Wedding Page 10

  After making a few courteous inquiries, about my seminary training and my family and background, the answers to which I kept as vague as possible without being deliberately rude, they went on with their own talk. It was obvious to them that Margrave Aranyi was making a love match, marrying a nonentity, illegitimate and landless. I sensed it in their minds, by the very lack of specific thoughts. Knowing I was gifted, but with no other clue to my origins, they shrugged mentally, suppressing any impolite conjectures, deciding it was none of their concern and hoping for the best for their overlord’s sake.

  Only, surprisingly, from Lady Ladakh, mother of the hated Drusilla who had tormented me in my early days at La Sapienza, did I detect some sympathy. A follower of the Christian faith and naturally reserved, she too had been an outsider, and had adapted to the demands of marriage into the insular northern gentry and the rigors of life in the mountains. If there is communion between husband and wife, she thought to me, the sadness of her widowhood still apparent after ten years, everything else will sort itself out in time.

  Dominic ate and drank with his right hand, his left, still gloved, lying palm up in his lap. He managed well, weeks of practice making him proficient. When he needed help, for cutting meat or buttering bread, Stefan anticipated his needs perfectly, doing it all so unobtrusively that people saw it merely as the respectful, devoted regard of a well-brought-up young man for a revered older lover, and smiled and nodded their approbation. The Ormondes, proud of their son’s promotion from undistinguished cadet to the companion of Margrave Aranyi, said nothing overt, but took every opportunity to call attention, by questions about procedure in the ’Graven Military Academy or observations on the difficulties of arranging suitable matches for younger sons, to Stefan’s position.

  The household, distracted by Dominic’s interesting announcements, noticed nothing amiss with the master. People continued to call out to Dominic during the meal, and he replied happily and graciously, the fact that he was eating with the wrong hand lost in the general air of celebration. Everyone living at Aranyi had been aware of my situation, but Dominic’s toast and subsequent declaration of my pregnancy and early due date validated their assumptions, made them real. The families and troops from the surrounding landholdings, for whom Dominic’s approaching marriage and fatherhood were news, were grateful not to have been left out of the secret.

  There were, thankfully, few opportunities for Dominic and me to exchange more than pleasantries, although I was not pleasant. Dominic tried once or twice, asking me how I had spent my time while he was away, and was I comfortable in my room, to which I replied, “Very nicely, thank you,” and, “Yes.” As I blocked our communion, and as the constant interruptions intruded, Dominic shrugged and gave up. Later, tonight, he promised, I will explain.

  “Tonight,” I said, “is one meal too late.” I rose the moment I had finished dessert.

  Dominic put his right hand on my arm. “Wait, Amalie,” he said. “It’s inconsiderate to end the household’s festival dinner so soon.”

  I curled my lip with indignation. “I’m not—” I said, but I saw that as soon as I had risen and thrown my napkin down, everyone in the whole damn hall had stood up, some people hastily cramming in a last mouthful of pie or tossing back a quick swig of wine before regretfully moving away from the table. “Oh, shit.” I sat down again. “That never happened before.”

  “No,” Dominic said. “You did not sit at the high table while I was away, did you?” He saw my answering shake of my head. “And you were not proclaimed my betrothed then.”

  “Everyone thought I was.”

  “Yes. But the announcement changes it from a guess to a fact.” Dominic studied my frowning face in the ensuing cacophony of benches scraping on the stone floors, laughter and calls for refills of empty cups as people, seeing me now seated, took their own seats again and resumed the meal. “And if everyone thought you were my betrothed, why are you so angry that I said so?”

  “Because you’re supposed to ask me first!” I shouted. Stefan looked up, distracted from dribbling sweetened heavy cream over his second dish of cloudberries; his parents, the Ladakhs and the Galloways became suddenly animated in their previously languid argument over the relative merits of farming and grazing on mountain soil. Several people at the nearer tables glanced our way, smiled at the ’Graven already having their first lovers’ quarrel and dutifully returned to their own desserts.

