Val was another story. He had never warmed to Dominic as Jana did, was just as likely to cry or turn away when Dominic approached him or picked him up. When Dominic tried the same line on his son that had worked so well with his daughter, Val had rejected such idiocy. “You’re a grown-up,” he informed Dominic, surprised that his father appeared to be unaware of the fact. “You drink whisky.” Dominic often enjoyed a drink or two before supper, had let the children sniff it to convince them it was disagreeable and that they weren’t being deprived of a treat. As Dominic and I laughed in spite of ourselves, Val said, “I drink milk,” then turned back to his interrupted feeding, snuggling his face into my open dress. For him, milk came from only one source, my breasts.
It was not all Val’s stubbornness. I enjoyed nursing my children, had been thrilled by the way it connected me with them, no longer inside me, but still drawing nourishment from my body. I had found the touch of the soft little mouth when they were infants as sensuous, in a different way, as Dominic’s lovemaking, and had not minded the stronger pull of the older child. “Careful with those fangs,” I had teased Jana when her first teeth began to show. But she had never really hurt me. I had weaned her more because I knew it had to be done eventually, and for Dominic’s sake, than for my own need.
Dominic accepted the fact that children must be nursed. His pleasure in his new family, with Jana’s birth coming six months after our wedding, had survived all the hardships of parenthood, the nighttime disruptions and the changes in sleeping arrangements. He had never grudged Jana her monopoly on my attention. He had even sampled my milk himself, drinking from me one night before I knew what he was up to, smacking his lips and working his mouth as if tasting wine. “Fragrant and earthy,” he said, “a rich bouquet with an unusual aftertaste.” My tolerant smile only encouraged him. “I’m beginning to see why my daughter is so addicted.” He dipped his head for a second helping, his deep voice purring with low laughter when I slapped him away from me.
But eighteen months is a long time, and Dominic’s patience had worn thin this second time around. He was resentful of Val’s constant demands on me, sick of the smell of sour milk that clung to me despite regular laundering and bathing. He could not squeeze my breast in a moment of passion, could not take my nipple in his mouth, without producing a stream of the fluid that no longer appealed to him. He was spending fewer nights with me, and there were not so many attempts to make up for it during the day, as there would have been in the past.
Shortly before we visited Stefan, Dominic had come into my room as I was nursing Val at bedtime. My husband had been aroused for me, his thoughts already in my mind, so that I felt my body melting in response before the door completely opened. Dominic had taken in the familiar scene and his desire had died. “I wonder,” he said, “if my son intends to keep that privilege all to himself, or if he will allow his father an occasional share of pleasure in the next ten years.” He had slammed the door and spent the night with Niall.
If we ever got out of here– no, I told myself, when we get out of here– there will be a lot of work undoing the bad effects of our imprisonment. Val was well on the way to nursing constantly; my nipples were becoming cracked and sore from such heavy use. He nursed as much from fear and unhappiness as hunger, swallowing the milk as a consequence of his innate need to suck. He was young enough that although I was dirty and I stank, and wore a scratchy dress that irritated Val’s skin where he touched it in the same way it did mine, yet his craving for his mother’s arms overcame every other discomfort. The frightening changes in his life, coupled with the lack of his usual balanced diet, had started him on the retrogression to infancy.
It was the same for me. My desire to protect my son, combined with my own worries, made me hold onto him like a fearful child at bedtime with a familiar toy. Val’s mouth on my breast reassured me as much as him. It meant we were together and that I was doing everything in my power to keep him safe and well.
Once we were home, I told myself, things would be different. How wonderful it appeared now, the work of weaning, of caring for my two children. Home again, rested and fed, bathed, in my own comfortable clothes, with Dominic’s love and support, how could anything be a problem? The women of the household will help, as always, I thought dreamily, Isobel and Magali and–
I sat up suddenly, drenched with panic-induced sweat. Reynaldo had read me just now, studied my memories. He had called me “Lady Amalie,” the name my household uses, a custom that began before I was married, when the people I would spend the rest of my life among had wished to show their acceptance of the woman who could not yet be called ‘Gravina Aranyi. Surely, I argued hopelessly with my fear, the man might simply believe that was a proper way to address me, like Lady Melanie, the unmarried daughter of a noble family. Then I remembered the moment on the trail when we were captured, when I had realized the bandits were not overawed or impressed by the announcement of my identity, but had expected ‘Gravina Aranyi to walk into their trap.
