Wedding (22 page)

Stefan thought hard, trying to find the right
words for the thing that bothered him most, that Dominic had
stressed in his odd lessons with the gifted cadets. “They have no
pride,” he said at last, “no sense of honor. They really don’t.
It’s just not there in their minds when you look. And they don’t
have families, most of them, to make them want to behave honorably.
Dominic can talk to them in their own language, you know, and he
asks them questions, about right and wrong, and honor—and they just
laugh. It’s sickening; they laugh right in Dominic’s face.”

That was hard to imagine. “What does Dominic
do then?” I asked, almost preferring not to know.

Stefan stared at my question, remembered I
was a different species—female—and said, “Nothing. They’re Terrans.
They can’t fight, they don’t know how to use a sword, and their own
weapons aren’t allowed here. So the only honorable thing to do,
Dominic shows us by example, is to treat them like children or
women. A man doesn’t take offense at a badly-behaved child, and if
a woman says or does something vulgar a gentleman simply ignores
it. So that’s what we do, treat them like children who weren’t
brought up right.”

Or women
, I thought.
An inferior
species that doesn’t have to be taken seriously.

We had reached the door to the Margrave’s
bedroom, and we knocked and went in. Dominic lay naked on the
enormous bed, prostrate, his eyes shut, his arms extended straight
out to each side. Naomi knelt on the floor beside the bed, her
prism-handled dagger in her hand, a beam of yellow light pulsing as
it made a slow circuit of Dominic’s naked torso. Naomi moved the
dagger back and forth over Dominic’s arm, while an amazing sound
like the blare of a brass instrument issued from her throat.

Dominic opened his eyes. “My two loves,” he
said, motioning Stefan and me in. “Come and help make me whole
again.” He had a weary look about him, from the pain of the last
weeks that he was no longer alleviating with
crypta
, but he
bore it well now that he was to be completely healed. He sensed our
discomfort. “You see, the healing works best with the bare flesh.
Naomi,” he said, grinning, “shouldn’t you remove your dress at
least?”

The witch stopped her strange chanting and
returned Dominic’s smile, teeth bared like fangs. “My lord,” she
said, repressed passion in her voice, “you know very well what we
should do. But I will do my best for you, despite all your
restrictions.”

Naomi resumed her singing for a short time,
then rose to sit on the side of the bed. She touched the beam of
light directly to Dominic’s left arm and hand while stroking his
head with her right hand.
Bend your elbow
, she said.
Flex. Make a fist. Stretch
. Each time he obeyed her command
she made communion with that one place in his mind, sensing both
the brain’s activity and the traffic along the nerve pathways of
the arm and hand—a form of biofeedback.

Dominic had been suffering from something
like the reverse of phantom limb syndrome. An amputee often
continues to feel pain in a limb that no longer exists. Dominic’s
arm was intact, the flesh wounds healed, but the damage he had
suffered from handling the Eris weapon had left scars in the brain
and the nerves.
Surely
, I thought,
if a backwoods witch
knew about this unusual condition and the sophisticated technique
to heal it, others on Eclipsis must, too, in the seminaries
and—

Naomi’s concentration wavered at my
unintentional criticism. The witch lifted her head, swiveled her
neck and shoulders, glaring at me with a fury that was terrifying.
The beam of light glowed in the unlit room, giving her bowed body
an eerie halo.
‘Lady’ Amalie.
Her sneer was almost audible.
What do you know of Margrave Aranyi’s physiology? You think he
is like other men? Even after last night, you see no difference?
You are as unobservant as the ungifted
.

The hatred and resentment hit me like blows.
Dominic startled at the wrath that was exploding around him. “So
that’s how it is,” he said. “Perhaps you should leave us, Amalie,
while we sort this out.”

I didn’t wait to be asked twice. I lifted my
skirts with an angry jerk and swept out the door. Stefan followed
me into the corridor. “Don’t you want to stay and watch?” I
asked.

“No, Mistress,” he said. “That woman could
eat us both for breakfast.”

“
If
she is a woman,” I said. “And
if
she gets up before dinnertime.” I wondered if Stefan
shared my protective feelings, or if he was too young to see
Dominic as vulnerable. “Aren’t you worried about leaving Dominic
alone with her?”

