“I want to go home!” he screamed. “I hate it here!” He looked into my eyes as he unleashed the ultimate weapon, making sure it hit the target. “I want Isobel. Isobel is nice. Isobel won’t give me bugs.” He had never expressed a preference for his nursemaid before, secure in the knowledge that I might humor him, where Isobel would more likely enforce the rules.
To Val’s surprise I hugged him close, weeping real tears of my own. “I want Isobel too,” I said. “I hate it here too.”
Val put a grubby finger in his mouth, shocked into silence. He had never seen his mother helpless. Lightheaded from hunger, shaking from the long ride and the lingering effects of Reynaldo’s torture, I could feel every control in me slipping away. It had become so natural to rely on Dominic, his strength and decisiveness. Now I had to be the strong one, for my children, but I was running on fumes.
I took in deep breaths and let them out with a whoosh, telling myself there was a reserve of energy in me somewhere still untapped. After a few minutes, against all expectations, I discovered there was. I wiped sweat and tears from my face with my sleeve, stood with Val in the center of the pallet, then held up the stub of candle at eye level. Without a prism I had no way to separate the light, but its spectrum was limited, nothing like sunlight or even moonlight, mostly yellow, with a useful bit of blue near the wick. It would suffice. By holding the candle out to the side and staring straight ahead, I angled the light in obliquely. After a few blinks and false starts, I was able to create a mild jolt of electricity that killed every living thing in the straw, and also anything that had remained on me and Val.
“It’s all right now,” I said. “They’re all dead.” I set the candle back in its niche, shook out my cloak and spread it again on the straw, sat down with Val in my lap, and watched Jana bending over something in the corner.
Jana straightened up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, clutching herself in desperation. “But I don’t want you watching me!” The thing in the corner was a chamber pot. Jana had never been troubled by girlish modesty before, and I figured the squalid surroundings and the fatigue had spooked her, like me and Val.
After my experience with the bedbugs I could not trust anything here. “I won’t watch you,” I said. “But let me see that pot.” Jana brought it over and I peered inside from the relative safety of my arm’s length. Just as I suspected, a huge spider was lurking inside the curve of the lip at the top.
This time, as I reached for the candle again, I hesitated, remembering Reynaldo’s threat. I had promised not to use my gift against him or his men; surely my oath had not encompassed arthropods. And so far, I had felt no sense in my mind that my impromptu extermination had alerted Reynaldo to my disobedience, if that’s what it was. From the shrieks of revelry in the hall above us, it sounded as if the bandits and their camp followers were more interested in celebrating the imminent upturn in their fortunes than in monitoring their hostages. But there was no need to risk everything for a spider, even a big one. I knocked it out onto the ground and Jana stomped it.
At Jana’s continued insistence, I turned my back and made Val do the same. There was a great rustling of skirts, and Jana seemed to take forever with the riding knickers, but at last she was done. By then I, too, was clutching myself, and only just made it to the pot in time.
When I had finished Val sidled over with a confession. “I went in my pants.” His lower lip trembled with shame. “I couldn’t help it.” Poor lamb, he had worn his soiled diaper all this time and not complained. Now he had wet himself again while Jana and I used the pot.
“Of course you couldn’t help it,” I said, shaking with maternal rage as I recalled Reynaldo’s brutal treatment. “I almost wet myself too. You’ve been a good, brave boy.”
Val had been making real progress recently, learning to tell me or Isobel ahead of time, proud that he usually stayed clean and dry all day like an adult. We had put a diaper on him this morning—better to be safe on the journey home—but I had not expected Val to need it. What had happened today was a sad setback for him.
I undressed him, removing his little breeches and the soaked and soiled diaper. I wiped the worst of the dirt off his backside and between his legs with the outside of the diaper and laid it on the floor beside the chamber pot. I was at a loss for what to do next. Val still wore a diaper at night. There had been one clean diaper in the baggage pack, for our first night at home. By now all our baggage was no doubt distributed amongst various loyal supporters of Reynaldo’s. Val would have to sleep naked, wetting into the straw if I couldn’t catch him in time for the pot. By morning his breeches would be dry. “You’re such a big boy now,” I said. “You can sleep without diapers tonight.”