Reynaldo knew me, I felt certain, knew me and Dominic. My kidnapping was not random, not simply the result of traveling with few guards in deep forest. If another party had preceded us down that lonely trail, I suspected the bandits would not have accosted them, not if it meant alerting their intended victim to the danger she was nearing. Baffled, too tired to think clearly, I slept.
CHAPTER 8
By morning I felt feverish and sick, too weak to rise. The rough fabric of my hand-me-down dress had been irritating my skin all night, as if those biting insects I had killed were resurrected and crawling all over my body. Eclipsis’s best protection against the cold climate, the durable, water-resistant wool from the hardy mountain-bred sheep, produces a kind of allergic reaction in the mostly red-haired ‘Graven. Gifted men and women, both, wear soft undergarments next to our tender skin. Pink skin, red hair, silk and linen must she wear. An Eclipsian nursery rhyme ran in my head, detailing the sensitivities, physical and emotional, of the sibyl. Had Michaela known this when she exchanged her daughter’s clothes for mine, she would have been unable to contain her delight.
I watched Jana use the pot, my outer eyelids swollen half-shut with fever or allergy. In the permanent twilight of the unlighted cell, something about Jana looked different, but I forgot it as I crawled to the pot myself and sank back in the straw again. Faint and sick, my heart pounding with the exertion, my blood wheezing a dreary song in my ears as it struggled up through my neck, I had reached a new depth of suffering.
Val struggled with his filthy diaper. “Come here, love,” I called, removing the impediment, letting him relieve himself on the pot.
“I went all by myself,” he said when he had finished.
Jana would have none of it. “A boy pees standing up,” she told him. “Only a baby sits down to pee.”
Val’s face crumpled to cry. Then he saw the flaw in her dismissal. “You sit,” he said. “You’re a baby too.”
Jana’s eyebrows rose in a frightening parody of Dominic’s enraged look. “I’m a girl,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a boy, but you act like a baby.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” I was losing control, of myself and of the impossible situation. At home, with boundless space and many willing helpers, the children never spent so long in each other’s unwelcome company.
Jana turned her back on her brother. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said with genuine sadness. “But he’s so useless.” She spoke as one adult to another, regretful but honest, ignoring my feeble objections. A brilliant thought struck her, giving her face the wary, wide-eyed stare of a feral cat. She leaned beside me to whisper. As Val approached, wondering what he was missing, Jana tried to drive him off. “Go away, baby. It’s private.” She pushed him hard with the flat of her palms against his chest.
Val stumbled, fell on his bare backside, and cried with the abandoned misery of unrequited love.
Jana knew she had crossed a line and prepared, from bitter experie
nce, to bear the explosion of my parental temper. Like the warrior-heroes of legend, she stood her ground, eyes defiant in the face of doom.
The harsh words didn’t come. My new weakness extended as much to verbal exertions as to physical ones. I found just enough energy to stand, but not to speak. Grimly silent, I lifted Val, stumbling myself with the weight of him, sat back down hard on the straw, and rocked him in my lap.
Jana watched me with a mixture of surprise and worry, grateful at first, if puzzled, to have escaped scolding or punishment. As my attention remained fixed on Val, she began to fidget and sulk with annoyance, not at her own act, but at mine, for prolonging the interruption.
Michaela entered with breakfast. By now Jana knew the routine. Crouching near the door under Michaela’s watchful gaze, she ate swiftly and methodically through the food, swallowing every edible scrap. This morning she made no attempt to offer Val a share, nor did I prompt her. He was suckling again for comfort after his recent sorrow, his eyes and runny nose dripping liquids onto my breast. Even oatmeal and cloudberries wouldn’t have tempted him now.
The sickness I had awakened to made me superstitious and despondent. I would gladly nurse Val another year, I thought, a kind of sacrificial offering to the gods, if I could be sure of our safe return to Aranyi. Dominic would have something to say about that, I reflected dreamily. My scalp tingled with a palpable thrill as I imagined Dominic’s language were I to propose such a thing.
Something jumped out of my hair and skittered down my face. I screamed, brushing at my head and face, squirming three ways at once as another one crawled around between my dress and my ribs. Val, startled by my sudden movement and the loud noise, stopped nursing and joined me in companionable howls.
