Wedding (6 page)

“Weren’t you? What was all this about, if you
weren’t overpowered?” I made the sign against evil, jabbing my hand
at his face.

Dominic stepped back, smiling sadly. “No
weapon, however powerful, could compel me to do something wholly
against my nature. If the desire did not already exist in my mind,
the weapon would have had nothing to build on.” Dominic was not
looking at me as he spoke, but at the wall, eyes unfocused, looking
into himself, tortured by his accusing memories.

“But you don’t always have that desire,” I
said. “You never even thought about it when I was at La Sapienza.”
I remembered it so clearly, the love we had created then for each
other in our minds. Dominic had had to do more of the work, as his
skill was greater. But my perceptions had been acute, sharpened by
my training. What Dominic had wanted then had been simple and
unthreatening—sexual fulfillment for both of us. We had achieved
that, despite our geographical separation. Surely, now that we were
together, we could attain it again, if only he would trust himself
to enter communion with me. “Please, Dominic, don’t let this weapon
come between us forever.”

“You’re not listening,” Dominic said, his
voice rising with the beginning of anger. “It’s not the weapon
keeping us apart; it’s me. If I hadn’t wanted to hurt you on some
level of my consciousness, I could not have done it.”

“But that’s just it!” I shouted. “You didn’t
want
to hurt me then. All that happened is we didn’t form
communion, and you didn’t know when to stop.” I blushed, his
self-control having the perverse effect of making me uncomfortable
with saying these things aloud.

“Oh,” Dominic said, “you’ll make any excuse
for me, say anything rather than admit—”

“Admit what? That I love you? That I want you
physically? I admit it.”

“Cherie,” Dominic said, “so do I want you.
But you don’t seem to recognize the danger. Our communion was
blocked, and you may not have been aware of what was in my
mind.”

I laughed. “Nothing. That’s what was in our
minds, yours and mine. Nothing except sex. And it wasn’t in our
minds, but in our—”

“Yes, Amalie, I understand.” Dominic shook
his head at my coarseness. “And what makes you so sure we can try
it safely now?”

“Because,” I said, “all that time in the
shelter, whatever else I may have felt, I never felt sick. The
whole time I never once felt nauseated, that I had to throw
up.”

“That’s wonderful,” Dominic said, giving a
harsh laugh. “A real testimonial. I can honestly say that I don’t
make the woman I love vomit.”

“No, Dominic,” I said. “You don’t know what
this means. Every other man or woman, no matter how attractive they
are or how much I like them, I always feel sick when they try to
make love to me. It’s something to do with my gift, I think. That’s
why I rejected Tomasz Liang and Matilda Stranyak at La Sapienza.
You’re the only person who ever touched me without nauseating me.
And that night, all the time we– fucked,” I stumbled over the word
but forced myself to continue, “and didn’t form communion, and it
was too much for me—I never felt so much as queasy. Not once.”

“My poor love,” Dominic said. “No wonder you
couldn’t enjoy the Midwinter Festival.” He was tempted to comfort
me, thought better of it, and stood looking helpless.

“Don’t you see?” I said. “If anything had
been seriously wrong between us, I would have felt sick. But it was
just our bodies acting without our minds. Now that we’re away from
the weapon’s influence, able to form communion, everything should
be all right.”

“It may not mean that much,” Dominic said.
“It might prove only that we share a physical communion, not that
we can control it.”

I approached Dominic while he spoke, reaching
up to put my arms around his neck, but he backed away. “No, Amalie,
don’t do this to me.”

Whatever happens, I love you
, I
thought to him, staring into his eyes. He tried to retreat, to back
out the door, but there was still some communion between us, and I
held him in it while I wriggled out of my nightgown at the
shoulders and pushed it down, freeing my breasts, then my hips,
stepping daintily out of the shimmering puddle of silk when it
reached the floor. As I had hoped, Dominic became instantly erect,
could not contain his reaction to the sight of me.

“No, Amalie.” It was barely a whisper.

I took the chance to inch closer, until we
were almost touching. “Put your arms around me,” I said.

