Wedding (3 page)

If we had truly been in the grip of the Eris
weapon—the images were in his mind, too powerful to suppress. I
cried out as I saw them, covering my eyes with my hands as if that
would block them.

Dominic picked up the sword and belt again
and pushed them toward me. “I mean it,” he said. “From now on, use
this if you have to.”

“That’s crazy. A sword is your weapon. I’ve
never used one and it’s too heavy for me anyway.” I looked for my
small dagger with the prism in the handle. There it was, on the
floor beside the bed. “This is my weapon,” I said, with something
like pride in my voice for the first time this morning. True,
Dominic had his own prism-handled dagger, had years of experience
in its use, while I had only six months of training. But I had
become proficient in that time, sometimes too quick to rely on its
seductive amplification of my meager strength. I was a match for
Dominic with this, where in every other area he could overpower me.
I unsheathed the dagger and held the prism in the handle up to the
light, as I had been taught.

“Put that away, Amalie!” Dominic roared the
command to me in the military officer’s scream of stress under
attack. “
Now!
”

I obeyed automatically, as he had hoped, the
tone of voice acting like a physical force on my limbs. He was
trembling with fear, sweating despite his nakedness. “You could get
us both killed,” he said. “Or worse. It’s the active
crypta
that enables that thing to find us, to dominate us. We could become
trapped in her cell, made slaves to her power.” He made the sign
against evil again.

A telepathic weapon seeks out it targets, he
explained, sensing
crypta
the way a Terran weapon senses
heat. Dominic and I had been in simple telepathic communion,
delighted at the enforced interruption of our journey that would
allow us our long-delayed consummation a little sooner. As soon as
we touched, even before that, as soon as our thoughts formed the
first deep link between our minds, the weapon had locked onto the
crypta
and taken over, blocking the communion, leaving our
bodies to act out our desires. All we had remembered was that we
wanted each other; tenderness, care, the patience and
self-restraint of love had gone.

“That’s why I’ve been rejecting your
communion,” Dominic said, calmer now. “With the magnification from
a prism we would be announcing our presence.”

“Then we’ll have to go without forming
communion, all the way to Aranyi?” That worried me more than
everything else. I had been counting on reestablishing our
communion, certain it was our only chance of getting back to
normal, whatever that was.

“Aranyi!” Dominic’s voice was bitter. “The
farther up in the mountains we go, the greater the danger. I have
no right to drag you into it.”

“You’ll only make things worse by delaying,”
I said. Returning to La Sapienza was certain defeat for me; I must
gamble on Dominic and Aranyi, even without communion. “We have to
go on to Aranyi.” How I would travel was another matter, too sore
even to think about mounting a horse.

Dominic hesitated, a look of tenderness
softening his harsh features. “You will need to bathe in any case,”
he said, more to himself than to me, “and we must all eat.”

It was still early. Dominic and I had begun
our sexual frenzy late yesterday afternoon and had slept eventually
to rise with the sun. At least there was sun. The storm had ended
during the night and the day looked like a good one for traveling.
Dominic put on shirt, breeches and boots, and went outside to fetch
water and more wood. With a flick of fingers and thumb I lit the
fire, my inner flame functioning this morning as it could not
yesterday, immobilized by Eris.

When the water was warm, Dominic and I
washed, drying ourselves with scraps of soft linen. They were the
remnants of my underwear, the shift cut to pieces, sliced by that
same sword Dominic was urging me to carry, and ripped off my body
in the course of our passion. We said nothing, had decided not to
refer to it. Dominic had brought in my baggage, and I dug out
another shift while he found my dress, rumpled but intact.

Once I was clothed he allowed his men inside.
They did not appear to be offended by last night’s banishment to
the stable. Even Ranulf tramped in cheerfully, ready to
congratulate his lord on his successful wedding night. The
scratches on Dominic’s face and the bite on my neck, my swollen
lips and our bloodshot eyes seemed to amuse him and some of the
others, but their words died unspoken as they caught something of
the strained mood.

