Wedding (26 page)

I smiled into his face. “Yes,” I said, “to
everything. Yes, yes, yes.” I kissed Dominic as he had kissed me
earlier, forcefully, and was glad I did not have to work as hard as
he had to get a response. Afterwards I leaned my cheek against his
chest, feeling the softness of his well-worn linen shirt. “I think
I will marry you,” I said, “if you promise not to announce it all
over again.”

True communion came over us then, the
resolution of all our conflict freeing our minds.
Beloved
,
we thought simultaneously.
Dearest love
. Not human or alien,
not ’Graven or Terran. Only lover and beloved, each of us equally
one and the other.
My love
, we thought, and kissed
again.

Dominic stood up, lifting me easily in his
arms. “I will leave for Eclipsia City tomorrow,” he said. “I would
take you with me, but I know how hard it is for you to travel, and
I should not be gone long.”

The door opened as he reached for it. Stefan
stumbled in, curious about the shouting he had heard, saw me in
Dominic’s arms, reddened in the inevitable blush, and tried to
withdraw. Dominic put me down quickly and caught his lover with one
long arm. “Don’t run away, cheri,” he said. “I have some good
news.”

Stefan waited politely while Dominic thought
to me,
Only to my companion will I make the
announcement
.

“Lady Amalie has agreed to marry me,” Dominic
said.

Stefan stared like the victim of a practical
joke waiting for the second bucket of water to fall.
“Congratulations, my lord,” he said, speaking formally. Then his
boyish side came through. “Is this a different betrothal from
Midsummer night? Will you be marrying each other twice?”

Dominic laughed. “Yes,” he said, giving me a
conspiratorial smile. “As many times as it takes. And you will be
my second at all the weddings.” He gave Stefan a quick hug to show
he didn’t mind the teasing.

Stefan bowed to me. “Best wishes, Mistress.”
He gulped, and his eyes moved like a cornered animal’s to Dominic’s
face. “Forgive me—my lady,” he amended, as Dominic thought the
correction to him.

Don’t do that
, I thought to Dominic.
Don’t blame Stefan for calling me ‘mistress.’
To Stefan I
said, “To you I will always be Amalie.”

Dominic looked down his nose at me.
Don’t
tell me how to deal with my own companion
. I could swear I saw
his hair bristling like a cat’s.

Why not
?
Stefan meant no harm,
doesn’t know we’ve all decided I’m ‘Lady Amalie’ now
.
And
here at Aranyi he’s your companion and should be treated as such,
no matter if he’s just another cadet under your command in Eclipsia
City
.

Stefan was staring at us open-mouthed. He had
picked up my thoughts that, in the grip of high emotion, I had sent
out without shielding them. He started to back out the door,
wishing he had not entered.

Dominic was caught between us. He turned on
me first in fury, not bothering to shield.
How dare you!
he
shouted into my brain.
How dare you speak to me like that, in
front of him
– He jerked his head in the direction where Stefan
had been. Stefan was gone, had made good his escape while Dominic
went for me.

I looked Dominic up and down—the splendid
height of him, the injured pride, the outraged officer—tried to
reconcile him with the frightened, abject man who would not make
love to me two months ago, and the wounded warrior who had returned
home, covering his pain with a deadening layer of
crypta
,
and laughed out loud at the contrast. “I dare because I will be
’Gravina Aranyi,” I said. “Or have you had second thoughts?”

Dominic’s face turned purple when I laughed.
He was speechless.

I didn’t wait for him to find words. “And
Stefan will be part of our family. I don’t want any
bullshit
in my household.”

Dominic was still silent, but trembling a
little, with laughter.

“My husband will have his companion, as he
should,” I said, taking the chance to reach for Dominic’s hand.
“But you must promise me he will be a
companion
—a lover, a
partner, the third spouse in our marriage. Not a subordinate or a
servant.”

Dominic’s face was growing paler, almost back
to normal. When I touched his hand he picked me up, as before
Stefan’s intrusion, and kissed me on my throat, the tip of his
tongue flicking my skin.
I promise
, he answered.
I am
marrying the woman with the worst temper in the world
.