Dominic didn’t move. He stood very still,
only his deep breaths betraying the strain he was under. He
resisted as well as he could, but I used my newly-acquired skills
and forced him. It was funny, this tall, powerful man, and small,
delicate woman, in a kind of mental wrestling match. Eventually I
won a partial victory. Dominic’s arms moved, in the jerky, awkward
way of something done involuntarily, and he held me—too tightly. He
relaxed slightly, able to laugh as I used my
crypta
again to
loosen his grasp.

“You see?” I said. “I’m not completely at
your mercy. I think you can make love to me gently, but if you
can’t, if you try to hurt me, I can stop you.”

Dominic was not so easily conquered; he had
merely been caught off guard. As I snuggled into his embrace,
lifting my face to be kissed, expecting any moment to be picked up,
deposited on the bed and ravished, not in an unthinking fog of
lust, but with love, I did a stupid thing. I shut my outer eyelids,
hiding the inner ones and loosening the tie of communion. Dominic
seized the moment of freedom, pushed me away and ran for the door,
pulling it shut behind him.

“We will talk when I return,” he said from
the safety of the corridor. “About this, and the child, and—”

I tugged on the doorknob, but Dominic was
holding the door fast shut. A woman’s voice sounded from the far
end of the hallway. “Let Dominic go to bed, Amalie,” Eleonora said,
her voice rising and falling with the exaggerated emphasis one uses
in dealing with a badly-behaved child. “You may sleep in, but the
rest of us must rise early tomorrow.”

Dominic released the knob suddenly and the
door flew inward, exposing me, naked and flushed, to Eleonora’s
sardonic gaze. Most of my bruises were gone, but my thighs retained
the last yellow-green traces of their rough treatment. Eleonora
looked me over, seeming to zero in on these areas. “Very lovely,
Amalie,” she said. “But not the sort of thing to attract Dominic,
as you will discover.” Her tinkling laugh grated on my nerves all
night.

Reluctantly I acknowledged another reason for
Eleonora’s dislike. She and Josh had not been able to have
children. They had tried for years, every false hope ending in
disappointment, her seminary work never quite making up for the
deprivation, no child to show for their brave marriage of working
partners. My being Terran was not just an excuse for Eleonora’s
prejudice. It was the reason for my immediate conception of
Dominic’s child. We were not closely related, through centuries of
intermarriage between the same few families, and were not cursed
with the resulting infertility that had afflicted so many marriages
between the ’Graven, like Eleonora’s, and Edwige Ertegun’s.

My pregnancy now could only exacerbate
Eleonora’s bitterness, and my own nature had enough in common with
hers that I sympathized with her more spiteful emotions, understood
them all too well. And I could admire, even share, her genuine care
for her brother’s happiness. It was her way of showing it, as if I
wasn’t fully human, or not an adult, not fit to be Dominic’s
companion, that had created an immediate enmity between us.

I tossed and turned most of the night,
feeling, in a faint hangover of communion, some of Dominic’s
choking frustration from our failed reconciliation. Sometime around
dawn I fell into a disturbed sleep and when I awoke, late in the
morning, Dominic, and Eleonora and Josh, were long gone.

T
he next week passed with
the speed of a holiday in paradise. Pregnancy enhances one’s gift
and its effects; despite our unsatisfying farewells, the powerful
mental connection between Dominic and me remained, stretching and
thinning like plastic film as the physical distance between us
increased, but not breaking. I could enjoy the comfort of it,
unspoiled by any immediate worry for his safety. It would take
several days for the Aranyi party to cross the mountains and reach
Andrade, more time after that for all the ’Graven forces to join up
and coordinate their counterattack on the rebels.

My condition revitalized my body as well.
Once I had slept out the exhaustion of travel, I adjusted to the
altitude and I had no morning sickness. With my energy restored,
and with no demands of work, I had leisure to explore another kind
of existence, what few Terrans had ever had the privilege to
observe: the daily life of a ’Graven lord’s realm.

Aranyi Fortress with its extensive grounds
was more like a small town than one family’s house. An inner wall
enclosed the castle and front and back courtyards. Beyond these was
a large expanse with many smaller buildings, encircled by an outer
wall. Guards controlled gatehouses at the entrances, as farm
laborers and crafts people passed to and from their work in the
fields, the pastures and the villages beyond.

