Wedding (24 page)

In the deserted breakfast room, Dominic moved
a bench near the wall to lean against, sat down and patted his lap.
I settled in happily, leaning sideways into his arm, resting my
head against his chest. Our third eyelids, as always in such
proximity, lowered in a sensual reflex. It would become our method
of discussion, a way to talk face-to-face of serious things while
maintaining the communion of touch. Dominic sat quietly with me for
a few minutes, enjoying the connubial coziness. “I’m sorry,
Amalie,” he began. “I must go away again.”

I groaned. “Why can’t you just stay home for
once, with me?” I clasped my arms around his neck and wished I
could keep him here forever, never have to care about anything in
the outside world.

“I need ’Graven Assembly’s approval to marry
you,” he said.

I had almost forgotten. The torment of the
past months flooded my mind again, the doubts and worries. I asked
the obvious question, what had made me so angry two nights ago.
“How could you call me your betrothed in front of everybody, if you
don’t even know whether you can marry me?”

Dominic unfastened my arms from his neck to
hold my hands, and looked into my eyes. “Because you are my
betrothed. You are the woman I am going to marry. I thought we
understood each other now, that you know I want to marry you, that
I love you. When I returned after all that time away, and you were
waiting for me at the gate, wearing my gift, the symbol of our
betrothal—” He paused, remembering. “And that night, when you
called me your lord husband—I knew your mind then. You were telling
me this is what you want, too. Can you deny it?”

I could only shake my head and smile back at
him. Dominic had said some of this before, during festival night,
but it was more real now, in daylight, with our clothes on.

“And when you welcomed Stefan so graciously,”
he continued, “as I would expect my wife to do, I knew it then.
When you and he touched, I
felt
it,
knew
it, that we
were already husband and wife, and the ceremony is simply for the
rest of the world to know it too.” Dominic held me against him, his
face next to mine breathing hot on my cheek. “I always hoped you
would be my wife, but at that moment, I knew.”

His beatific smile and the accompanying words
sent a rush of joy through me, although I couldn’t quite trust it
yet. “But you didn’t know,” I said. “You’re leaving now to ask
permission to marry me. And you probably won’t get it.”

Dominic sighed, a heavy, chest-heaving intake
and exhalation that rocked me physically as his speech had
emotionally. “Amalie,” he said, “if I cannot marry you by the
’Graven Rule in the way I prefer, I will marry you privately before
the gods, or in a Christian ceremony—”

“I’m not Christian,” I said, unable to help
myself, “and neither are you. We can’t really marry in a Christian
ceremony if neither one of us—”

“Stop it, Amalie. I’m saying that I will
marry you somehow and you will be my wife.” Dominic’s voice grew
deeper and more insistent with each word. “Do you understand?”

“No,” I said. But I was smiling again.

Dominic was too wrapped up in his reasoning
to know when I was teasing. “I know I left things vague. I was
frightened and angry, and I didn’t dare say what I felt.” He
tightened his hold on me. “But you seem to have made your decision
long ago. Everything you have thought and done since I brought you
here is precisely what an affianced bride should do. You have
conducted yourself like ’Gravina Aranyi from the beginning,
learning about the Realm, the fortress and the land, working with
Berend and Magali.” He squeezed my waist, proud to have inspired
such devotion. “After all that effort, don’t tell me you have
changed your mind.”

I pushed against Dominic’s strong arms
encircling me, twisted around on his lap to see his face, wanting
to know if this was a serious offer or Dominic’s way of making the
best of things, accepting a state of affairs that had developed in
his absence. “I never really made up my mind in the first place,” I
said.

Dominic’s inner eyelids began to lose their
silvery reflective quality and took on a clear, glassy appearance.
I had succeeded, if that is the right word, in making him angry, in
wounding him and causing him to fight back. “If you do not want to
marry me, you have chosen a strange time to tell me. But I want to
marry you,” he said, as if threatening me with a harsh punishment,
“and I will marry you, unless you can give me one good reason why
not.” The translucent eyes carved through me like laser
surgery.