Stefan shook his head. “Dominic can handle
women without my help.” He blushed as he caught my reaction to this
sentiment that I was too upset to shield. “I mean, she’s a member
of his household.”

As if that made everything all right
.
I supposed it did, when I stopped to think about it.

Naomi was not alone with Dominic very long.
She emerged from the room just as Stefan and I were wondering
whether we should go back downstairs and rejoin that argument about
the Terrans. The witch stepped quietly into the corridor, shaking
out her skirts with one hand as she walked and recapturing the
strands of hair that had as usual escaped from their clasp with the
other. Her dress was on inside out, the front lacing of the shift
untied, revealing the swell of small, high breasts. She walked
toward us with her long, confident stride where we had waited a few
doors down, and looked only at Stefan while addressing us both.
“You may come in now, to form the communion of healing.”

Dominic lay much as we had left him, although
with a sheet covering him to the waist. He was sleepy, as if
sedated, and no longer in any pain. There was a wet spot on the
sheet, the smell of a man’s sex.
She is a powerful
sorceress,
Dominic was moved to explain to me.
I must pay
her price, however extortionate.
He winked at Naomi.

Naomi smirked as she saw my reaction.
“Margrave Aranyi needs the true communion of love,” she said, “to
be healed from a false wound.” As before, her skepticism and
mistrust were directed all at me.

Dominic raised himself on one elbow. “It’s
all right, Naomi,” he said. “Amalie will not ruin all your good
work.”

Naomi went to stand at the foot of the bed
and motioned Stefan over to Dominic’s left side. She harbored no
resentment against Stefan as she did with me. Because he was
Eclipsian, I guessed. Or because he was not a woman.

Because he is not pretending to be
something he is not
, Naomi thought to me.
Because he loves
my lord for himself, not for his castle and his lands and his– his
cheese!

Naomi
, Dominic said, laughing at the
last incongruous accusation.
It is as well Amalie values my
possessions, since they will be hers, too. It does not diminish the
force of her love or make it less real
. He reached his hand to
me, his thoughts moderated by Naomi’s ministrations to lazy good
nature.
I have a fondness for cheese myself
, he said.

Naomi shrugged and gave up the fight.
Standing on three sides of the bed, Naomi at the foot, Stefan on
Dominic’s left, I on his right, we formed a miniature cell as in La
Sapienza. We did not hold hands or touch; our communion flowed
around and through Dominic, connecting each of us directly to him
and to the others. It was an imperfect cell, blocked by Naomi’s
distrust of me, my nervousness at her intense dislike, and Stefan’s
skittishness at the witch’s awesome power.

Yet the cell was effective in its mission.
Dominic did not need perfect harmony in his household, only the
healing love of the people who could give it to him, whatever their
differences. Communion heals if it is genuine, as Naomi had been at
pains to tell me, and each of us had true communion with Dominic.
As the communion surrounded him, his eyelids drooped and closed,
his breathing slowed. His arm relaxed, the fingers flexing and
stretching, until he was ready for the deep sleep through the night
that would complete the healing process.

Naomi broke the communion with surprising
delicacy. “I must sleep, too,” she said, a smile for once softening
the harsh contours of her face.

Dominic’s thoughts, on the edge of
unconsciousness, called to us.
Sleep with me,
he said.
Both of you, sleep with me.

Stefan and I stared at each other in
consternation for a moment until I understood. Dominic was making a
literal request, not for a sexual group, but that we spend the
night in communion.
Come
, Dominic commanded again.
Join
me
.

I shrugged. “Go ahead,” I said to Stefan.
“Lie down on that side, I’ll stay over here.”

When Stefan lay down carefully on top of the
sheet, Dominic whispered, “Naked, cheri.” His voice was groggy with
impending sleep. “You heard Naomi. It must be the bare flesh.” His
eyelids fluttered but did not fully open.

“But, Dominic,” Stefan said, “your lady is
here.”

“Good,” Dominic said. “Where are you, Amalie?
Come on, get your clothes off.”

I remembered Berend’s warning. “Dominic,” I
said, “do you understand that Stefan and I are both here with you
in the same room? Neither one of us is really comfortable with the
idea of being naked in front of the other.”