A couple of the men cooked breakfast. It was
soldiers’ rations—lumpy porridge with a few grains of precious salt
sprinkled on—but I wolfed it down like the others, famished after
the long night without supper.

While I scraped up the last bits with my
fingers, I stole glimpses at the men, wondering what they guessed
or knew of last night. None of them were looking at me, or even
thinking of me, other than to hope I would not slow us down. They
were Aranyi men, tenants and freeholders on Dominic’s land, and the
loyalty they would feel for any overlord was intensified by
Dominic’s genuine abilities, his skill in all the arts of war, his
natural air of command. They would not dream of questioning his
sexual practices, much less commenting on them. If they had come in
to find my naked and bleeding corpse, and been ordered to bury it,
they would have done so without a second thought.

Ranulf, more of a companion than a
subordinate, turned his craggy face once in my direction with a
glare. His antipathy was still strong; his first sight of me six
months ago—gifted and with the third eyelids to prove it, but with
the shorn hair and immodest dress of a Terran—had affected him like
a slap in the face that could not be reciprocated. So long as
Dominic wanted me, he would try to keep his opinions to himself.
The woman who rejected Dominic or resisted him, as those scratches
seemed to indicate, did not merit Ranulf’s sympathy, merely his
contempt for her poor taste. Now, as he took in my proper Eclipsian
clothes and the hair that barely covered the nape of my neck, he
was thinking,
You may have bewitched my lord, but you don’t fool
me
.

I wanted to discuss how I could travel but
would not raise so sensitive an issue in front of them all. Dominic
was maintaining a mental shield, preventing any wordless
communication between the two of us, so I sat and listened as
Dominic and his men debated. After the storm, the trail was going
to be even more difficult, hard going for the horses alone. There
would be the constant danger of the animals’ losing their footing,
toppling us into the mud, or over the edge of a precipice. We could
walk and lead them but—I felt the men’s concern they would not
voice in my presence—
What about the woman?

While I worried the question was settled. Two
of the men scouted ahead and came back to report that the only
trail up to Aranyi was completely blocked by fallen rocks and the
uprooted trees they had carried with them as they slid. There was
no way around it. Facing a journey of half a day in good weather,
we would be lucky to be moving in under a week. Dominic and the
rest finished their meal and set off to clear a path.

As soon as they were all outside I unsheathed
my dagger, held the prism in the handle to the light, and prepared
to examine myself. I had learned this much of the healer’s art at
La Sapienza. It would be easy to look inside myself, beyond what a
probing finger could feel, and make sure I had not sustained any
internal damage.

Dominic came bursting through the door.
“Amalie, do you
want
to kill yourself?” He was ablaze with
indignation, forgetting that he had contemplated the same thing. He
hovered over me, hopping mad with anxiety, unsure how to prevent
what he saw as my act of desperation.

I didn’t like to say that I was checking for
injuries that he might have caused; we’d had enough recriminations.
“I refuse to kill myself over a few bruises,” I said, keeping my
voice and face expressionless.

Dominic’s face contorted with rage. “Didn’t
you hear one word I said before? Do you think I
like
being
shielded from you?” He leaned in as close to me as he dared. “Put
the fucking dagger in its sheath,” he said, every syllable crisp,
his voice stinging me like the lash of a whip.

Oh gods! His hand was on his sword hilt. I
sheathed the dagger. “Amalie,” he said, “any use of your prism
could attract that evil.”

“I thought it was just communion that was
dangerous,” I said, sounding lame even to myself. I blushed with
shame, appalled at my own stupidity. “I’m sorry, Dominic. I didn’t
think.”

“No,” Dominic said. “We haven’t been thinking
clearly. That’s what those bastards in Andrade are counting on,
that the ’Graven will be as disorganized as ever, not using our
brains.”

I swore not to use my
crypta
or my
prism, except in the unlikely event that someone else found the
shelter, someone unfriendly, and I needed to defend myself. My
internal exam would have to wait. I felt surprisingly well,
actually, now that I had bathed, however unsatisfactorily, and
eaten, however unappetizing the food. If anything was really wrong
with me, I would find out soon enough; unless and until I needed
healing I would not jeopardize our safety.