  Dominic’s face looked as murderous as I felt. “And just when, exactly,” he asked, “was I supposed to do that? Out in the courtyard, in front of everybody? Or would you rather I’d called you into the bathroom? ‘Oh, by the way, Amalie, will you marry me, and while you’re here would you wash my back?’ ”

  He was going to make me laugh, and I refused to let him break down my wall of righteous anger. “You could have held off on the announcement, and asked me after dinner, right after that explanation you promised.”

  “And go through the entire meal with people wondering if you were just my mistress, or if I’d changed my mind while I was away?” Dominic’s eyebrows rose in his most supercilious expression. “I doubt very much that’s what you wanted.”

  “You have no idea what I want!” I was shouting again, and this time people were able to hear, as the meal had reached its natural end. I switched to telepathic communication. You’re so sure of my answer you think you don’t have to bother asking. I’ve fallen at your feet like every other conquest, and all you have to do is declare that you’ve deigned to raise this one up to the exalted heights of ’Gravina Aranyi. There was no excuse for my affected manner; because of my pregnancy I drank only water at my meals.

  Dominic’s eyebrows rose higher than ever, although now there was an amused twitch at the corner of his mouth. Before he could find something mollifying to say another thought struck him, one not so agreeable, and a look of fear entered his eyes. It’s the injury, isn’t it, he said, so certain of the answer to this that he made it a statement, not a question.

  “What?” I was shocked out of telepathic speech. I had almost forgotten Dominic’s wound; the lingering pain I had grown accustomed to had surprisingly evaporated rather than increased with Dominic’s return. “Of course it’s not that!” I glared at him. “You really do have a low opinion of me. Why exactly do you want to marry me anyway?”

  Dominic looked somewhat appeased. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said in a whisper. “After dinner, alone.” He breathed suggestively into my ear, attempted a caress, using crypta, of my breasts, covered only by the gauzy lace of my silk sheath.

  “Thank you very much,” I said, “but an after-dinner fuck isn’t my idea of a marriage proposal.” My nipples were conspicuously hard, the aureoles puckered from his mental fondling, and I turned away, hoping to hide the fact of my unavoidable arousal at his touch.

  “It wasn’t intended to be,” Dominic answered the back of my neck. “It was supposed to be a healing session.”

  I was surprised into turning around again. He lifted his left hand with his right, cradled it against his chest, his first open acknowledgement of his condition. “This is not an ordinary wound,” he said. “If it were, it could have been healed immediately; with so many telepaths gathered together, there were healers enough. But this was caused by a telepathic weapon, by a force of concentrated hate and anger. To heal it, I need love—communion.” He stared opaquely at me, his thoughts, like his face, unreadable. “An after-dinner fuck with my betrothed, for example.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “I never joke about communion,” he said. “Or fucking. At least not at Midsummer.”

  “Couldn’t Stefan—”

  “Not all by himself, no,” Dominic said. A fond smile changed his face from the hardened, pain-wracked mask of the soldier to a lover’s mellow vacuity. “He’s very young and inexperienced.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “for making that important distinction. And what makes you think I can do it
?”

  Dominic shook his head as if to expel water from his ears. “Would it be so unpleasant, Amalie, to try?”

  I had wanted that very thing, I remembered, had attempted to force him into my bed before he went away. And right now the touch of his hand on me, even the lightest mental caress, had made me faint with desire. I looked into his silvery gray eyes, saw genuine anxiety, and sighed. “No, Dominic,” I said. “It’s not unpleasant, you know that. I just wish—”

  “My lord!” An old man called from halfway down the center line of tables. “I hear the rebels put up a real fight. Not like last time!”

  Ranulf stood up. “Be quiet, old man,” he said. “Can’t you see Margrave Aranyi is with his lady?” Somewhere along the trails back to Aranyi Ranulf appeared to have changed his opinion of me.

  The old man wheezed a phlegmy laugh. “Plenty of time for that,” he said. “The master’s got all night for that. I want to hear about the battle.”

