts were as crisply formed as perfectly
enunciated words, not slurred in half-sleep. He was already looking
for his sword, hung neatly in its scabbard on a hook on the wall.
He reached with his left, that a couple of hours ago had supposedly
been useless.

I stared, visualizing to myself, making sure.
“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

He sighed, lay back down. “Weeks in the
field,” he said. “It’s a reflex.” His left hand grasped mine and
guided it to his standing cock.
I’m glad you woke me,
beloved
, he thought to me,
since it seems I was up
.

I pulled my hand away. “You’re despicable.” I
sat up, dizzy and disoriented in the middle of the night. “I’m
going back to my own room.”

“Amalie!” Dominic spoke aloud. “What is it
now?”

I resented having to tell him. “That was a
very good act you put on, you and Stefan. Not using your arm,
making us help you with the dancing, letting him cut your meat at
dinner. I believed it, I really did. You must have had a lot of
laughs, you two, planning it all, seeing what you could get a silly
woman to believe.” I sat on the edge of the bed, felt with my feet
for my sandals and retrieved my prism-handled dagger, after the
disastrous days in the travelers’ hut never out of reach, from the
bedside table. My gown and the sheath of underwear were buried
somewhere in the bedclothes. Naked but for shoes and weapon, I
stood up and edged to the door.

Dominic was ahead of me, moving so quickly he
was between me and the door before I had taken two steps. As we
confronted each other face to chest it was like the time I had
“visited” him in the ’Graven Military Academy barracks, although we
were not imagining this, were not creating the physical details
with our minds for our bodies to interpret as substance. Solid
reality was all around us: the heavy wood of the door at Dominic’s
back, the cold night air raising the hairs on my naked skin and the
insistent presence of his erection that rose in front of him,
pointing at me like a triumphant, mocking demonstration of his
duplicity.

“Let me go, Dominic,” I said. “I’ll spend the
rest of the night in my own room, and in the morning I’ll arrange
to travel back to the city.”

Dominic went limp in an instant. “What have I
done? I thought– when you broke my hold and refastened it– I
thought you enjoyed it.” He searched his memories of a couple of
hours ago. “By all the gods, Amalie, I know you did. And what is so
terrible about that, that we pleased each other?”

I touched the fingers of my left hand to
Dominic’s miraculously healed arm. “You tricked me,” I said. “I
would have been willing to make love if you’d just
talked
to
me. But that’s too simple. You had to play on my sympathies, make
me sorry for you.”

At my touch, Dominic looked down at his own
left hand. He seemed to notice it for the first time since
awakening, held it up in front of his face, wiggling the fingers.
“It worked!” he said, as if proving a heretical theory he had held
for years, scorned by the orthodox. He laughed deep in his chest.
“I knew it would. So did my sister, although it nearly killed her
to admit it. None of them wanted to believe it, but they saw, when
I came home. Even Ranulf changed his mind.” He was making no sense,
but then none of this did.

Applying the technical training I had learned
at La Sapienza while ignoring the ethical lessons, I unsheathed my
dagger, angled the faint light and the heat of the dying fire into
my eyes, creating a force that bumped Dominic aside like blowing an
insect off a window screen. “Good night,” I said. “Or good morning.
It’s been real. See you in my dreams.” I opened the door and
stepped out.

It was dark and silent in the corridor. the
torches in the sconces burned down to flickering nubs. I stood for
a moment getting my bearings. Another door opened farther along in
the direction I must go and a man wearing only breeches slipped out
of the bathroom, not bothering to button. He looked up at my
involuntary squeak of dismay, grinned in delight at the sight of a
naked woman—two for the price of one on Midsummer—and made a run
for me.

