Wedding (17 page)

With Dominic’s hand on me I had no control
over my thoughts. We fell further into an awkward communion, and
Dominic learned my last, nausea-inducing decision. His face went
dead white, then pale green. He took his hand from me to grasp the
banister, hanging his head and gagging. Couples passed us
incuriously, hurrying upstairs. Not a few of them were drunk to
sickness; I could hear people throwing up in the courtyard. There
was nothing unusual in Dominic’s behavior, except to me, who knew
he was never sick.

Somehow Dominic kept his dinner down.
Clutching the railing, he lowered himself to sit on a step and hung
his head between his knees. I leaned over him to hear his whispered
words. “You couldn’t do such a thing, Amalie.” He lifted his head,
his eyes with their inner lids lowered, glassy and empty. His hand
reached for mine, the fingers seizing me like talons, nails digging
into my flesh. “Even if you could leave me,” he said, “surely you
would not abandon your child?”

I looked around helplessly. One couple, in
too great a hurry to make it all the way up the stairs, stopped on
the landing. Wedging the woman into the corner, the man hiked her
skirts above her hips as she clutched her partner’s shoulders and
locked her ankles around his waist. People sat on the steps,
kissing and fondling. There was no more music, only the breathy,
sighing sounds of sex. I pried myself loose from Dominic’s grip and
flexed my numbed fingers. “Come on, then,” I said, “if you can, and
explain to me why I should stay.”

Standing three steps above, I slowly tugged
him upright and braced him as he swayed. After a moment of deep
breathing, he was able to climb the stairs to the floor of
bedrooms, and I let him lead me along the corridor, pushing his way
past groping couples, fending off the occasional reaching hand that
would pull one or both of us into a group. He stopped outside a
door to a bedroom, not mine. “That’s the wrong room,” I said.

“No, my lady wife,” he said. “It is the right
room for us.” He opened the door, led me in and sat down on the
bed, pulling me along to sit beside him. It was a beautiful room,
spare and opulent at once, with an enormous high bed, a few pieces
of heavy, burnished wood furniture and sumptuous wall hangings
depicting naked, fleshy goddesses. I noticed all this because I
wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t give him the opportunity to form
full communion and weaken my resolve.

He loomed over me where we sat, a tall, hot
presence that seemed to fill the entire large room. I looked up,
compelled by the force of his thoughts. His face had a faraway
look, as if he were seeing into the future, or perhaps the past. He
was still recovering from the sickness that our communion had
brought on, festival merriment that had congealed to icy terror,
slowly melting back to warm love. His arm tightened around my
waist, his face lowered to mine for a kiss.

I pulled away. “I can’t believe this,” I
said, forced to speak, to make some sense of things. “Before you
left, you were afraid to touch me, terrified of hurting me, because
of what the telepathic weapon did to our communion. Now you’ve been
wounded by that weapon, not just influenced but damaged. It must
have messed up your mind along with your arm, if you think you can
announce some phony betrothal and not say one meaningful word, and
then take me to bed for Midsummer night.”

“Yes,” he said, “the most important night of
the whole year. After being so long apart, we should spend it with
each other.” He said nothing else. He touched the front of my dress
where my nipples pushed against the lace, rubbed his thumb over
one, back and forth, around in circles. I sat and cried silently,
nearly choking on my tears and the arousal that would have had me
flat on my back with my legs in the air but for the anger that held
me unmoving, stern and upright.

“Stop it,” I said when I could stand it no
longer. He took his hand away the instant the words left my
mouth.

“I will do nothing you do not want,” he said.
“You must tell me what you want.”

“You can’t do what I want,” I said. “I want
you to be sane. I want you to not get yourself killed.” My voice
rose in a wail. “I want you to have sense enough that I don’t have
to tell you these things.”

“Oh,” Dominic said, “you ask a great deal of
a husband. But I have done two of those three.” At my skeptical
expression he said, “I didn’t kill myself, and you really don’t
have to tell me these things.” He laughed in my ear, low and
rumbling. “As for the first, I’m sorry, but if it’s sanity you want
Aranyi is not the place to look.”

He unlaced his shirt with his right hand,
wriggled his left arm free and tugged the shirt over his head, then
pulled off the glove that covered his left hand. The flesh was
white and hairless, smooth but not atrophied, only a little
softened from its weeks of disuse. There were no scars or any
indication that he had been burned. He stood up and began to work
on the buttons of his fly.

“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, but 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.