“You’ve cared for me all these wretched days…Iero’s hand of mercy…and I so disgusting in my perversions. I’d no idea that I had…I don’t know what to say.”
She didn’t run away. Scarce controlling my urge to wrestle her back into my arms, I could not but shove the wadded bedclothes tighter into my treacherous parts and shut my foolish mouth. A warrior woman of Evanore. She likely had a knife to hand—though where hidden in that gown I dared not imagine. What business had she in red silk instead of her habergeon? Yet truly, mail as sturdy as her father’s might not have resisted my urgency this day. Her father…Now there was a remembrance made my shaft begin to shrink.
The silence stretched long enough, I ventured a glimpse to make certain she was no stray illusion after all. She stood at the wide window, where the unexpected brilliance of sunlight split by mullioned panes had set off my befuddled misbehavior. Red gown in disarray, bronze hair tousled, she folded her arms and pressed one hand against her lips as her shoulders shook.
Just as I, shamed and regretful, returned my attention to the rumpled sheets, muzzled laughter burst that fine barrier and brightened the room even as the sunlight. “Dear Brother Valen,” she said, when her first spasms had eased, “when you wake, you wake. Though I must appreciate, and approve, your gracious conscience, I don’t know if I will ever, ever, forgive you for stepping back. I’ve imagined this occasion since I first took you walking out of Gillarine. Were I living in my grandmother’s day, I might have carted you off to my fastness that very night! Somehow you cause a woman to lose her mind and forgo all other…yearnings. Indeed your fingers carry magic.”
Unable to keep my gaze from her, I gaped, uncomprehending.
She shook her head in mimed rue. “What’s more, honesty requires me to confess that this is the first time I have visited you this tenday of your stay at Renna. Other tasks have occupied my time. It is Renna’s physician, Saverian, you must thank for your care. Though I’ll warn you: Play your finger tricks on her, and she’ll have you a eunuch before you can sneeze.”
The astringent angel. How could I ever have believed that sexless messenger of the heavenly sphere to be Elene, who was abundant earth itself? I felt ridiculous…and marvelous…and then, of a sudden, weak as a plucked chicken, as the sunlight faded into flat gray.
Elene produced a comb from her pocket and began to tame her hair. Chilled and chastened under my rumpled sheets and blankets, I curled up around my regrets and considered the mysterious certainty that had halted so fine a pursuit. I was no diviner. The only thing I’d ever predicted with accuracy was whether a sick or wounded man was like to live or die.
Life or death… I closed my eyes and recalled that core of heat beneath Elene’s silken skin…that core of life…My eyes popped open again. “Oh, good lady!”
My face as hot as the color of her garments, I motioned her near. What I had discerned might be more dangerous than any magical indiscretion. She approached my bedside, brows raised in amused speculation, her face at a level with mine. Not even the spider on the windowsill could have heard my whisper. “Mistress Elene, do you know you are with child?”
Clearly not. For a second time the sun vanished behind burgeoning clouds, and I existed once more entirely within the bounds of disastrous winter.
“You’re wrong! No god would be so cruel…so foul…the Mother would not permit it!” She spun in place, her arms flailing in helpless frenzy, until her bloodless fists gripped a warming iron and she smashed it onto the bed not a tenquat from my head. “Damnable, accursed madman! How could you know?”
I didn’t take the warming iron so much for a personal assault, as for a measure of shocked desperation. Her earlier confessions affirmed the child was not mine, begotten in some lunatic frenzy I could not remember. I kept a wary eye out for a second strike. “I’ve always had this instinct—”
I began to say it was a scrap of talent inherited from my mother, the diviner. But returning memory swept through me as a spring wind through an open door, swirling away dead beliefs like dried leaves. My hands trembled, no longer from frustrated lust, but from evidence revisited and truth laid bare. Josefina de Cartamandua-Celestine, drunken diviner, wife of Claudio, was not my mother.
“Valen, are you ill? Did I strike you? Holy Mother, I’m sorry. You’ve been so—I didn’t mean—Let me find Saverian.”
The warming iron clanked onto the floor, the noise making me wince. Elene streaked out of the room in a blaze of scarlet, while I flung off the bedclothes and examined my naked flesh. What did I expect to see? Blue dragons tearing through my skin? Surely the doulon sickness had unstrung my reason.
But my mad grandfather’s words popped into my head as clearly as I’d heard them that last night at my family’s home. Everything is secrets and contracts…I stole from them. A treasure they did not value. I had the right, but they could not forgive the loss of it…Only, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria was not my grandfather. He was my father.
I stumbled to my feet and strode the length of the chamber, an expansive room of whitewashed stone walls, of clean curves and arches and broad paned windows. Swelling anger gave strength to limbs too long cramped and idle. My skin buzzed as if I’d been buried in a barrel of flies.
Thou canst not know! He’ll think I told thee…Claudio exacted such a price…keeping me from thee. His babbling made sense now. I could reconstruct the history: Janus de Cartamandua, whose pureblood wife was long dead, had brought home an infant, a child of his own body, and struck a bargain with his son, Claudio. Raise this child as your own, Janus would have said, and I’ll not announce to the world that the Cartamandua bloodline is corrupted. I will even supply unimpeachable birth witnesses for the Registry.
Claudio, furious, filled with hate for the man who put him in such a position, would have agreed in a heart’s pulse…on condition that Janus stay away…never tell the child the truth…never interfere. For seven-and-twenty years Claudio had pretended to the world that the loathsome child, whose very existence promised ruin to the family, was his own pureblood offspring. And all the anger he dared not show for his own father, he had expended on the child he despised—the son of Janus de Cartamandua and a Dané named Clyste.
“Spirits of night…” Truth pierced my heart like a sword of fire, as painful as any remnant of my madness: I had heard my true mother’s voice. Beyond a barrier of mystery in Gillarine’s cloister garth, I had felt the pulse of her lingering life…experienced her grief and wordless tenderness, heard her music that had touched places within me that I didn’t know existed. But I’d not known it was she, imprisoned for Janus’s crime…trapped, condemned to slow fading. So he had described her fate. Now she was dead, and I could never know her. And I…
I propped my hands on a long bare table of scraped pine, my whole body shaking.
“Return to your bed, and I can keep the others away from you for a while longer.”
In an arched doorway stood a tall whip of a woman, dressed in riding leathers. Though her height spoke contrariwise, her nose, as long and straight as my own, her skin, the hue of hazelnuts, and her hair, straight, black, and heavy, tightly bound in a thick braid, testified unmistakably to Aurellian descent. Pureblood or very near. Tangled as I was in the unraveling of long deception and a loneliness that threatened to unman me, I had no capacity to guess who she might be.
“On the other hand, if you roam the halls of Renna, I’ll take no responsibility for the consequences, especially if you insist on wearing naught but your skin. The housemaids rarely see such sights. Evanori are a modest people.”