Jana had watched all my activity with a cynical air. “Val’s a big baby,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “And he stinks. He smells like a bandit.”
Val lifted his weary head, always ready to do battle with his bullying older sister. “I don’t stink,” he said. “You stink. You’re a bandit. I hate you.” He began to cry again, blubbering little sobs from being tired and hungry.
I turned on Jana in fury. “Thank you very much for your help,” I said with crude sarcasm. “I was hoping to make Val cry some more, but I don’t have your talent.” Jana’s face fell and her mouth opened, but I was too angry to stop myself. “He’s not having the wonderful adventure you are, and he isn’t Captain Reynaldo’s little darling like you.”
Jana’s shoulders slumped and she hung her head. I heard a strange sniffling, hiccupping noise. How long had it been since this tough little girl had allowed herself to cry in my hearing? She had held up like a trouper, only to be defeated by her own mother.
“I am so sorry,” I said, appalled at my cruelty. I grabbed Jana’s hands as she fought me, then wrapped my arms around her and kissed her teary face. “I have the best girl in the whole world. We’re all tired and hungry, and it makes us say stupid things, even me. Can you forgive your wicked mother?” My voice trailed off. I was not good in a situation like this, unsure how much of the truth I dared express to young children or whether it would be better to mouth sunny platitudes of hope to keep our spirits up. My children knew me well enough to be suspicious of any unnatural optimism on my part, but there was no point in burdening them with too much reality.
Jana was not appeased. “You said I was only a girl. You told him Papa wouldn’t pay for me.” She broke away from me, backing against the wall and screaming her next words. “But Papa loves me best. Papa will come for me and take me home, and leave you here with that– that stinking baby you love so much!” She broke into loud, uncontrolled sobs.
My head whirled with fatigue as I was thrust back into the intense emotions following Val’s birth. Jana had loathed the little being from the moment of his arrival, the scrap of humanity that had taken her place at my breast and in my bed. She had denied or forgotten that, at three-and-a-half, she had not nursed or slept a full night with me for close to two years, and reacted as if Val had thrown her out bodily from her rightful position in the family.
At first she had reverted to infancy, speaking baby talk, pretending to dislike solid food or to be unable to walk. When that had failed, provoking Dominic’s admiring laughter but no action, and only my weary disregard, she had fallen back on violence. I had caught her once, Isobel many times, bending Val’s limbs at unnatural angles or gouging at an eye with determined fingers. It had been established as a firm rule that Jana was never to be left alone with the baby under any circumstances.
Niall Galloway, new to our household, and with the jaded experience of being the eldest of six children, had given us the benefit of his expert opinion. “Don’t worry,” he said, “when the next one comes she’ll love it as if it were her own.”
Dominic raised an eyebrow. “Amalie,” he said, “I give you fair warning. If there is a ‘next one,’ I will deny fathering it.” He had not really expected Val, had never demanded that his wife give him a son, although he had
seemed pleased enough with the gift after the fact. But two children were sufficient in what had been, not so long ago, a purely masculine household.
“Dominic,” I said, “if there is a ‘next one’ you may divorce me for reason of insanity.”
Slowly things had improved. Jana was always Dominic’s favorite. It was normal for a man to prefer a child, who could talk and think, who had a personality, to an infant, and there was already a natural sympathy between this father and daughter. Dominic took her riding and hunting, short expeditions to introduce her to his favorite country pastimes. He gave her a tiny knife and showed her how to hold it, telling her she could use it only when he was with her. He let her fall asleep in the Margrave’s bedroom, carrying her upstairs to Isobel and the nursery later when he wished to make love with me or with Niall. Jana knew she had one parent she could count on to put her first, and while she resented the way Val had wormed himself into my heart, she drew closer than ever to her father.
