by Jude Fisher
Fifteen
Bindings
‘What is it, my love? You look so sad.’
Ravn crossed the chamber in two strides and wrapped his arms around his wife. Instead of leaning back into his embrace in her usual passive fashion, the Rosa Eldi turned to face him and her wide green eyes were troubled. But just as she was about to speak her mind, the white ermine robe which he had commissioned for her at immense expense slipped seductively down off one smooth, pale shoulder, exposing the top of her breast. She caught at it in consternation, but the moment had already imprinted itself on her husband. She watched Ravn’s gaze drop, saw how it was drawn automatically to the falling edge of the fur: how his pupils flared wide and black and his hand rose to cup the exposed flesh.
Seeing him thus, desire rendering his handsome face bland and generic – a man, any man; Ravn Asharson, King of the Northern Isles no longer – its tide coursing through him to erase all marks of his true personality as thoroughly as the waves might carry away the driftwood, footprints and crabshells that had laid their character on a strand, to leave behind no more than a featureless expanse of sea-washed sand, she felt an enormous sorrow. As his hands pulled down the other side of her robe so that the velvet pooled about her feet; as his hot mouth fell again and again on her neck and she felt him grow hard and urgent against her, she felt that instead of possessing his spirit, as she had believed to be the case when she had first ensnared him; rather than sealing their connection, tying their bodies and souls into a single inextricable knot, she was losing him – the essence of him – once again.
And that was not all.
The truly bizarre matter in all this, though, was that even as they fell upon the bed and his mouth met hers, she felt she was losing herself, too. In all the lessons of love the Master had taught her in his icy fastness at the top of the world, not one had concerned the sensations she might experience during the acts that might be performed upon her. And so she had expected none, and had passed through each successive encounter – with Rahe, and then with the men to whom Virelai sold her on their travels – untouched by the experience. Until now.
On the ship which had carried her safely away from the Moonfell Plain, she had found that Ravn’s touch awakened something in her. At first, she had thought this some effect of the rhythm of the waves beneath the hull of the vessel; or some proximity of the ocean’s great swell. But then, when they had made dry land and were ensconced in Halbo’s well-walled castle, whatever it was had announced itself in a myriad of different signs. She had become aware of a curious sense of her own displacement whenever her husband was not at her side for, despite all the ease of the northern court, where people largely spoke their mind and did not ring around their words and actions with hieratic posturings or meaningless ceremony, she knew in some deep place in herself that this was not and could never be her true home; though whether she owned such a place it was impossible to say. But when he was with her somehow she felt more at her ease, more complete in herself. Then she began to notice that if she observed Ravn speaking with another woman, let alone laying a hand upon her arm or shoulder, even in the least suggestive manner, she would feel a twinge in her chest or gut – a chill like a cold wind whistling among her bones. And when he lay with her – each night, or early in the morning, at snatched moments in the afternoon, or before they dressed for dinner – the touch of him made her skin burn, as if her blood were rising up to meet his, as if it would sear away any physical barrier between them so they could mingle as one entity. Moreover, with increasing frequency, she would often find herself swept away in the tide of passion. The most extraordinary sensations would ripple through her, possessing her, overriding any consciousness she had to match her exertions to her husband’s so that her breath came in the same great heaves, her incomparably pale skin flushed pink from top to toe, and her cries – those of a distant seabird skimming lonely seas – echoed his own. At times, it seemed, she lost herself entirely and became that bird, at the mercy of strange new elements, swept here and there by salt and stormy winds. And sometimes she exulted to feel herself so lost and powerless. But the temptation to slip beneath those dark waters and never return was hard to resist.
When she came back to herself after these bouts of desire she was frightened. She had been lost all her life, and through no fault of her own; what would become of her now if she allowed herself to slip beneath those waves forever?
And so this time, as his mouth closed upon her and the two of them fell naked and urgent onto the fur-covered bed, she fought her own will. For her own sake – as well as his own – she would have to lift some measure of the enchantment she had thrown over her lord and bring him back to himself. Then, she would learn more of the actual nature of the man to whom she was bound. Then, and only then, she would learn the extent of her powers, and his response to her as a woman, rather than the sorceress she believed – and feared – she might truly be.
The banquet that night had been thrown in honour of the marriage of the Earl of Black Isle, a pitiful rocky outcrop in the eastern channels between the mainland and the Fair Isles, and the daughter of Ravn’s oldest and most trusted adviser, the Earl of Stormway.
