Wedding (2 page)

“The gods forgive me,” he said with a groan.
“I thought I had killed you.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Even if he had
lost his wits enough not to notice whether I was breathing or if my
heart still beat, the
crypta
must have shown him the truth.
If one of us died, the void, the gaping hole left in the survivor’s
mind would be excruciating. Until he experienced such desolation it
was a safe bet I was alive, regardless of injury.

“Dominic,” I said, “How could you think—” I
paused, at a loss. If the communion that should have told him I
lived, that I was merely in the deep sleep of exhaustion, was not
functioning, there was nothing I could say. It was the communion
that had brought us together, the communion that had made us
“lovers.” What were we without it? Enemies? Strangers?

While I considered, Dominic followed his own
logical progression. He held the blade of the sword and extended
the handle to me. “If you prefer, ’Gravina, take revenge yourself.
As you are alone here, with no man to act for you, it is your
right.” He spoke coldly, in the formal language of court and
’Graven Assembly, the appropriate style for the formula of
vengeance central to ’Graven life—and death.

I stared, once again confronting the gulf
between his world and mine that always reopened to part us each
time we thought we had bridged it. Dominic knew he had wronged me
and that, by his code of behavior, only revenge would make things
right. His death for my injuries. The equation seemed unbalanced.
He hadn’t killed me or raped me, but he was acting as if he had. In
his mind, I suppose, he thought he had, that he had tried, that the
intent was what mattered.

“And how will that help me?” I asked, my
voice scratchy with early-morning fatigue, unable to scream my
rage. I hadn’t been angry with him until hearing this idiotic idea.
“Leaving me here with your corpse, holding a bloody knife, for your
men to find.” I recoiled at the thought:
Dominic dead, his men
knowing only that this Terran woman had killed their lord…

Dominic shut his eyes in order to avoid
seeing me and the evidence of his mistreatment. “You are ’Graven,
gifted. My men would not forget themselves so far as to lay a
finger on you.” He pushed the sword toward me, lifting his head to
expose his throat. “Do it, Amalie,” he said, his voice breaking.
“It is your right.”
I no longer have any reason to live
, he
was thinking, despair unlocking the strong shield he had erected in
his mind.
And I would rather die at her hands than my own, my
last sensation her touch…

I backed away in horror.
If you insist on
killing yourself, kill me first
. My thoughts bubbled up naked
and honest from my exhausted mind, with no pretense of courage as
spoken words can provide. I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t
want to live without him. However unlikely the pairing, we were
still a couple, each essential to the other. Dominic was like a
second self, a part of me that had been missing all my life. Last
night hadn’t altered the uncomfortable fact that being truly
solitary was worse than anything else I could imagine.
Don’t
leave me alone, separate again, not now
, I begged Dominic in
thought.

Dominic appeared to reach full consciousness
at last, catching the emotions behind my thoughts rather than any
specific words. He looked at me—naked, bruised and cold in the
unheated hut, ready to fall in a faint except for the shivering
that kept me in motion—and he actually
saw
me for the first
time since the storm brought us here. With another groan, this time
of pity, he lifted me gently in his arms, took one of the
foul-smelling blankets from the bed and wrapped it around me. He
found the pot I needed and, with a lover’s care for his beloved,
supported me while I squatted to use it.

The touch brought on our communion as it
should have last night but had not. Dominic experienced the same
burning pain I felt when my traumatized flesh opened to relieve
myself. As the sensation ran through us in tandem, he began to
weep, the wracking, shoulder-shaking sobs of a man for whom the act
of crying is so rare that the forces of suppressed emotion tear him
apart like an earthquake when they break through.

After I finished with the pot I sat beside
him on the bench where he still wept, his head in his hands. The
return of communion was worth a thousand tears, I thought. I
stroked his hair, wiped his wet face with my fingers. “It’s not as
bad as all that,” I said. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

Dominic’s howl of laughter was like an
assault. “How can you say something so stupid? You claim to know
me, yet you deny this essential truth. You should have killed me. I
have proved them all right, your friends at La Sapienza, that smug
’Gravina Ertegun.” He let out another wail that I was sure would
bring his men on the run, Ranulf in the lead, to defend their lord.
But we remained alone.