Then one day Jana just let it go. As far as she was concerned, Val did not exist as a human being. She rarely spoke to him except to berate him or call him a name. If he reached for one of her possessions with a curious baby hand she would slap it away. But she ceased going out of her way to hurt him, and I had assumed the worst was over, that she had accepted the fact of a permanent younger sibling.
Now I saw Jana’s jealousy had merely been submerged under her growing maturity. In this time of stress the old feelings came out as strong as ever. And I was saddened that my words on the road, my failed attempt to save Jana from captivity, had only put more distance between us. I looked from Val to Jana, my two so very different children, each demanding more from me than I could deliver. Val was clinging to my legs, clutching through my skirts, trying to stay upright but about to lose the battle. Jana was slumped against the wall. She, too, looked ready to drop. As I was. My legs shook so much now after squatting over the pot that I had to sit down again on the straw.
Val followed me, pulling at the front of my dress. “I’m hungry,” he said. That was one complaint I could do something about. My breasts were swollen and heavy with the day’s accumulation of milk, my dress and shift wet with leakage, and I was glad to ease myself as well as Val. As he suckled contentedly, I called Jana over to join us. It was a mark of how defeated she felt that she forgot her anger and came eagerly to sit on my other side. I put my arm around her and kissed her. I had thought about what I must say.
“I need to tell you something important,” I said.
Jana looked up. “Is Papa coming?” She was accustomed to the fact of her parents’ wordless communication, was sure Dominic was sending his thoughts to me.
How I wished I could lie. Dominic didn’t even know yet what had happened. “He will be,” I said. “But you must listen to me in the meantime.” I started in, wanting to keep things on a level that Jana could comprehend. “Do you remember the story of Ciaran and the giant?”
Jana turned her head away. “I’m not a baby. I don’t want to hear a baby fairy tale.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because I’m not going to tell you one. But that story reminds me of you.” She made no response but sat rigidly beside me, waiting. “In the story, Ciaran climbs the tallest tree in the forest, up to the giant’s castle in the sky. The giant asks Ciaran what the stone is on the handle of his dagger. And Ciaran tells him—”
Val took his mouth off me. “I know! I know! He says it’s an opal.” He had loved learning that word, perhaps because it referred to something he didn’t see every day. “Ope-ul, ope-ul, ope-ul,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said, pleased that one child was momentarily diverted. I stroked Val’s cheek and he returned to the breast. “Then the giant asks why Ciaran’s eyes are silver. And Ciaran says—”
This time Jana made the effort. “He says he’s blind.”
“Very good,” I said. “Now answer this, my two clever children. Why didn’t Ciaran tell the giant the truth? Why didn’t he say, ‘I have silver inner eyelids because I am ‘Graven and gifted, and this is a prism that I use to work my magic’?”
Val was too engrossed in feeding to ponder such a philosophical riddle, but Jana got the message. “Because he wanted to trick the giant!” she shouted in her excitement. “He didn’t want the giant to know what he could do!”
“That’s right,” I said again. “If he had told the giant the truth, that he had the gift of crypta and that the ‘stone’ on his dagger was a glass prism, the giant would have stolen it, and Ciaran would not have been able to escape with the giant’s iron treasure.” I looked into Jana’s eyes. “Do you see, now, why I told the bandits you were only a girl, and that Papa wouldn’t pay for you?”
Jana’s face lit up with her rare smile, showing her sharp little teeth. “Because you wanted to trick them,” she said while I nodded my approval. “Because I’m worth the most!” She thought some more. “But it didn’t work!” She glared at me with her old jealous fury. “They didn’t believe you.”
“No, they didn’t,” I said. “They were a lot smarter than that stupid giant in the story.” I stretched an apologetic hand out to her. “And anyone, even bandits, can see how much you look like Papa, and that makes you valuable. I wanted to keep you out of this. I hoped you could get home safe and help Papa rescue me.” I saw no reason to mention Val.