Yes
, I said.
Almost as bad as her
husband’s
.

Dominic kissed my throat again, sucking at
the hollow at the base. As Magali could have told me, he was a man
and he could not wait. Our honeymoon had been delayed long enough
and there was no point in holding off any longer, with pregnancy
swelling my body every day. He carried me upstairs, forestalling
any objections I might make by covering my mouth with deep kisses.
We must do things properly for once
, he thought to me as he
crossed the threshold of the Margrave’s bedroom and lowered me onto
the conjugal bed.

But even Dominic tired eventually. We were up
and dressed in time for supper, and I slept alone that night. In
the morning Dominic left for Eclipsia City and ’Graven Assembly,
taking Stefan with him on the journey.

D
ominic’s absence seemed
endless. I continued my exploration of the castle and the grounds,
chatted and laughed with Magali on the pretense of running the
house, and worked with Berend at the books. None of this activity,
enjoyable as it was, prevented my doubts from returning. So long as
Dominic was here to shout at me, to argue me out of despair, I
could believe in the possibility of our marriage; without his
forceful presence, I was left to think for myself, and my thoughts
rarely took an optimistic turn.

Josh and Eleonora grumbled together in
communion, chafing at the delay, debating whether to leave to
resume their seminary work or await Dominic’s return. Dominic had
persuaded Eleonora to act as my attendant at the wedding, so there
was no point in her going, only to have to travel back again in a
week or two. “Please,” I said, “stay a while longer.” I would be
more comfortable with both of them here than alone with Eleonora,
doubly unhappy at my marriage and at being separated from her
husband.

Josh, intrigued by my transformation into
“Lady Amalie” and aware of my underlying uneasiness, sounded me out
on my feelings about becoming ’Gravina Aranyi. “Amalie,” he asked
one day, in a serious tone of voice for a change, “do you know why
I continue to use my Terran name?” As I shook my head he answered,
“To remind myself and everybody else that I’ve been changed by
living as a Terran.”

I saw what he was trying to tell me. “Dominic
wants me to pretend I’m not,” I said. “And you’re saying that it’s
impossible, that I’ll always be Terran, is that it?”

“No,” he said, “just the opposite.” He
thought how to explain. “You see, I’m not really Terran, but I’m a
different person now than I would be if I had grown up as the Sir
Georgi I was born. I lived as a Terran, thought I was one for a
while, when I was a boy. Those years set some parts of our
personalities irrevocably. Calling myself Sir Georgi Sakhalin-Chang
now would be a lie. I’m not that person. I’m not exactly Josh
Kaminsky either, but using the name is a way of being true to
myself, and being honest with other people. Just as ‘Lady Amalie’
is a closer approximation to who you are than Amelia Herzog
was.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I really am a
Terran. I was born there, lived thirty-five years there. My parents
were Terrans—”

Josh stopped me with a frown. “No, Amalie.
You’re not really a Terran. Dominic sees the person you are,
regardless of where you were born and how you were reared. All you
have to do now is accept that person as your true self.”

“But you just said those things determine who
we are. Our childhood, where we grew up.”

“I said
those years
do it. How we
react to our situation. For me they gave me a broader outlook, made
me less provincial than if I had had a typical ’Graven education
and thought Eclipsis was the whole universe. For you, they pushed
you in the direction of being Lady Amalie, even without knowing
anything of Eclipsis or ’Graven. You never accepted your situation
as I, in some ways, accepted mine. You were unhappy being
different, devastated when your gift developed.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Of course,” Josh said, impatience bursting
at the front of his thoughts. “Maybe because I’m a man, the
emotional isolation wasn’t as crippling. I figured I’d find a place
for myself somewhere. You just felt trapped.” He raised a hand as
if giving me a blessing. “Now that you’re free, don’t feel
guilty.”

“Is that what you think this is—guilt?” He
was a seer; if he made it his business to analyze me, he would find
every little niggling thought that was bothering me, winkle it out
and pull it to shreds.