Dominic gulped in air and let it out several
times. “Amalie,” he said when he was able to speak, “I swore to
myself, six months ago, that I would not lose you, that I would do
nothing to make you hate me, to frighten you off.” He looked into
my eyes, but resisted the communion, so that he saw nothing of my
feelings. “And the first night alone with you, my first chance to
show that I could keep my word, I destroyed any hope I had of
deserving your trust. Or your love.” He stared down at his own
naked body as if it had betrayed him.

Again I recalled the lectures that Edwige and
my coworkers had given me, worried at my choice of a lover. And I
considered Dominic’s “essential truth,” as I had resisted doing
fully up to now. For most telepaths, men and women alike, sexual
relations with an unsympathetic partner are at best unpleasant,
more often impossible. Nothing is more literally deflating for a
man than the hostile or merely uninterested thoughts, however
inadvertent, of a potential lover.

Dominic was different. He had developed a
perverse preference over the years, finding an unwilling boy more
exciting than a compliant one, even though, or perhaps because, he
was handsome and sophisticated enough to attract many boys, and
men, eager for his attention.

I thought of it as something Dominic did with
his own sex, not with women, and I had never feared for my safety.
Last night’s events had not changed my mind. We had not been in
communion; he could not have sensed my pain, any more than I seemed
to have experienced it myself while behaving with such abandon. If
he had not felt my discomfort, he could not have enjoyed it, could
not have been deliberately inflicting it in order to heighten his
own pleasure.

“You haven’t lost me or made me hate you,” I
said. He was blocking me again, so that I was obliged to speak. I
edged closer to him on the bench, opening the blanket, hoping to
wrap it around us both. The touch of skin would reactivate the
simple communion between us, enough to avoid these
misunderstandings.

Dominic turned his head and forced himself to
look at my body. “No?” he said. “Then you are more
accommodating
than you should be.” He used, derisively, the
word that had tormented me in La Sapienza, where I had been unable
to respond in the required way to the sexual needs of my
coworkers.

“Oh, fuck!” I said, as Dominic moved away
from me on the bench.

“No, thank you,” he said, “I think we’ve had
enough of that for one night.” He was being deliberately offensive,
creating a mental distance between us to reinforce the safety of
the physical one.

I was too tired to try to initiate communion
again. And furious. Whether at Dominic for his hopelessness, or
myself for my passivity, I wasn’t yet ready to decide. I had been
so certain that being with Dominic was the right choice for me. I
had made excuses for him from the start, when he had “visited” me
at La Sapienza, making love to me telepathically for everyone to
overhear. Now I was trying again, hoping to find an explanation, an
alternative to what I had suspected all along, that we had no
business being a couple. A nobleman and a swordsman, tall and
proud, lord of a vast territory with the power of life and death
over hundreds of people, a man whose usual choice of partner would
be someone of his own sex—what would he want with a small, soft
woman like me?

I had told myself that communion like ours
did not have to be sexual, and no doubt that was true, in theory.
But in our case it drew us together inexorably, against our
instincts. And here we were after our first night of physical
union, with me bruised and shaken, Dominic suicidal from
remorse.

This simply couldn’t be
, I thought.
It couldn’t turn out like this
. Tears came to my eyes. There
had been nothing but failure in my life: on Terra, at La Sapienza,
and now with Dominic.

Dominic was still crying, but quietly, his
eyes wide open, staring straight ahead. He blinked several times,
following my thoughts as I had them. Eventually he began to look
around, found belt and scabbard, replaced the sword, and handed it
all to me. “Here,” he said. “You carry this until we get back to La
Sapienza.”

“No,” I said, dropping the whole heavy
apparatus on the table and pushing it away. “I’m not going back to
La Sapienza.” The thought of crawling back there, battered and
defeated, was almost as terrible as using Dominic’s sword against
him. I was not ready to conclude that Dominic and I had failed like
everything else. Not yet.