The place teemed with people, in the
corridors and workrooms, in the outbuildings and gardens, all
streaming into the great hall twice a day for meals. Life went on
in its natural cycles, with or without the master’s presence.
Dominic spent half of every year in the city on Royal Guards and
’Graven Assembly business, and Eleonora returned only for the
occasional visit, but animals and crops must be tended the year
around, land administered, buildings maintained, and the workers
must be housed and fed.

But for all the autonomous nature of this
community, nobody forgot whose property it was. Dominic was lord,
and as his betrothed, I received the benefit of the allegiance
given to him. Everywhere I went, guardroom or smithy, laundry or
mews, even the hectic kitchen, everyone curtsied or bowed, smiled
and dropped, however briefly, the task at hand, in order to greet
“Lady Amalie.”

As with Magali, my initial reaction was to
deny the title, to say, “No, I’m only Amelia Herzog, from Terra.”
Luckily I saw before making so gross an error how confusing it
would be, how insulting. Eleonora had introduced me as a Terran, as
if to undermine my admittedly temporary position, but the ploy had
backfired. Most of the staff, born and bred on Aranyi land, their
families settled in Aranyi Realm for generations, had never
traveled farther than a few miles from their home. People from the
other end of the realm were viewed with distrust; those from a
neighboring realm were strangers. City dwellers were a separate
species. A Terran was impossible to imagine, but would certainly be
recognizable, like a giant insect or a two-headed monster.

I, by contrast, was obviously ’Gravina. Apart
from the short hair, I looked exactly like the sort of bride
Dominic should have chosen, or been shackled to by his parents
years ago, and people made a simple mental adjustment. They assumed
they had misunderstood, that Lady Eleonora had merely meant I had
lived among Terrans, in the city. They knew some ’Graven had done
that, had heard of adventurers who had been to Terra itself. Men,
mostly.

The household regarded me from the start, as
my coworkers in La Sapienza, with less excuse, had come to do over
time, as the illegitimate daughter of a ’Graven lord. It was easy
to imagine my plight: for some reason unacknowledged, denied the
status of natural-born that my father’s acceptance would have
conferred, I had been unable to claim the rights of ’Gravina that
my looks and my gift obviously merited. Everyone was unfailingly
sympathetic. With the highlanders’ contempt for the lowlands, they
put every peculiarity in me down to a belief that I came from the
south or from Eclipsia City, and had led a strange life, in the
Terran Sector of the city or even off-world. It all worked in my
favor, explaining any unfamiliarity with traditional Eclipsian
ways.

Without trying, I was becoming the “Lady
Amalie” of Edwige’s invention. It was like my arrival at the
airport, the men at the baggage claim, only here it was the benign
opposite of that ugly reaction. People knew I could read their
minds, and they were delighted not to have to search for the
correct words or find the courage to speak. They had only to
envisage their genuine pleasure in the fact of their lord’s finding
a suitable wife at last, certain that their welcome and good wishes
would be perceived.

It seemed, for once, that I could not fail.
Even at La Sapienza, where I had been given every benefit of the
doubt, had had every allowance made for me as a beginner and a
foreigner, I had not been able to adapt to the life of a seminary
worker, to conform to the expectations of the others. Here, at
Aranyi, there were no complicated skills to master, no duties to
perform. My growing fluency in the language, always easier for
telepaths, as we perceive the meaning of the thoughts before they
are spoken, made the illusion effortless to sustain. Each day I
grew more confident. With Eleonora’s malice perversely protecting
me, I was free to come and go, to ask any question without arousing
suspicion, to observe all the fascinating work of the household. I
could look and talk and wonder to everyone.

The fortress alone was bigger than any
building I had seen on Eclipsis, apart from ’Graven Fortress, a
cross between a castle and a palace. The walls were solid and
thick, massive blocks of stone fitted together in a sophisticated
design that kept enemies and bad weather out while allowing air to
circulate and conserving heat. Like any defensive structure, it had
a strong back. Three sides of the building were freestanding, while
the fourth, up to the third floor, was built into the mountain.
Different rooms on the same level might look out on a steep drop or
be underground, depending on which side they faced.