Wedding Read online

  “Don’t waste your energy,” I said.

  “I could use a little help with the boots,” he said, smiling.

  “How dare you!” I screamed at him, jumping up in my rage. “How dare you let me spend weeks sick with worry, feeling sorry for you, and all the time you’d done it to yourself! I thought you might want to die, that you’d want me to help you kill yourself, and you bring me in here and ask me to help you with your boots.” I was becoming incoherent. “Stefan may worship you no matter how stupidly you behave, he’s only sixteen, but as you pointed out, I’m so much older. I know better.”

  “He told you, I see,” Dominic said. “I thought he might.”

  “Don’t blame an innocent boy for your crazy suicidal temperament,” I said. I slapped at him, flailing my arms, battering against his naked chest, crying and shrieking. If it had been any other night, people might have burst in, ’Graven or not, to save the master from this deranged woman, but tonight the shouts merged into all the laughter and squeals, the noisy lovemaking from the rooms around us.

  Dominic took it all in silence, letting me strike him and push him. It had little effect except to arouse him further. His erection threatened to pop the buttons he had not had a chance to undo, and he caught his breath with a gasp at my last ringing blow to his face. This time he grabbed my wrist with his right hand and held it away. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ll have me too hot to go slow, and after our last time I will not let myself lose control.”

  The violence excited him, as I ought to have known it would. He had tried to subdue the inner demon that made him mistreat his partners. He had never been troubled by the fact that violence against him was also stimulating; the situation arose so infrequently. “You’re sick,” I said.

  “Sick with desire,” he said. He didn’t let go of my arm, but pulled me closer. He grappled me down to sit beside him again on the bed, and he held me in some way that I couldn’t free myself. Too late, I understood that he was doing it with crypta. If I had guessed, I might have been able to avoid the trap or counter his artifice with mine, but he had acted well in advance, planning his strategy, setting his snares in place. It was as if both his hands restrained me, yet he was not touching me. My arms were pinned behind my back while his one good arm was still free, and I sat at his mercy.

  He had been patient all evening, waiting, if not for my forgiveness, then at least for the openness that Midsummer should bring. The combination of reunion after long absence and the enforced celibacy of my stay in the seminary, with the drinking and dancing of the festival night, was explosive in itself. Now by putting my hands on Dominic I had accelerated the pace, brought him to the edge of wild lust.

  I was in communion with him now, could no longer resist. I saw the whole truth of which Stefan had told me only the bare outline. The weapon, whose power had disrupted our communion in the travelers’ hut, had become both an abomination and an object of compelling fascination to Dominic. He had failed in some way, like me, long ago, in his seminary training as a boy; he could not be content until he won a contest of telepathic power, proving himself worthy of our communion. When he discovered the fragment of the weapon in the prisoner’s possession he had seen it as a sign. This would be Dominic’s moment of glory, the real victory that had eluded him in the massed anonymity of the large telepathic cell and the shameful slaughter of untrained civilians and rebels.

  The weapon had beaten him, and yet in defeat Dominic had found hope. It’s a woman’s weapon, he explained now in communion. That’s why the active form of it appears as a goddess. And why it burned my sword arm. It’s symbolic, like impotence. A warning.

  Warning of what? I was curious, despite my anger.

  That I can master it only with the help of my own goddess, he answered seriously. My own sibyl. My own ladylove.

  This was not what I wanted to hear—drunken foolishness. I pulled partway out of the communion. “I am no goddess,” I said. “Not even a sibyl. And I want nothing to do with that evil thing.”

  “But you helped me bear the pain,” Dominic said. “You suffered it with me, felt the wound as I received it. Didn’t you? And once we form true communion, I’ll get over these last lingering effects of the burning.” He tried again, touching me with crypta, like a fingertip tracing the thinned lines of my lips, tight with disapproval.

  “That sounds like the same gibberish that Tomas and Matilda gave me to get me into bed with them.”