Dominic’s arm pulled me back inside just in
time to slam the door in the man’s face. “Must I spend our entire
married life rescuing you from the consequences of your bad
temper?” he said. His voice lowered to a seductive purr. “I shall
guard you like a captive bride from the southern realms. You will
only be allowed outside wearing a burqa, and surrounded by an
entire squadron of Aranyi guards—and only once a year,
if
you ask me nicely the way you did tonight.” He leaned against me
where I stood, back to the door, hemmed me in with an arm on either
side, and kissed me—not the light, dainty sips of our earlier game,
but the deep tongue-thrusting grind that is a mimic of and prelude
to sex. If I had had any idea of escape, of indignant rejection,
the communion that this produced blasted it away.

For what seemed like hours, Dominic pushed
himself against me, his mouth on mine the focal point of our
connection, but every part of me somehow touching him, until there
were no separate individuals, only this one being that was the
essence of our unique communion.
My love
, he, I—we—thought.
Beloved. Let us never be divided again.
My gift was still
active, and when I flung my arms around Dominic’s neck in response
to this dual plea, the heat from the prism made his head jerk up
with a roar of pain.

“Darkness and damnation!” he shouted. “Put
that away, Amalie. Just sheathe the dagger and don’t say another
word.” He watched while I obeyed, then lifted me in his arms, the
right arm bearing most of the weight, laid me down on the bed, and
laid me. Ordinary, straightforward fucking, as in the travelers’
hut, with one crucial difference: we were in communion, with
nothing between us but love.

Our bodies came together in the simplest
configuration, me on my back, legs around his waist, Dominic
rampant above me like a heraldic lion. Arching his supple spine, he
bent his head for the occasional kiss. If it was awkward or
difficult with the difference in height, it did not seem so to us;
we arranged ourselves naturally, like the formation of a dance.

It was what we had yearned for all the time I
was in La Sapienza, what we had been waiting for since our first
meeting. We could touch and taste, see and hear, and our minds,
spared the labor of imagination, were free simply to savor the
experience. Conscious of the other’s physical responses and
conscious of each other’s awareness, it was a doubled, perhaps
quadrupled pleasure of love and sexual communion. As I clenched my
muscles around him, and as he spent himself in me, we experienced
the fullness and the release from the inside and the outside,
knowing his and my sensations simultaneously in an infinite,
reflecting-mirror progression.

Our thoughts commingled with less effort than
our bodies. I shared his memory of the burning from the Eris
weapon, relived the moment of wounding, but was spared this time,
through Dominic’s love, from the full force of the pain. While he
held me and thrust into me, then sank down beside me, pulling me up
for an embrace in the sighing aftermath of love, I saw the truth I
had denied: that our communion was exceptional; that Dominic’s
dangerous experiment had worked; that he had survived the searing
touch of the weapon because of my instantaneous communion with him
as it happened. I had taken part of the burden on myself,
preserving his life and his flesh. We had divided the pain and the
damage, and when he came home, if we could unite, joining minds and
bodies, both, in the way of lovers, we would make him, and me,
whole again.

“You will not have to wait long, beloved,” he
said, half asleep, “for me to repay you for you great kindness. It
is what I will do for you when our daughter is born. I will make it
as easy for you as I can.”

“But why did you have to do it in the first
place?” I asked. “Why not just leave the weapon alone, after what
it did to us?”

Dominic raised himself on one elbow, looking
down at my face to be certain my question was serious.
After
what it did to us
, he repeated.
You’ve answered your own
question. What kind of man would let anything or anybody do that to
us and then just leave it alone?

In our communion, I began to learn the nature
of men like Dominic, which women do not always appreciate: How a
man must seek revenge, not only against human enemies, but against
everything that threatens him. How his confidence depends on
winning, on control. Some people are capable of admitting defeat
and walking away, as I could with Eris, but a man like Dominic will
always hold the grudge. In my love for him, I proved the old
saying:
To understand all is to forgive all
. With him, as I
had seen from the start, there is nothing to forgive, only complete
understanding. I have come to admire him for what he did, for his
courage to take in his hand the enemy that had wounded us both,
knowing what it could do—terrified, but doing it for honor’s sake
and for our future happiness.