The rest of that day, and the ones that
followed, passed without incident. During the days, while Dominic
and his men worked to clear the trail, I felt an odd contentment,
alone in the noisome little hut, warm and dry, able to recuperate
from my ordeal. Most nights the men brought small game, caught in
snares, to supplement the porridge and flour paste, and once or
twice they found a few bitter shoots of early greens to season the
stew.

At first I tried to keep up the daily regimen
of prayers from La Sapienza, at least the midday ceremony, when I
was alone. But the ritual was too similar to communion to risk it,
and with no sibyl or fellow worshippers to perform the call and
response it seemed empty. Only during the daily eclipse did I have
the courage, more of a compulsion, to stand in the doorway, staring
up through the shielding third eyelids at the occluded sun,
filtering the life-giving rays into my brain and replenishing my
strength.

The evenings were different. We spent six
tense, claustrophobic nights in the shelter, during which time
Dominic, unwilling to risk a repeat of that first night, slept on
the floor. He strung a rope across the room and hung some saddle
blankets over it, making a partition, so that I could have the bed
to myself while he and the men rolled up in their own blankets on
the other side.

As Dominic had feared, we had more visions of
Eris. In the evenings, after our early supper, when the long red
rays of the setting sun left our empathetic gifts at their
receptive peak, the image of the goddess would blaze up behind our
eyes like a hologram show. I had made light of my coworkers’
warnings at La Sapienza, convinced that the personification of
“Eris” was mass hysteria. Now I shared it, the apparition that was
radiating out to every telepath within range.

Dominic and I watched each other through the
red haze, the lightning from Eris’s hair and fingers merging with
the flickering fire in the hut’s hearth. If we had touched then we
would have behaved as on that first night, even in front of
Dominic’s men, not caring, on the bed or on the floor. We sat as
far apart as we could to prevent the forming of communion, and did
not succumb.

On the seventh day Dominic and his men came
in at noon, in good spirits, calling out a military chant, their
work finished. There had been only light spring rain over the past
days and the trail was passable. We could be on our way after the
midday meal, reaching Aranyi late that afternoon.

By now the memory of that first night was
fading from my mind, like the marks from my skin. The thought of
riding a horse no longer made me flinch. I resolved that, as my
body was renewed, so Dominic and I would start fresh. We must think
of this whole thing as an accident, I decided, like a plane crash
on Terra—unfortunate, but usually the fault of weather or
equipment, not a single individual.

Yet Dominic could not see things in this way.
He was still punishing himself for what had happened, making no
allowance for the effects of the weapon. For all his fear of Eris,
he knew his weaknesses, his proclivities, and could not absolve
himself of blame. We finished our journey riding side by side, but
divided by the need to avoid communion, and by our opposing views
of the problem we faced.

D
ominic’s sister was waiting
for us as we rode through the entrance gate to Aranyi Fortress. If
I had not picked up Dominic’s thoughts at that moment, I would not
have identified her as a relative. Eleonora was Dominic’s
half-sister, a powerful sibyl a few years older than her brother
and still a beauty, with translucent skin and gold-red hair that
caught the last rays of the setting sun to put a halo of fire
around her elegant head. She was not as tall for a woman as Dominic
was for a man; where he gave an impression of strength, even
ferocity, she looked delicate, almost fragile—deceptively so.
“Welcome to Aranyi, Ms. Herzog,” she said, emphasizing the Terran
title. “I hope Dominic took good care of you on the journey. It’s
always tiring for lowland guests.” Her voice was higher and softer
than Dominic’s, but with the same attractive musical quality.

I thanked her, using a traditional phrase of
etiquette I had learned at La Sapienza. I could sense her
appraising me closely while concealing any open interest. She
embraced Dominic and whispered something to him that made him
laugh. She had not taken the chance of thinking it to him, in case
I listened. Here was another person close to Dominic who didn’t
trust me from the start.