  “It’s not gibberish. It’s the truth. Even if it wasn’t right for you with them, can you deny it’s right for us to be together?”

  “So if I let you fuck me tonight, your arm will get better?” I spoke as crudely as I dared.

  Dominic’s eyes widened in surprise. “Not all at once,” he answered the question before tackling my offensive way of expressing it. “The more we let our communion flow over and through us, the stronger we’ll become. Both of us.” He thought of the words I had used. “But if that’s how you see it, I’ll leave you now and find somebody else for tonight. Would that be easier?” He loosened the grip of crypta that had held me imprisoned, and I discovered that freedom from his touch felt remarkably like the nausea we had both experienced earlier.

  “Nooo,” I said, the word coming out like a moan. I swallowed and tried to speak dispassionately. “I just can’t stop thinking of you taking that thing, knowing what it was, and wounding yourself. Stefan was distraught when he told me. And it made me so damn angry.”

  Dominic laughed at that. “I’m sorry, beloved. But don’t think of it now. Let me love you as you deserve, make up to you for our first night. Tomorrow, or the next day, we’ll deal with the rest of it.”

  And now he began, as he had promised, slowly and carefully. Having seen that the crypta hold had not displeased me, he applied it again, freeing his hand to push my gown off my shoulders, further pinioning my arms and exposing my breasts. He put his lips to the nipples, nibbling and sucking.

  “Stop it,” I said. I wanted to understand more. “Wait.” This time it had no effect. Stop it. I surrendered to the communion, in hopes of getting through to him.

  He seemed delighted with my capitulation, but he did not obey the words. He continued to play with my breasts, using his hand now, treating them like disembodied, delicate things that must not be grasped or squeezed, only brushed with a feather’s lightness. I will stop, he said, if at any time I don’t please you. In communion he would share my sensations; I could not restrain him with deceptive words, only guide him by my transparent physical responses.

  “Oh,” I moaned aloud. “Oh, please—” I was so wet I could feel the moisture pooling under me. My chest quivered and shook as I strained against the invisible bonds of crypta. At one point I inadvertently freed myself, simply by exerting the lightest force of my own gift against his that bound my wrists; but this was not at all what I wanted. Redeeming my mistake quickly, I redirected my mental energy to his purpose, ensuring that his hold did not slacken again.

  Dominic’s face shimmered in front of mine, his eyes shining silver. Should I stop? he asked, taking his hand off me. A smile hovered at the corner of his mouth.

  No! I shouted into his mind. If you stop, when I’m done with you, your left arm will be the part of you that works best.

  “Good,” he said. “Now we know where we are.” Assured of my complicity in the game, he pushed me back against the pillows. Still using his crypta in place of his left hand, he clasped my wrists above my head, as in that time in the travelers’ shelter, the one moment I had thought I could have enjoyed. He reached under my skirts and ran his right hand up and down my sticky thighs. What would you like?

  You know what I like, I said. He had just proved that, finding and recreating my one pleasurable memory from that wretched night.

  No, he said, it seems I do not. I announced our betrothal without asking. I almost got myself killed without your permission. I have learned my lesson. You must tell me. He had not waited for instructions, b
ut was stroking and exploring the outer lips of my sex with his fingers, lightly and always slowly.

  That’s very nice, I said. Do that.

  He stopped, his hand a millimeter away from my flesh; I could feel the heat, but not the actual touch.

  Oh, I moaned again. What’s wrong now? My lower body bucked and squirmed, trying to reconnect with his hand that stayed just out of reach.

  You must ask politely, he said.

  It was not all his idea. He was getting it from me, discovering a mutual thrill in pushing the boundaries of his dangerous character.

  Please, Dominic, I said. Please do that some more.

  Are you sure? he said, teasing, pausing to struggle out of his boots and open his breeches.

  Yes, please, Dominic. Please. I was near tears, both laughing and crying. Never had I known such excitement, never had I had to beg a man to go faster instead of slower.