They had done their best with Breta Bransen, but they had not had the best material to work with in the first place. Stormway’s daughter might have been a prepossessing girl, being wide of shoulder and hip and as tall as any of Ravn’s warriors. But she carried herself with such contrition for her size that she appeared almost hunch-backed, she stooped so badly. Her hair – a pale, sandy colour much like her father’s, and with the same wiry unconcern for any confining style – had been plaited into a series of braids that had then been tied with silver ribbons about her head and threaded through with little sprigs of pale blue flowers. On another woman it might have looked both girlish and charming; but on Breta it looked more as if she had been pulled backwards through someone’s kitchen-garden and taken half its contents with her. The wiry hair escaped its bounds in little strands and clumps, marring the elegance of the braiding, and the flowers were becoming limp in the dry heat of the hall-fires. They had swathed her in a dress of pale blue linen, the colour of Sur’s calm sea, for luck; but the linen had crumpled and stretched hideously. Above it, Breta’s large, lumpy face was a perfect picture of misery.
She had not wanted to marry at all, let alone Brin Fallson, the Earl of Black Isle, a man with a sweating head and a laugh like a distressed donkey. It was not that he was cruel or unpleasant – she did not actively dislike him in any way – but he represented for her the final affirmation, if such were needed, that all the love and wit and gentleness you could possess would never make up for a lack of looks in this world. Not to mince words, she was plain; and that one unfair accident of birth – whereby she had inherited the sturdy looks of her beloved father, instead of the fey beauty of her mother – weighed heavy in the balance against all her other fine attributes in the eyes of the man whom she truly craved. She had been in love with Ravn Asharson since the age of seven, though to him she had never been more than a slower, weaker, more foolish playmate with whom he played his castle-games of hiding and ambush, stag-and-hounds, wrestling and duelling. She had borne his teasing, his thoughtlessness and his bullying with resignation, but time had neither erased nor eased the pain of knowing that her adoration was not one whit returned. She had conceded to herself some time ago that Ravn would likely never look upon her as an object of desire, but she had hoped in time that friendship and generosity of spirit would win him over. In fact, she thought now, he had probably never even looked upon her as a woman, let alone as a potential lover, until her father had presented her at the Moonfell Gathering. For Ravn, he had been kind then: even praising the cut of her dress, rather than laughing in her face, but it had been a humiliating experience all the same.
Her betrothed, on the other hand, had apparently watched her make her progress to the dais with trepidation, and such had been his relief at the northern king’s choice of
another woman for his bride that he had straightway sought out the Earl of Stormway and asked if he might call on his daughter on their return to the isles. To have any man smitten with her was a novelty to Breta, but rather than console her, it prompted in her an even greater despair in the impenetrable minds of men. However, for all that he was twelve years her senior and going thin on top of his big pink head, there was little she could really object to in him as a suitor. Ever since that heart-striking moment when she had seen Ravn look into the pale woman’s eyes at the bride-taking and watched there and then as he fell in love – like a diver plunging from a cliff – she had lost all her hope in the world. And so when her father had come to her with Brin Fallson’s proposition she had merely shrugged and acceded. If she could not have the one man she wanted, then she would give herself up to the first man who asked for her and damn the consequences.
But even though she tried hard not to think about it, the imminent prospect of the bedding was atrocious.
Once the feast was over, the bride and her betrothed would be led from the hall amid immense ribaldry and merriment, and be bound together in the best guest chamber, tied hand to hand and foot to foot (with a certain amount of room to manoeuvre) with the blue and green cords that symbolised the marriage of sea and land, woman and man, in Sur’s eyes. They would not be untied until the sun was at its highest point the next day.
Breta shuddered and moved to take her unwanted seat of honour beside her love’s new queen, whose task it was by tradition to pass the evening giving the wed-maid her best womanly advice. To have the wife of your heart’s desire giggling in your ear as to the best way to please a man – how to touch him here and there, and lay your lips just so – would have been quite unbearable; the one consolation of the evening, Breta thought, was that the pale woman had no conversation, barely said more than a couple of words at the best of times, and was hardly likely to confide secrets to her. She nodded politely to the Rose of the World, and sat down.
The Rosa Eldi smiled briefly, then her eyes dropped to the blue wedding cords tied loosely about Breta’s waist and suddenly, with a great flash of memory unlike any she had ever experienced, remembered her own wedding night – the crowds, the noise, the raucous laughter, the bawdy songs – and the look in Ravn’s mother’s eyes as she had tied the traditional first knot. She had known a kind of fear then, which had nothing to do with the wedding itself, but all to do with the unpredictability of being amongst too many people over whom she had little or no influence: for it seemed her charms had but small effect on women.
And remembering this moment, the Rosa Eldi felt uncomfortable again. There were too many people here, and she had the disturbing impression that they were all watching her and speaking about her just out of earshot. She kept catching little snatches of their conversation; but even when she concentrated, could not capture them whole. ‘Night and day,’ she heard; ‘Four months now’; ‘should have taken the Fairwater girl’ and then, most clearly of all, ‘if she will not breed, he’ll have to take another’. But the gaze of the forbidding Lady Auda was the most unnerving thing of all.