I nerved myself to return the knife-edge
stare. It cut but I felt no pain; I bled but did not weaken. We
were having the discussion we should have had months ago, if life
had not intervened, and I would not throw this chance away. I
listed all the things that had bothered me, that had chased each
other around in my mind for so long. “Because I’m Terran. Because
I’m not ’Graven. Because you don’t really want a wife and family.
How’s that?” I said. “I can give you three reasons.”

Dominic and I had entered, not communion, but
a strange, antagonistic kind of synergy, our emotions bouncing off
each other’s mind and rebounding with ever greater force. As I had
been hounded by these problems, so had Dominic, and he resisted now
by denying them, by rejecting their validity, as he had so often
wished he could. “I said good reasons!” he shouted. “Not bullshit!”
It sounds worse in Eclipsian, an obscenity beyond the literal
meaning.

“It’s not bullshit!” I shouted back at
Dominic, using the same filthy word, enjoying the brute force of it
in my mouth and on our eardrums. “It’s not bullshit. It’s real.
It’s the truth. It’s what you think, if you ever do think.” As
always, once I gave myself up to anger I let it carry me away. I
was eye to eye with Dominic but we were both bellowing as if across
a valley, our faces growing red, the tendons in our necks standing
out. Something Magali had said came back to me. “Now I’m pregnant
you don’t want the trouble of acknowledging another natural-born
daughter.”

The corners of Dominic’s mouth quivered. We
had not broken eye contact, and slowly, wondrously, his inner
eyelids grew opaque, the silver creeping back in, until I saw two
small reflections of my angry red face. “Where do you get such
crazy ideas?” he asked, smiling despite himself.

I could not lose my anger so quickly.
“They’re not crazy,” I said. “You can’t deny that all those things
are true.”

“Yes I can,” Dominic said. “I don’t have a
natural daughter, only a son. So if our daughter is born before we
marry, when I accept her publicly as mine she’ll be my first
natural daughter, not ‘another’ one.” He laughed at his stupid
grammatical quibble.

I raised my arm to slap his face and Dominic
caught my hand and held it and kissed the palm, then pulled me
close and kissed me on the mouth. When I resisted he used his gift
to pinion me, as he had during festival night. Helpless, I opened
my mouth, began to return the kiss as if my body were not under my
control, until I found my own
crypta
strength and pushed us
apart.

Dominic let me go. “Cherie,” he said, “do you
think I’m so stupid I’m unaware of all these things?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“No you don’t,” Dominic said. “You couldn’t
love anyone that witless.” He lifted my chin with a strong hand and
compelled me to look at him again. “Beloved,” he said, “I know a
little of what you’ve been going through. It hasn’t been easy for
me, either. And always something keeping us apart.”

I grew calm, surprised into stillness at the
echo of my own thoughts. Dominic took my silence for a good sign.
“You know I love you, don’t you?” he asked, sure of the answer, not
waiting for my nod. “That’s the most important thing. And it’s
true, I never did want a wife and family.” As I started to speak,
he laid a finger on my lips, hushing me. “Until now. Once I met
you, it was different. Can you understand that? I never married
before, would not marry just for the sake of being married. But now
that I can have you for my wife, and our daughter for my family, I
have a real incentive to marry.”

There was nothing to say, only to accept the
statement, not as a gift, but as a right, recognized and confirmed,
between partners. I bowed my head in assent and wished the rest
were so easy.

Dominic was with me, keeping pace with my
thoughts. “As for your not being ’Graven, I know there’s been a lot
of speculation in this house, and elsewhere, about who you are.
That you have the third eyelids, and the gift, and you look like
’Graven.”

“They call me ‘Lady Amalie,’ and think my
father wouldn’t acknowledge me,” I said, embarrassed by the way the
lie had taken hold in Dominic’s own house.

Dominic laughed. “It was the only way people
could make sense of things. And so convenient, no need to explain.”
His voice had developed an edge, and I drew back from him. “No,
Amalie,” he said. “It’s not you I was scolding, but myself. There’s
something I should have told you before.” He pulled me close again,
traced the contours of my nose and mouth, tucked a loose strand of
hair behind my ear.