“Darkness and damnation!” Dominic said.
“You’d think this was a Christer household, all this
respectability.” He was in danger of waking, losing the hard-won
benefit of
crypta
-induced anesthetic. “Which would you
prefer, unsullied decency with a crippled husband, or nakedness and
health?”

Dominic was enjoying the carefree attitude
that comes with drink, with drugs and sleep. Awake and sober, he
might have a very different outlook, and I was unwilling to risk
doing something that would leave him forever suspicious or feeling
betrayed. Eventually I thought of a compromise, and imparted my
idea to Stefan.

The Margrave’s bedroom is the central room of
a suite, connected to the wife’s and companion’s rooms by
bathrooms. I went through my luxurious bathroom into my bedroom,
Stefan into his, and we undressed. Stefan signaled to me in thought
when he was ready, going in first to lie down on Dominic’s left
side. I waited a few minutes, then entered the room in the dark.
While Stefan kept his eyes resolutely shut, I removed my robe and
slipped quickly under the sheet on Dominic’s right. As Stefan and I
came to rest in the embrace of Dominic’s loosely bent arms, we
created an unusual triple communion.

Even drowsy as he was, Dominic could not be
unaffected by the threesome. His erection tented up the sheet as
soon as we had snuggled in on either side. Dominic was like a man
drunk to the point of complete candor. “By all the gods,” he said,
“this is exquisite torture. The perfect fantasy realized, and too
weak to enjoy it.” He laughed in the languid, ungrudging way of the
inebriated; the next moment he was snoring.

Slowly I let go of my tension, closing my
eyes, focusing on the communion. It was early for sleep, but in the
shared thoughts it was as if we dreamed. I saw a vision of Dominic
being wounded by the fragment of the Eris weapon, grasping it in
his hand, screaming like a man being burned at the stake, his head
thrown back, throat arched in agony. Stefan rescued him, a fact he
had been too modest to tell me directly, but could not conceal in
communion. He had rushed in like a man prepared to die, grasped
Dominic’s hand locked around the cauterizing glass, pried his
fingers loose until the glass fell out, and kicked the evil thing
away. It seared a large area black and scored where it landed, all
grasses dead even to the roots. Dominic had dropped like a corpse
and Stefan had not been able to support the dead weight. But he had
broken the fall, and they had lain together on the ground, where
Stefan wrapped them both in Dominic’s cloak and soothed his lover’s
pain with his communion and his love.

Stefan dreamed too, seeing my moment of
communion here in Aranyi, how I had felt the pain in my own arm and
known Dominic’s despairing thoughts as he had them. Between us,
Stefan and I had shielded Dominic, provided a buffer against the
full force of the weapon’s destruction. Each of us had sustained
some damage, although Dominic had suffered the most. Now, together
in the large bed, the three of us could merge consciousness in
sleep, restoring ourselves as we healed Dominic.

He became my companion then,
Dominic
said.
He offered himself to the enemy in my place, acted as my
sworn partner
.
You see how much I owe you, beloved,
he
thought to Stefan. Still lying on his back, without shifting his
position, Dominic shared a reverent kiss with his companion, a
meeting, not of lips, but of love and thought that was, like sexual
intercourse while in communion, superior to the experience of
either one alone.

And you became my wife.
Dominic turned
to me in the same way, immobile, only changing the direction of his
regard.
You took my pain on yourself. As a husband does for a
wife when she bears his child, so you did for me
.

It was unconscious
. I denied such
heroism.
It happened without my awareness.

Proof
, Dominic said,
of what we are
to each other
. He kissed me as he had kissed Stefan, a wondrous
act of the mind that allowed the body so much pleasure without
exertion or even movement.

We lay at peace while we followed our own
thoughts. Until Dominic’s impetuous seizure of the weapon, his
relationships with both me and Stefan had been the uncomplicated
pursuit of sex and love. Whatever Dominic might have called us, we
were each his beloved, the woman and the young man who attracted
him at the moment. If the communion between Dominic and me was
unusually strong, it was necessary to bring Dominic together with
so unlikely a person as myself. Whereas with Stefan, the communion
had been instinctive and natural, based on sexual compatibility and
the appealing character of a handsome, worshipful boy who looked to
Dominic for guidance in becoming a man.