“When you fell into all this—becoming Amalie,
then Lady Amalie, soon to be ’Gravina Aranyi,” Josh said, “it felt
right to you, didn’t it?” He looked at me in his friendly, knowing
way, speaking tactfully, trying not to offend. “I know you’re
worried about marrying Dominic. Becoming ’Gravina Aranyi without
being born to ’Graven bothers you. You’d feel better about becoming
a sibyl because you could earn that.”

I felt somehow that I could say anything to
this man, that he would understand and not judge. “I
think
exactly what you’re saying, but I don’t
feel
it. When I was
at La Sapienza, I knew I should try to become, if not a sibyl, at
least a part of the seminary staff, an academician, but all I
really wanted was to be with Dominic. And I don’t know if you
remember from your time in Terran society, or if you paid
attention, but women aren’t supposed to want that—marriage without
having a career. It’s considered irresponsible, almost
suicidal.”

“Actually, I felt the same thing when I met
Eleonora, only worse.” Josh opened himself to me in turn. “It’s not
just a women’s issue. A man should make his own way, not coast on
his wife’s position.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to grant that much.
“But you two solved that very neatly—marrying, but both of you
working in a seminary. And you haven’t exactly ‘coasted.’ ”

“Remember that ‘discussion’ with the
merchant, the day after festival night?” Josh apparently decided to
counter my argument with a non sequitur. “Well, I came down pretty
hard on him, defending you.”

“I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Another thing to feel guilty about.

“Don’t, Amalie,” Josh said. “That’s not why I
mentioned it. Like you, I know that man was not completely wrong.
We simply disagree on how to go about changing things—and what
should be changed. And the gifted people in the seminaries are
doing all that work, trying to find ways of bringing better
standards of living, more amenities, to the rest of Eclipsis,
without destroying this world the way Terra was destroyed. And
without losing the good things the ’Graven do for society.”

“Thanks for helping,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Josh said. “I wasn’t finished.
Marrying Dominic, bearing him a gifted child, that’s as useful as
anything Eleonora and I are doing. So long as we reject Terran
technology, including fertility procedures, we
need—desperately—every gifted child we can beget. Eleonora regrets
every day of her life that we couldn’t have a child.” He frowned,
acknowledging his wife’s sadness, before looking up with renewed
purpose.

“We’ve chosen the only honorable course,
seminary work,” Josh said. “And it’s been wonderful, a chance to
live and work in communion with the person who is everything to me.
I’ve thought sometimes that it might be nature’s way. We work in
the seminary because we can’t be parents. For you, it’s the
reverse. Because you can bear a gifted, ’Graven child, you
conveniently ‘failed’ at seminary work, so you won’t be torn
between two incompatible alternatives.”

“I’m just not comfortable,” I said, “with
coming in here with nothing and ending up with so much. With living
a life of luxury while everybody else works so hard. With being a
wife and mother and nothing more.”

“Nonsense,” Josh said. “Those things don’t
really bother you, do they?”

He had surprised me into total honesty. “Not
really. Only in the sense of not wanting people to resent me.”

“Good,” Josh said, pleased with my candor.
“Now listen. Nobody at Aranyi resents you. You are more Eclipsian
than I am, because you never really became Terran. You’re simply
moving into the kind of life that is right for you—your essential
self, not the surface of your background. Everybody here
understands that intuitively, that’s why you’ve been accepted so
easily.” He stared at me, probing my mind like the powerful seer he
was, but so rarely appeared to be outside the seminary. “And if it
makes you feel better, marriage to Margrave Aranyi won’t be as easy
as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

For the first time in my discussions with
Josh, discomfort was evident in his voice. “You know, with
Dominic’s companion living in the same house. But you mustn’t worry
that your status as wife will be diminished.”

“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“Stefan is one thing about this marriage that makes me think it
will work out.” After a strained pause, I said, “But I am
frightened about something: ’Graven marriage sounds like going into
purdah. I am Terran in that respect. I wasn’t brought up to live in
a harem.”

Josh had no quick answer to this. “Dominic
might not follow all that stuff so strictly. He is
vir
.”