Roberson, Jennifer - Cheysuli 08 (51 page)

           
I turned my face to look up at him.
"I would never—"

           
"I know." Lochiel smiled.
His eyes, in dim light, were black instead of brown. "In anything we do,
there is no shame. Do you understand? I will have it no other way. In anything
we do, there is no shame."

           
I nodded, grateful he would do so
much to discard my degradation.

           
"Good." His hands shifted.
He lifted me up. Our faces were very close. He studied mine avidly, and then he
smiled. "There is your mother in you, also. You are her daughter as
well."

           
"Aye." Though I hated to
admit it.

           
"There is much in Melusine I
find most entertaining, especially her passion. Are you the same?"

           
My face burned against his hands.

           
"Was the Cheysuli
content?"

           
I began to tremble.

           
"Did you play kitten to his
cat?"

           
"God—" I blurted.

           
Lochiel smiled. "After the hunt
tomorrow, I will come to your bed."

           
"My bed?"

           
"To destroy the Cheysuli's
seed, we will replace it with my own."

           
In my chamber, alone, where there
was no bed, I wondered if he would conjure another fitting for his state.

           
Could I burn that one, too?

           
He would simply conjure again.

           
Did he think I would submit?

           
Or would he also conjure submission?

           
I looked at the door. I looked at
the latch. No ward I made would prevent Lochiel from entering my chamber. No
defense I summoned could prevent him from entering me.

           
After the hunt.

           
After the cat is dead.

           
What would my mother say?

           
I caught back the laugh before it
became a sob.

           
I pressed my hands against my mouth
to suppress another lest I shame myself.

           
There were drugs, I knew. There were
all manner of ways.

           
I did not want the child. I desired
the child to die.

           
There were other ways than this.

           
"There is your mother in you
also."

           
He wanted it this way to gratify
himself.

           
After he killed the cat.

           
I unlatched the door and went out of
the chamber that no longer contained a bed. I thanked the god I had burned it.
What the Cheysuli and I had shared, despite centuries of enmity, was cleaner by
far than the union my father proposed.

           
I went down to the undercroft, to
see the caged cats. They greeted me with snarls, with lashings of supple tails,
with the fixed stare of the predator as they paced out the dimensions of their
lives.

           
What had he said of them? "They
know what they have lost. They long for it back."

           
He had lost humanity in the shaping
of his self.

           
Did he know he had lost it? Did he
long for it back?

           
Did he know, in the great gulf of
darkness, why he could not leave?

           
Do you remember my name?

           
Did he understand what had happened?

           
Did you remember the truths we
discovered in our bed?

           
Did he recall the god at all, and
how he had come to be locked forever in cat-shape?

           
Do you remember the oath I swore,
when you said you needed me?

           
I remembered it all.

           
"Cheysuli," I said aloud.
The word was alien, shaped of a foreign tongue. Its sibilant hissed.

           
He had said something as the god
revealed the truth. Something about fate. I knew the word for that. The
Cheysuli called it tahlmorra.

           
"Fate," I said aloud,
"is another word for surrender." It was an Ihlini belief; we make our
own fates dependent on our needs.

           
One of the cats snarled. It thrust a
tawny, wide-toed paw through the iron bars and reached toward me, slapping air
with half-sheathed claws.

           
What else had he said?
"Prejudice and hatred is created, not born. You serve the Ihlini because
you know nothing else."

           
"I am Ihlini," I said,
"What else would you have me do?"

           
The cat waved its paw and snarled.

           
"Do you hate me?" I asked.
"Because I am Ihlini?"

           
His words were in my head.
"Cheysuli—Ihlini ... what difference does it make? What matters is that we
have one another."

           
I had sworn him an oath.

           
I looked at the cat. "Oaths are
made to be broken."

           
He was the father of my child.

           
The father of the Firstborn.

           
Anguish welled up. "Let me be
free of this!"

           
It echoed in the undercroft,
disturbing all the cats.

           
They know what they have lost. They
long for it back.

           
" 'Let them alone,' you said.
'They have known their cages too long.' "

           
He was not caged. He would not be
caged. My father would kill him, then strip the pelt from his body and use it
for a rug.

           
Would he have us couple on it when
he saw I had no bed?

           
The jaws clenched together.
"For that, then," I said. "I honor my oath that much—and then we
are quit of each other."

           
I knew what I had lost. I longed for
it back. But knew I could never have it.

           
In the hour before dawn I went out
of Valgaard, crossed the smoky Field of Beasts, and passed through the defile
into the canyon beyond. There I found the cat I had known as man, whose name
was Kellin.

           
I was bundled in a heavy cloak.
"You know what you are," I said. "I know what you are. According
to my father, what you are is what you shall be—until he desires to add a new
rug to his floor to keep his feet warm in winter."

           
The eyes were huge and green. Sense
had returned to them. They glared balefully.

           
"I owe you an oath," I
said. "I gave it freely, not knowing what you are, and could in all good
conscience claim its meaning forfeit .. . but there are things between us that
are not so easily governed." I looked at the female beside him. "Did
you tell her there is a child? That the child of the prophecy, so beloved by
the Cheysuli, lives here in my body?" I pressed my hand against
cloak-swathed belly. "If I suffer this child to live, I bring down my
people. I destroy an entire race. That I will not do. But neither will I permit
my father to kill you. I have no desire to gaze each winter upon the stones
they will put in the sockets that once were your eyes."

