Wedding Read online

  Dominic was different. He had developed a perverse preference over the years, finding an unwilling boy more exciting than a compliant one, even though, or perhaps because, he was handsome and sophisticated enough to attract many boys, and men, eager for his attention.

  I thought of it as something Dominic did with his own sex, not with women, and I had never feared for my safety. Last night’s events had not changed my mind. We had not been in communion; he could not have sensed my pain, any more than I seemed to have experienced it myself while behaving with such abandon. If he had not felt my discomfort, he could not have enjoyed it, could not have been deliberately inflicting it in order to heighten his own pleasure.

  “You haven’t lost me or made me hate you,” I said. He was blocking me again, so that I was obliged to speak. I edged closer to him on the bench, opening the blanket, hoping to wrap it around us both. The touch of skin would reactivate the simple communion between us, enough to avoid these misunderstandings.

  Dominic turned his head and forced himself to look at my body. “No?” he said. “Then you are more accommodating than you should be.” He used, derisively, the word that had tormented me in La Sapienza, where I had been unable to respond in the required way to the sexual needs of my coworkers.

  “Oh, fuck!” I said, as Dominic moved away from me on the bench.

  “No, thank you,” he said, “I think we’ve had enough of that for one night.” He was being deliberately offensive, creating a mental distance between us to reinforce the safety of the physical one.

  I was too tired to try to initiate communion again. And furious. Whether at Dominic for his hopelessness, or myself for my passivity, I wasn’t yet ready to decide. I had been so certain that being with Dominic was the right choice for me. I had made excuses for him from the start, when he had “visited” me at La Sapienza, making love to me telepathically for everyone to overhear. Now I was trying again, hoping to find an explanation, an alternative to what I had suspected all along, that we had no business being a couple. A nobleman and a swordsman, tall and proud, lord of a vast territory with the power of life and death over hundreds of people, a man whose usual choice of partner would be someone of his own sex—what would he want with a small, soft woman like me?

  I had told myself that communion like ours did not have to be sexual, and no doubt that was true, in theory. But in our case it drew us together inexorably, against our instincts. And here we were after our first night of physical union, with me bruised and shaken, Dominic suicidal from remorse.

  This simply couldn’t be, I thought. It couldn’t turn out like this. Tears came to my eyes. There had been nothing but failure in my life: on Terra, at La Sapienza, and now with Dominic.

  Dominic was still crying, but quietly, his eyes wide open, staring straight ahead. He blinked several times, following my thoughts as I had them. Eventually he began to look around, found belt and scabbard, replaced the sword, and handed it all to me. “Here,” he said. “You carry this until we get back to La Sapienza.”

  “No,” I said, dropping the whole heavy apparatus on the table and pushing it away. “I’m not going back to La Sapienza.” The thought of crawling back there, battered and defeated, was almost as terrible as using Dominic’s sword against him. I was not ready to conclude that Dominic and I had failed like everything else. Not yet.

  It wasn’t only stubborn pride. I had insisted on going with Dominic despite the warnings, because I wanted to be with him. I had never wanted anything so much in my life. I still wanted him. I wanted the real Dominic, the one whom I had known unreservedly, in communion, for months now—the one who loved me. Those feelings we had shared, intimacy so all-encompassing it was like inhabiting the other’s being, love that was almost maternal in its total acceptance, its desire to spare the other every sorrow or danger—I couldn’t believe they were false or imaginary.

  Dominic shook his head at my denial. “There is no alternative but La Sapienza. I would take you to Eclipsia City if you prefer, if it were not for this—this plague from Andrade, this damned Eris crisis.” He made the sign against evil as he spoke, using his left hand, the sword hand, the side of power, the same sign the baggage handlers had used against me on my arrival at Eclipsis’s airport.

  It was the gesture more than any words that stabbed at my brain, like the point of a knife in my sore flesh. Dominic is not superstitious. He is an officer in the Royal Guards, a warrior, with more faith in his own proven abilities than in the uncertain protection of the supernatural. But as he held his closed fist with thumb and little finger protruding, I was able no longer to repress my memories of last night.

  Eris. The image had appeared to me all the while that Dominic fucked me without thought or awareness: a goddess of light, covered but still radiant, shining through the vessel that would contain her energy, lightning shooting from her fingertips, her hair undulating tendrils of flame. Eris had infiltrated our minds, putting her own presence in place of our communion and disabling our crypta, so that I hadn’t even been able to make the inner flame. Dominic’s silvery eyelids had reflected the image, I recalled with a shudder. Not a reflection, but a projection outward of what was in his brain, behind his eyes. I should have seen my own face mirrored, but I had seen her, Eris, blazing and burning and destroying.

  She—it, I corrected myself—it was a weapon, and the people using her—it—were rebels, somewhere in the renegade realm of Andrade, on the other side of the mountains from Aranyi. Eris was simply a thing, a prism, a piece of glass like the ones in the handles of the daggers Dominic and I carried, only bigger. It took a large group of telepaths to control her. It, I thought irritably. It.

  But it had been she last night, blazing and blinding, overpowering us with her rage.

  Eris was not simply a large prism. I admitted the truth to myself. Eris was a telepathic weapon, wielded by the gifted, people like me and Dominic. Eris acted on the mind, the emotions, finding the dark side of those under her influence, freeing it from the control most of us manage to impose, using it the way a modern weapon harnesses laser power or nuclear energy. That’s how these weapons work, by combining individual hateful thoughts to create a destructive telepathic force.

  The force Eris used, the source of her extraordinary powers, was anger—an emotion that Dominic and I possessed in abundance.

  This insight, oddly, gave me hope. Dominic and I had cultivated anger, each of us in our separate worlds, over years of growing up gifted, different and damaged. We lived with anger every day and knew how to manage it. If we had overindulged in its effects, now and in the past, we were veterans, survivors. I doubted there were any two gifted people in the whole of Eclipsis better qualified to defeat this weapon.

  Dominic was going home to Aranyi, not simply to escort me for a visit, but because he must marshal troops to fight this threat to the ’Graven Realms. He was taking me with him only because I had not wanted to stay any longer at La Sapienza.

  “But that explains it!” I said. “We were under the control of– of– of that thing.” I was unable to speak the name aloud, too conscious of Dominic’s fear, and my own.

  Dominic’s grating laugh shattered my fragile returning confidence. “No,” he said. “We’re not close enough to feel the full effect of the weapon. Last night we were merely without our true communion.” With no telepathic connection between us, Dominic had simply had sex with my body as with anyone he felt no love for: not with deliberate cruelty, but with his great strength unchecked, making no effort to be gentle, and indifferent to his partner’s pleasure.

  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.