Jana mulled over all this information. She took my offered hand, then fell against me in a hug, kissing me and petting me, careful not to come into contact with her brother. “It’s better I came with you. You need me more than Papa does. I’ll help you until Papa comes.” She looked confidently around the fetid little cell.
She stood up, filled with new determination, and her stomach growled in unison with mine. It must be long past suppertime at home. I couldn’t decide whether to call attention to ourselves by shouting and demanding food, or to be grateful for being left alone.
Jana, as always, chose the active course. She stood below the little grate that looked out onto the floor of the great hall, gauging the distance to the ceiling. Feeling for cracks and irregularities in the stone wall, she climbed nimbly to the top and hung onto the bars, peering into the realm of our captors.
Reluctantly I opened my mind to my daughter’s, as if to read her thoughts, but instead following her consciousness on a reverse course that led inside her mind. I would be able to see through Jana’s eyes, could spy on our captors without having to move from my place on the straw. Jana would feel nothing, was unable to detect another presence in her mind, any more than an ungifted adult could. The ease with which I accomplished this migration of outlook is proof that Jana is my biological daughter despite our lack of outward resemblance, but such an intrusion into my child’s being always feels unethical, and I would do it only in an emergency.
One look made me wish I had kept to myself, or that my daughter was not quite so agile. “Come down, Jana,” I called softly. “Come back down and sit with me.” It would do no good to scold or to make her feel that she was watching something wrong.
Jana wasn’t listening to me. She had news to report, unaware that I had shared her moment of discovery. “Captain Reynaldo has his penis in that woman’s mouth!” she said, fascinated at this activity she would be unlikely to observe in the barnyard at home. Like all country children, she had learned the facts of animal life early and had absorbed, in an abstract way, the idea that something similar went on between human beings. What she was seeing now went against all the knowledge she had acquired on the subject so far.
Val stopped nursing for a moment, his attention caught by yet another example of adults’ absurdities. “That’s silly,” he said. He nuzzled my right breast, having drained the left one, and I switched him over to the other side.
I tried to keep my voice neutral. “Don’t shout,” I said to Jana in a stage whisper. “We don’t want the bandits to know we can see them and hear them.”
Jana looked down and around for me, briefly acknowledgi
ng my warning, before returning to stare again at this unusual entertainment. “Why, Mama? Why is that woman sucking on his penis?”
I gave Jana the short answer, the one that didn’t really answer her question. “To get my comb,” I said, fighting back the tears I had hoped I had conquered earlier. I had seen the comb in Reynaldo’s free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the woman’s head to her task. He had gone through our baggage, had found the heirloom that Dominic had given me for a betrothal gift, the priceless piece of worked glass that had been in the Aranyi family for countless generations, that I had worn to honor Stefan and his new family. And now this slut, this bandits’ whore, Michaela, was going to wear it, just as soon as she finished earning it.
Jana watched the bandits a little longer, confirming my explanation, then dropped to the ground. She stood in front of me, hands on hips. “Don’t worry, Mama,” she said. “Papa will get it back. Papa will cut that woman’s head off for stealing it, and give it back to you.”
I shook my head, forced to smile in spite of everything. She looked so much like Dominic, even sounded like him at times. “Yes, sweetheart,” I said. “He will.” Try to maintain some perspective, I told myself. The loss of a piece of jewelry, the least of my worries, should not upset me so.
Something else troubled my daughter. “Does Papa stick his penis in your mouth? Is that how you make babies?”
Darkness and damnation, I thought, sounding like Dominic myself. Why now? Why did I have to deal with this now? “No, love,” I said. “You know how babies are made. Remember when we mated my mare with the chestnut stallion? He put his penis in her vagina. Then, later, she dropped the little roan foal?”
Jana nodded uncertainly.
“Well, that’s what people do when they make a baby.” Other parents get to have this conversation at home, I thought. In my wretched state it felt as if the bandits had deliberately contrived to add psychological torture to my physical woes.
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