  He wasn’t the only one. While the tables were cleared and disassembled, the tablecloths gathered up and shaken over the midden, the floor swept and the dishes washed, Dominic was drawn, reluctantly at first, into an account of his recent adventures. Ranulf tried to shield him from the most probing questions, but in the short interval of work required between the end of dinner and the beginning of the dancing, a crowd of men converged on Dominic, eager to hear of the action they had missed. Old men, like the loudmouth who had called to Dominic, young boys not yet of age, and some genuine professional women—soldiers—surrounded Dominic like fish around a piece of bread, nibbling away at his every modest word.

  It went against his nature to boast, and there was little to tell that would do him credit. But here, in his household, people took the slightest act of valor as a new heroic epic in the making. With a glass of whiskey in his right hand, Ranulf interposing the helpful elaboration, Dominic grew increasingly at ease and loquacious. He had forgotten, as had I, what it was I had been about to tell him I wished.

  At another time, I too would have liked to hear about his war, even if it was no Iliad. But tonight, our bitter words in my mind, I preferred to sit quietly for a while and think. I would learn far more from Dominic directly, if and when we ever had that promised chance to be alone. I leaned across the empty chair to Stefan and caught his eye. A boy’s face; he looked as if he had just turned sixteen, earning the right to carry the sword that seemed too heavy for him on this very campaign. “I bet you could add a thing or two to that account,” I said to encourage him.

  Stefan blushed at my mild praise. He really was impossibly good-looking, especially remarkable in one so young, when most boys his age seem like genetic experiments gone wrong. “Not really, Mistress,” he said, addressing me correctly as an unmarried woman of uncertain rank. “It wasn’t much of a battle. Afterwards Dominic– I mean Margrave Aranyi– said he’d have to be tortured to get him to talk about it.” He stared in unconcealed surprise at Dominic amid the admiring throng.

  “Yes, well, you see,” I said, “here at Aranyi we’re experts at torture. All the whiskey, and the boys fluttering their eyelashes at him. Any man would break under the strain.” I saw I was making Stefan uncomfortable, and to curb my sarcasm changed the subject. “Are you far from home?” I asked, although I knew the answer. From my work with Berend I had learned that Ormonde was the nearest independent gentry holding to Aranyi.

  “No, Mistress,” Stefan said. “My father owns some land less than a day’s ride down the mountain.” A gentleman always understates. He owns “some land,” not the largest estate this side of La Sapienza. He is Sir Karl at first introductions, not the Lord of Ormonde, until it is necessary for clarification. Stefan, a middle child in a large family, appeared to have learned the gentlemanly code well.

  Stefan looked nervously in the direction of his parents, who were absorbed like the others in Dominic’s narrative, although Sir Karl tore his attention away long enough to give a small nod of permission to his son. Probably deciding it was acceptable for Stefan to speak with this unknown Mistress Amalie on festival night, rather than making any judgment on the content of our conversation.

  I wanted to find out what I could about Dominic’s wound—how he had gotten it, what the original damage had been, how his abilities and his mood had been affected before coming home—but knew I would have to proceed cautiously with this young man. Our moment of intense communion in the courtyard had not carried over to inevitable familiarity. If anything, falling so suddenly into such a revealing relationship had caused Stefan to retreat into a protective, adolescent shyness. And there were other obstacles.

  Stefan had all the reticence of his class, to which were added the hefty additional shares from being a cadet and Dominic’s beloved. He had spent his entire short life taught not to complain, about fatigue or hunger, or at frustrations in lessons or weapons training. Once at the ’Graven Military Academy, and elevated by Dominic’s interest, his whole being would revolve around service—to comrades, officers, Dominic and the world of ’Graven. He would tell me nothing he thought Dominic wanted kept hidden, and if I pushed I would lose any chance of winning his trust.

  “I knew your sister Rosalie at La Sapienza,” I said, finding a safe approach. Everyone uses relatives as an opening, hoping to find a connection between families. Glossing over my dislike of that little toady to Drusilla Ladakh, I talked at length of seminary life, from which Stefan had graduated not so long ago. “I also knew your brother’s betrothed,” I said, when we had exhausted this topic. “Matilda Stranyak invited me to her wedding, but I imagine I missed it after all this time.”