  We had found our way, by trial and error, mostly error, but we had found it. In full communion, Dominic still holding me in his strong grip of crypta, I had to request each next step. If I didn’t beg he would cease his lovemaking altogether and watch me writhing spread-eagled on the bed, gasping and sighing. You must ask, he would say, implacable.

  As the game escalated, he dictated more of the terms: I must request things in the right order; I must use formal speech. Every time I reached the edge of climax he would find another reason to withdraw, leaving me captive and untouched for longer stretches to plead and moan. It brought us down before ascending the next peak, extended the delicious torment. He would not allow the final release for either of us until I recited some mysterious formula, but he would not tell me what it was.

  I offered to take him in my mouth since he refused to take me below. “Please, Dominic-Leandro,” I said, certain that speaking his full name, with the recognition of our intimacy it implied, would spur him to action. “Please, my Dominic-Leandro.”

  My Amalie-Katrin. Caught between temptation and disapproval, he was unable to conceal the quickening heartbeat and heavy breathing of his arousal. He had held himself in control all this time from experiencing my pleasure, but he could not contain his desire much longer. No, my love, he answered my request. That is not the way of an honorable man with his wife. Acknowledge what I am to you, and relieve us both.

  My lord husband. Thought or spoken, these were the magic words; please, my lord husband, the only phrase that satisfied him. It made him very happy to hear it, and I soon learned it made me very happy to say it. Each time I called him by that title, his gratification was visible in his face and discernible in his touch. The spell did not lose its power with repetition, instead bringing from him a more concentrated attention with each utterance, until I was so close to orgasm I could not produce the words with mouth or thoughts, and he had to pull them from my mind half-formed.

  When he entered me at last and brought us both to climax, I screamed so loud I was sure people would think a murder was being committed. But all around us, in the fortress’s many rooms and corridors, people cried out their pleasure, and no one heard us above the rest. And when he was inside me, thrusting with the great force of his love, I could think only of our connection that I hoped would never break, the rope of crypta that tied us, made me in truth his lady wife that he called me in answer to each pleading request of my lord husband.

  PART FOUR:

  HEALING

  CHAPTER 8

  We slept in light communion, the foretaste of married life to come, Dominic’s body curled around mine, a larger parenthesis enclosing a smaller one. He slept like a cat, on the edge of wakefulness, his breathing soft and regular. Dreams filtered out through his open mind, scenes from the recent conflict—telepaths forming a cell around Eleonora, the nucleus in the center; an army of men rushing toward us in ragged lines, undisciplined but fierce and determined, armed with hammers and pickaxes. Before the awful image of the Eris weapon appeared, Dominic’s thoughts jumped away, to his memory of me in my crypta test. In his dream I stood naked before ’Graven Assembly, not defiled by the Terran clothes of reality, fleshy and proud like the goddesses on the wall hangings, using my prism for the first time with supreme confidence. Dominic had seen a deeper truth of my gift than I could have known then, confronted by so many new concepts and surrounded by people who looked like strangers but had turned out to be family—irritating and frightening sometimes, but my own kind.

  I woke in the dark to the unaccustomed physical communion. Dominic was awake and alert in an instant at my slight shift of position, always the soldier primed for action. What is it? He would not risk speaking aloud. What’s the matter? His thoughts were as crisply formed as perfectly enunciated words, not slurred in half-sleep. He was already looking for his sword, hung neatly in its scabbard on a hook on the wall. He reached with his left, that a couple of hours ago had supposedly been useless.

  I stared, visualizing to myself, making sure. “Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  He sighed, lay back down. “Weeks in the field,” he said. “It’s a reflex.” His left hand grasped mine and guided it to his standing cock. I’m glad you woke me, beloved, he thought to me, since it seems I was up.

  I pulled my hand away. “You’re despicable.” I sat up, dizzy and disoriented in the middle of the night. “I’m going back to my own room.”

  “Amalie!” Dominic spoke aloud. “What is it now?”