The King’s widowed mother had tonight been seated – by some horrible error, or by her own contrivance – directly opposite the new queen, and her eyes seemed always fixed on the Rose of the World, who felt those chill, violet eyes on her every minute they were in each other’s company, and instinctively knew this regard for what it was: the possessive dislike of one woman for another who had usurped her position. Auda sat there gaunt-faced and shrivelled, a queen-spider fallen on hard times, her dark, white-streaked hair bound severely back into an elaborately knotted coif, her lips pursed so tight it seemed her face might sink suddenly inwards on itself. She radiated a regally compelling disapprobation; and the new Queen of the Northern Isles knew she was at all times the focus of her enmity.
In all the time that the Rosa Eldi had been in Halbo, Auda had uttered barely three sentences to her.
The first, on the evening she had set foot inside the Great Hall after landing on Eyran soil but moments earlier, had been: ‘If you think your whorish nomad tricks will hold my son, you are sadly mistaken.’ The second had been the traditional words with which a man’s mother passed her son into the care of another woman, and hissed between bared teeth. After which Auda had taken to her chambers and refused to share a table, a room or even a breath of the same air with her son’s new wife. And the third, a few weeks later, had been only after Ravn had ordered that the Lady Auda’s chambers be refreshed with new Circesian hangings and rugs, which necessitated the removal of all her furniture and the lady herself, and under this ploy, had persuaded her down to his solar, where, with Ravn’s big hands cupping his mother’s as she grasped the Rosa Eldi’s crushed fingers, had been muttered under duress: ‘Welcome to Halbo, my son’s wife.’
The last part of the greeting, ‘and my queen’, had gone unspoken and the Rose of the World had watched as her husband lost both the heart and the courage to press the point.
Since that time, Ravn had insisted on his mother’s presence at all public occasions, and she had complied with pressed lips and a haughty demeanour, watching and watching the Rose of the World, and had never addressed her directly again.
Tonight she looked especially sour, though there was a gleam in her eye. A little while after the repast had been served, she leaned forward suddenly past her son and, without any polite acknowledgement of her daughter-by-law’s presence, spoke across her to address the Earl of Shepsey, who was seated at the Queen’s right hand.
‘Back still playing you up, Egg?’
Egg admitted that this was the case, but that he ascribed his condition to his age and a draughty chamber. He started to include the new queen in this conversation by asking whether she found the castle chill, when Auda spoke over him.
‘Well, it will take no less than sorcery to amend your age.’ She gave the Rosa Eldi a pointed stare, and when this failed to provoke a response, launched into a lengthy treatise on just which herbs he might add to his bath for ameliorative effect. ‘And make sure you test the temperature of the water before you get in: too cold and the muscles will seize; too hot and you’ll just make it worse.’
Egg thanked her.
‘No magic, that,’ the former queen said loudly. ‘No nomad fakery required at all: good old-fashioned Eyran methods will do the trick every time.’
The Earl of Shepsey looked uncomfortable, but Ravn was intent on a conversation across the table, and if he heard his mother’s barb, he gave no sign of it.
Auda made further remarks on the subject to a lady on the opposite side of the table, and then called her maid, an equally poisonous creature called, for no apparent reason, Lilja (for she resembled no lily, but rather a burdock, being both wide and dark) and made requests that she ‘pass the wine by that woman’s platter’. Lilja did so, awkwardly jostling the Rosa Eldi’s shoulder as she retrieved the flask. The Rose of the World looked around, startled, but the moment had passed. A few minutes later, Auda raised her voice. ‘Bring me a spoon that is untouched by that woman’s hand!’
Quiet fell across the top end of the hall. Even Ravn heard this.
‘Mother,’ he said, his voice edged with warning.
Breta Bransen, seated on the old queen’s right, silently passed her own spoon to Auda with a frown. She had no love for the woman who occupied Ravn’s bed and all his thoughts, but such rudeness was a blight on an evening which was already sorrowful enough.
Auda took the spoon from her without a word. A little later, she beckoned Lilja to her and whispered something in her ear which caused the serving woman a sly smile and to hasten off.
‘You’ll be wanting babies straight away,’ the old queen now addressed herself to Breta, who coloured. ‘Not getting any younger, are you, girl? Left it a bit late getting wed, though. What are you now – twenty-three, twenty-four?’
Breta nodded grimly.
‘The same age as my boy. I always suspected you might h
ave had a bit of a soft spot for him,’ Auda went on mercilessly. ‘And why on Elda he wouldn’t take you or another like you, Sur only knows. Good stock, I told him you were, just what the kingdom needs: a fine Eyran bloodline and a sturdy set of hips: you’d give him all the babies he could want to save his throne; but he’s always been a fool for a pretty face, and now he’s got himself a wife looks more like a skinny white serpent than a proper woman. Still, I’m sure he’ll learn his lesson the hard way: men always do.’