  “No, Mistress,” Stefan said, grateful for the easier conversational material. “My parents have insisted on a summer wedding, but Petrus wants to keep his freedom as long as possible.” He glanced in Dominic’s direction, blushing endearingly as he recognized the unflattering implications of this sentiment while speaking to Dominic’s betrothed, and stammered an apology. “It’s an arranged marriage,” he said, recovering quickly. “Not like yours.” He blushed even darker, caught out at last in an intimate thought he ought not to express.

  “Never mind,” I said, “men don’t always get what they want, assuming they know what it is.” We sat in companionable silence while Stefan contemplated my last reply and we listened to the hubbub around us. “There must have been some danger,” I said to draw him out, as Dominic’s strangely hollow account wound down, “if only because of the difference in fighting miners and smiths instead of regular soldiers.”

  “That’s what Dominic– I mean Margrave Aranyi– said,” Stefan answered with enthusiasm. “But it was easier than training, in a way, because once it started we didn’t have time to think.” It had just taken a little prodding to get past the constraint and the modesty of his gentry upbringing; he was thrilled to talk to someone about his first battle. He told me more about the fighting than Dominic did for years afterward, unaware in his innocence that he was spilling his lover’s secrets. “We took hundreds of prisoners,” he said, his face changing, a mature look of distaste coming over it, like Eleonora’s when she arrived home. “It should have been over then, but that’s when Dominic– I mean Margrave Aranyi– was wounded, and then it was terrible.”

  “Please,” I said, not wanting to derail his train of thought but hoping to help him over the rough spot, “call him Dominic when you’re talking with me. And I don’t understand. How did he get hurt?”

  Stefan, trying to keep his composure, was looking at the floor, not at me, or he might have realized his mistake. “Dominic was interrogating prisoners,” he said. “Using crypta in forced communion. I’d never seen that before. And one of them had something in a metal case. Dominic asked him what it was, although he must have known.” Stefan looked up now, into my eyes, no longer considering whether to talk or not, but seeking comfort. “Anyone with any gift at all could tell it was a piece of that weapon the rebels had used, but Dominic made the man open the case to show it, and then
he took it.”

  I didn’t dare breathe, wouldn’t take my eyes from Stefan’s tormented face, the bowed shoulders and clasping hands. “Dominic held it in his bare hand, the way a seer would,” Stefan’s voice had a tearful throb as he continued, “and he held it up to the light and tried to– to– make communion with it. And it burned his hand, and up his arm, and he screamed, like some of the wounded, only worse, because he was screaming with crypta, not out loud, so only some of us heard it.” He was ready to break down in sobs as he recalled the moment, his own sympathetic pain a dull ache in his mind.

  “How did you save him?” I asked.

  Stefan shook his head. “But, Mistress, I didn’t! You see him.” He inclined his head in Dominic’s direction, still chatting with his admirers. “He can’t use his hand at all, and the arm just hangs there.”

  “No, but how did you get the weapon away from him, stop it from burning him up completely? Or taking him over?”

  Stefan flushed again, from a belated realization that he had said far too much. “I don’t remember,” he lied. It was, of course, hopeless, but touching all the same. He had betrayed Dominic’s trust, the solemn, if totally misguided oath sworn to his first, awe-inspiring lover, and he was determined to keep back what little remained unrevealed.

  He was not yet fully aware that between me and any true love of Dominic’s there was almost no such thing as secrecy, a disconcerting or delightful fact, depending on the circumstances. I would find out easily enough, when I cared to. For now, I knew only this: that Dominic had wounded himself, that what I had grieved over as the ruin of a life that meant everything to me, Dominic had chosen, through stubbornness, pride or just plain idiocy.

  Stefan saw my face as I absorbed this information, and his youthful devotion turned to childlike fear. “Mistress,” he said, “Dominic made me swear to say nothing. I promised him.” He was pleading with me not to betray him as he had betrayed Dominic.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I won’t say a word to Margrave Aranyi. Not one word.”