It wasn’t only stubborn pride. I had insisted
on going with Dominic despite the warnings, because I wanted to be
with him. I had never wanted anything so much in my life. I still
wanted him. I wanted the real Dominic, the one whom I had known
unreservedly, in communion, for months now—the one who loved me.
Those feelings we had shared, intimacy so all-encompassing it was
like inhabiting the other’s being, love that was almost maternal in
its total acceptance, its desire to spare the other every sorrow or
danger—I couldn’t believe they were false or imaginary.

Dominic shook his head at my denial. “There
is no alternative but La Sapienza. I would take you to Eclipsia
City if you prefer, if it were not for this—this plague from
Andrade, this damned Eris crisis.” He made the sign against evil as
he spoke, using his left hand, the sword hand, the side of power,
the same sign the baggage handlers had used against me on my
arrival at Eclipsis’s airport.

It was the gesture more than any words that
stabbed at my brain, like the point of a knife in my sore flesh.
Dominic is not superstitious. He is an officer in the Royal Guards,
a warrior, with more faith in his own proven abilities than in the
uncertain protection of the supernatural. But as he held his closed
fist with thumb and little finger protruding, I was able no longer
to repress my memories of last night.

Eris
. The image had appeared to me all
the while that Dominic fucked me without thought or awareness: a
goddess of light, covered but still radiant, shining through the
vessel that would contain her energy, lightning shooting from her
fingertips, her hair undulating tendrils of flame. Eris had
infiltrated our minds, putting her own presence in place of our
communion and disabling our
crypta
, so that I hadn’t even
been able to make the inner flame. Dominic’s silvery eyelids had
reflected the image, I recalled with a shudder. Not a reflection,
but a projection outward of what was in his brain, behind his eyes.
I should have seen my own face mirrored, but I had seen
her,
Eris
, blazing and burning and destroying.

She—
it
, I corrected myself—
it
was a weapon, and the people using her—
it
—were rebels,
somewhere in the renegade realm of Andrade, on the other side of
the mountains from Aranyi. Eris was simply a thing, a prism, a
piece of glass like the ones in the handles of the daggers Dominic
and I carried, only bigger. It took a large group of telepaths to
control her.
It
, I thought irritably.
It
.

But it had been
she
last night,
blazing and blinding, overpowering us with her rage.

Eris was not simply a large prism. I admitted
the truth to myself. Eris was a telepathic weapon, wielded by the
gifted, people like me and Dominic. Eris acted on the mind, the
emotions, finding the dark side of those under her influence,
freeing it from the control most of us manage to impose, using it
the way a modern weapon harnesses laser power or nuclear energy.
That’s how these weapons work, by combining individual hateful
thoughts to create a destructive telepathic force.

The force Eris used, the source of her
extraordinary powers, was
anger
—an emotion that Dominic and
I possessed in abundance.

This insight, oddly, gave me hope. Dominic
and I had cultivated anger, each of us in our separate worlds, over
years of growing up gifted, different and damaged. We lived with
anger every day and knew how to manage it. If we had overindulged
in its effects, now and in the past, we were veterans, survivors. I
doubted there were any two gifted people in the whole of Eclipsis
better qualified to defeat this weapon.

Dominic was going home to Aranyi, not simply
to escort me for a visit, but because he must marshal troops to
fight this threat to the ’Graven Realms. He was taking me with him
only because I had not wanted to stay any longer at La
Sapienza.

“But that explains it!” I said. “We were
under the control of– of– of that thing.” I was unable to speak the
name aloud, too conscious of Dominic’s fear, and my own.

Dominic’s grating laugh shattered my fragile
returning confidence. “No,” he said. “We’re not close enough to
feel the full effect of the weapon. Last night we were merely
without our true communion.” With no telepathic connection between
us, Dominic had simply had sex with my body as with anyone he felt
no love for: not with deliberate cruelty, but with his great
strength unchecked, making no effort to be gentle, and indifferent
to his partner’s pleasure.