           
The black tail lashed. Green eyes
did not blink.

           
"Then come," I said
roughly, angry that I cared. "I will set you free of this shape so you may
resume your own. We have fought for centuries, the Ihlini and Cheysuli—I think
it will do no harm if we fight a while longer."

           
If it came, it came. But I would
not, as my mother threatened, live to see it. The god would, in making the
bargain, require something to seal it. All I had of value was what he had given
me.

           
Worth giving up, I thought, so I
need not spend the centuries watching the descendants of our races waste lives
trying to kill one another in the name of a prophecy.

           
Worth giving up so I need not
replace my mother in my father's bed for the balance of forever.

           
The woman knelt at the Gate, and
fire bloomed in her hands. She held them out steadily, reached across the pool,
and shaped living god/ire into a reflection of itself. In her hands the god
writhed as he writhed within the Gate.

           
She parted her hands and drew them
apart.

           
Flame surged in her palms, licking
from her fingers as each gout of godfire stretched toward the other. Then she
brought her hands together and joined the halves again. She built of flame a
goblet, then fed it on itself. Bloody runes formed on the rim. In the bowl
sparks snapped; smoke rose from the contents.

           
She raised it to her mouth and drank
the flame away. The goblet was banished. Godfire glowed in her eyes.

           
She looked at the cat who crouched
nearby, beside the rim of the Gate. Tufted ears were flattened. Fire blazed in
green eyes as the tail beat basalt.

           
The woman's mouth opened and smoke
issued forth. Her voice was alive with light. Each word was a spark that broke
from her lips and formed into a rune. The words she spoke bound themselves into
sentences, until the runes formed a necklet that dangled in midair.

           
"He did not know," she
said. "He believed himself Ihlini. He came to you consenting, eager for your
touch, eager to serve the Seker. He meant to bind himself to you. What you
revealed in his soul was not what he expected."

           
Viscid liquid boiled. Smoke billowed
up. The runes that had been words burned brightly in the darkness.

           
"I do not question the
punishment; he is Cheysuli, and transgressor. But he meant only to serve. His
heart was empty of hostility. He meant no sacrilege."

           
A second necklet was conjoined with
the first into a glowing girdle. It moved from the air to bind itself around
her hips; to seal her wrists together. Smoke issued from her nostrils. Her eyes
wept blood.

           
"To the god of the netherworld.
Who Made and Dwells in Light; who illuminates our souls, I offer this bargain:
my immortal life in exchange for his true guise."

           
The blood she wept was black. It ran
down her cheeks to fall into the Gate, where the godfire hissed in welcome to
itself.

           
She prostrated herself. Her hair
tumbled free of pins and fell down into the Gate, where the godfire crept up
the strands. It lingered at her hairline, then spilled in a glistening net to
sheathe her face in a glowing filigree.

           
Her breath was made of flames.
"Let him go," she begged. "Let him be a man. I will give you my
life. I will give you the child."

           
Godfire gouted forth. It broke in a
wave over the cat, bound it in white fire, then dragged it inexorably toward
the Gate.

           
"No!" she cried. "I
promised you the child!"

           
Claws locked into stone. And then
the claws were human fingers with bloodied, broken nails digging into smoking
rock. "Ginevra!" he shouted, with the voice and mouth of a man.
"Ginevra!"

           
She broke free of her bonds and
thrust herself to her knees, hands locked around wrists that were fleshed in
human flesh. She dragged him forth from the Gate, breaking bonds. He climbed
out, dripping gouts of godfire, and was reborn as a man.

           
Her grasp on his wrists broke as she
fell to her knees. "Done," she gasped.

           
The man's breathing was labored. He
bared human teeth in a snarl that was wholly bestial, as if he had forgotten
how to make his mouth form words.

           
"Go," she said raggedly.
"The bargain is made. If you linger now, you invite his renewed
interest."

           
The man laughed harshly. He knelt
upon the floor in an aspect of obeisance, but the burning in his eyes was born
of different loyalties. " 'The Lion shall lie down with the witch.' "

           
She stared at him. "What?"

           
"My jehan had the right of it.
And now we are wed—Lochiel's daughter and the Prince of Homana." The
laughter broke again from a throat made raw from fire. "How the shar tahls
will untangle our birthlines I dare not predict; it may take more decades than
either of us has."

           
Her face spasmed. "Go."

           
"Not without you,"

           
Her breath halted, then resumed.
Color ebbed in a face of fragile, faceted planes, delicate as the arches that
shattered overhead. "That is finished. That is over."

           
Green eyes burned in the clean,
sculpted features that were, in their fierceness, in their avidity, far more
feral than human. He was predator to her prey.

           
"Go," she said again, as
the Gate behind her blazed. "There is nothing between us now."

           
He closed his hand around her wrist.
"What is between us now is of an entirely different making than what we
shared in bed."

           
The woman's laughter echoed in
basalt, and crystal arches. "Enmity?"

           
He pulled her from the floor. "His
name is Cynric."