I waited in apprehension. There were so few
secrets between us, I dreaded another revelation, something worse
than all we had weathered so far.

Dominic took a breath and let it out slowly.
“I do not like to discuss such a thing. But this is relevant to our
situation.” Still he was silent. “My mother,” he said at last. “She
was not ’Graven. She was not even human. Not entirely.”

Had I known, or guessed something of this?
His height, his slender yet powerful frame, his gift that was not
quite like the others’, that had not fit into a seminary. “Thank
the gods,” I said. “I thought you were going to tell me something
dreadful.”

“Did you hear me?” Dominic asked.

“I heard you. But I don’t know what to say.
If you’re not human, what are you? And if you’re really a lizard
man or have three heads, wouldn’t I have noticed it by now?”

Dominic didn’t laugh. “Listen to me,” he
said. “This is serious. When the first settlers created the world
we have now, the forests and the animals, all the things we grow
and eat and rely on to live—they tried a few– experiments– that
didn’t quite work out. You know they had the genomes for the entire
Terran ecosystem?”

I could only nod.

“Well, they used them. You remember the
‘aides’ in the seminary.”

“Oh, Dominic,” I said. “You’re not a
lemur-cat-ape creature. I don’t believe it.”

“No, not that. That’s one of the other
experiments. But there were experiments on humans, too, especially
gifted ones. The idea was to speed up human evolution, just as they
were forcing rapid evolution of the whole ecosystem, a way to make
gifted people better adapted to the cold and the altitude, to the
weak sunlight and the harsh conditions of those first years. They
tried mixing in genes of some other species with the human genome,
and they succeeded. Too well.”

I waited in silence for him to continue, knew
he needed time and no interruptions.

“My mother was one of these beings, with an
extraordinary gift, and too well adapted to the natural environment
to live among humans, in houses and wearing clothes. Her people
live for hundreds of years, high in the mountains, and can change
their sex at will. Or so I’m told.” He dared to look at my face to
see how I was taking all this.

Something buried deep in my memory was trying
to surface. “Naomi is one of them, isn’t she?” I could recognize
the similarity between her and Dominic that had disturbed me
before. It was what gave her the ability to heal Dominic when other
telepaths could not, her physiological resemblance to and communion
with her patient that she had taunted me with not noticing.

Dominic shook his head. “She’s a hybrid, a
mix, like me. I don’t think anyone has seen a pure one, apart from
my mother. To me, to all of us at Aranyi, she was beautiful and
rare, a goddess come to earth for a little while.” His eyes focused
inward, the childhood years breaking through the mist of adult
oblivion, until he came back to the present, pain contorting his
features. “I don’t remember her well. She died when I was five.”
His voice was hoarse, with a sobbing note underneath.

All my natural compassion was aroused by such
a strong emotion from my lover. This was what telepathy and empathy
were for, to comfort someone dear to me—the best use I could make
of what had for so long been only wearying, demanding “gifts” that
drained my energy and disrupted my life but gave nothing in return.
I tried to form full communion.
Tell me
, I thought to him.
Let me take some of the burden from you.

Dominic blocked my attempt. “Let it be for
now,” he said. He deliberately closed off the unbearable memories,
regained something of his everyday ironic detachment. “I mentioned
it only because I owe you the truth.” Distaste for the whole
subject was evident in the set of his mobile mouth. “And to show
you that ’Graven Assembly accepted me as heir to Aranyi. So you
see, someone like you—gifted, and human—that should not be so
difficult for the council to swallow.”

Another memory was forcing its way into
consciousness. That beautiful book I had not wanted to read, the
one written in archaic verse that told the founding myth of
Eclipsis. About the sky god Zichmni and the silver-eyed goddess
Qiaolian. As far as I could tell, this myth, like all such myths,
had a kernel or two of truth behind it: a mingling of Terran
settlers, the leader who had taken the name of Zichmni, legendary
traveler to an unknown land, and the exceptional, gifted beings
they bred from their genomes; whose descendants, half-forgotten,
feared and venerated, had left genetic markers in some of their
noblest families. Like Aranyi.