  I resented having to tell him. “That was a very good act you put on, you and Stefan. Not using your arm, making us help you with the dancing, letting him cut your meat at dinner. I believed it, I really did. You must have had a lot of laughs, you two, planning it all, seeing what you could get a silly woman to believe.” I sat on the edge of the bed, felt with my feet for my sandals and retrieved my prism-handled dagger, after the disastrous days in the travelers’ hut never out of reach, from the bedside table. My gown and the sheath of underwear were buried somewhere in the bedclothes. Naked but for shoes and weapon, I stood up and edged to the door.

  Dominic was ahead of me, moving so quickly he was between me and the door before I had taken two steps. As we confronted each other face to chest it was like the time I had “visited” him in the ’Graven Military Academy barracks, although we were not imagining this, were not creating the physical details with our minds for our bodies to interpret as substance. Solid reality was all around us: the heavy wood of the door at Dominic’s back, the cold night air raising the hairs on my naked skin and the insistent presence of his erection that rose in front of him, pointing at me like a triumphant, mocking demonstration of his duplicity.

  “Let me go, Dominic,” I said. “I’ll spend the rest of the night in my own room, and in the morning I’ll arrange to travel back to the city.”

  Dominic went limp in an instant. “What have I done? I thought– when you broke my hold and refastened it– I thought you enjoyed it.” He searched his memories of a couple of hours ago. “By all the gods, Amalie, I know you did. And what is so terrible about that, that we pleased each other?”

  I touched the fingers of my left hand to Dominic’s miraculously healed arm. “You tricked me,” I said. “I would have been willing to make love if you’d just talked to me. But that’s too simple. You had to play on my sympathies, make me sorry for you.”

  At my touch, Dominic looked down at his own left hand. He seemed to notice it for the first time since awakening, held it up in front of his face, wiggling the fingers. “It worked!” he said, as if proving a heretical theory he had held for years, scorned by the orthodox. He laughed deep in his chest. “I knew it would. So did my sister, although it nearly killed her to admit it. None of them wanted to believe it, but they saw, when I came home. Even Ranulf changed his mind.” He was making no sense, but then none of this did.

  Applying the technical training I had learned at La Sapienza while ignoring the ethical lessons, I unsheathed my dagger, angled the faint light and the heat of the dying fire into my eyes, creatin
g a force that bumped Dominic aside like blowing an insect off a window screen. “Good night,” I said. “Or good morning. It’s been real. See you in my dreams.” I opened the door and stepped out.

  It was dark and silent in the corridor. the torches in the sconces burned down to flickering nubs. I stood for a moment getting my bearings. Another door opened farther along in the direction I must go and a man wearing only breeches slipped out of the bathroom, not bothering to button. He looked up at my involuntary squeak of dismay, grinned in delight at the sight of a naked woman—two for the price of one on Midsummer—and made a run for me.

  Dominic’s arm pulled me back inside just in time to slam the door in the man’s face. “Must I spend our entire married life rescuing you from the consequences of your bad temper?” he said. His voice lowered to a seductive purr. “I shall guard you like a captive bride from the southern realms. You will only be allowed outside wearing a burqa, and surrounded by an entire squadron of Aranyi guards—and only once a year, if you ask me nicely the way you did tonight.” He leaned against me where I stood, back to the door, hemmed me in with an arm on either side, and kissed me—not the light, dainty sips of our earlier game, but the deep tongue-thrusting grind that is a mimic of and prelude to sex. If I had had any idea of escape, of indignant rejection, the communion that this produced blasted it away.

  For what seemed like hours, Dominic pushed himself against me, his mouth on mine the focal point of our connection, but every part of me somehow touching him, until there were no separate individuals, only this one being that was the essence of our unique communion. My love, he, I—we—thought. Beloved. Let us never be divided again. My gift was still active, and when I flung my arms around Dominic’s neck in response to this dual plea, the heat from the prism made his head jerk up with a roar of pain.