Michaela laughed so hard tears ran down her weathered cheeks. “Lice!” she said when she could spare breath for speech. “My fine lady has met her first louse. I bet he didn’t like what he saw any more than you did!” She shook with paroxysms of exaggerated laughter at yet another example of my sheltered life, and watched my contortions with contemptuous amusement.
The joke was soon over. Michaela had something on her mind, something more important than my introduction to lice. Although Jana had finished eating, the woman left the plate on the floor, in no hurry to leave, while she considered me carefully, her eyes cold, an executioner measuring the victim’s neck. She scratched at her own head until she found a victim to crush between two long dirty fingernails. “When did your man say he was coming?” she asked, as if we were neighbors gossiping over the backyard fence.
“Two days.” I answered honestly. Reynaldo had heard it; there was nothing I could accomplish by lying. “He said he’d be here tomorrow night.”
“I wonder how he’ll like you when he finds you?” Michaela said. The words were taunting, pointed. I stared back at her, probing in her thoughts. The ragged dress, of course, and the lice, the starving and the dirt were all in her mind, the contrast with the clean, plump, healthy ‘Gravina who had arrived here. But something else, something she didn’t dare think all the way even to herself.
I shivered in fear. The wool from the dress had combined with the bites from the lice to cover me in a rash, little red welts that bubbled and oozed with clear liquid. I scratched and picked, not caring if I made things worse or rubbed my skin raw, wanting only the relief.
When Michaela had gone I beckoned Jana over to me. Perhaps I could reflect some of the faint light coming through the grate off the blade of my little dagger and into my eyes, a crude simulation of the effect of light bent by a prism. I could delouse us all, at least temporarily. Everyone here must be crawling with lice, fleas, who knew what forms of mutant Eclipsian life. My last reserves of energy could all be spent on killing bugs, I thought, hopelessness leading to paralysis. I slumped back down without an attempt at action, without saying a word.
Jana, sensing it was safe, persisted in her earlier attempt to share a secret. “I need to tell you something.” She spoke in Terran. Glad of a distraction, I nodded encouragement.
Jana looked at her brother in my arms. “I don’t want him to hear.” Terran was her least favorite of the three languages, ordinary Eclipsian, formal, court speech, and Terran, she had grown up hearing and speaking. She hoped Val shared her dislike.
Val looked up. “Hear what?” he asked in Terran.
Jana groaned and switched to formal speech with its cumbersome, elaborate phraseology. “My lady mother, you could bestow on the outlaw Captain Reynaldo my brother, Valentine.” She was proud of her brainstorm, this ingenious way for us to buy our way out of captivity, but she tried to speak modestly, as befits the address of dutiful daughter to revered parent. “Valentine is the true-born heir to the Aranyi Realm. Reynaldo might keep him and allow you and me to return home with my lord father.” She could see already that I wasn’t best pleased with the idea so far, and hastened to counter my most obvious objection. “Papa wouldn’t mind,” she said, reverting to ordinary speech.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I glanced at the innocent subject of this dreadful debate, half-asleep in my arms. If Val had followed this proposal he gave no hint. “Reynaldo wants ransom,” I said. “Money and goods.” There was no point in discussing Val’s worth to me as my child. “It’s because Val’s the heir that Reynaldo knows Papa will pay to get him back.” Just in case she had any doubts, I wanted to reassure her, too. “Of course, Papa will pay for all of us because he loves us. But Reynaldo knows the heir to a Realm has to be ransomed.”
Jana frowned with impatience. The most important point was yet to come. She couldn’t wait to construct the labored inflected phrases of formal speech and tried Terran again. “But Struan can be the heir!” The brilliance of her idea exhilarated her; she was almost dancing with pleasure. “See? Reynaldo can keep Val, and Papa can have an heir anyway!” She looked with something approaching affection at Val, the only time he had possessed any value. “Struan would be a good heir. Papa likes him better.”
Val, groggy with milk, had picked up only a little of what had been said. “I’m the air,” he said, transliterating into ordinary Eclipsian. “Struan is natural-born.” He shut his eyes, secure in his unalterable position in the scheme of things, and returned to his interrupted nap.
But Jana had spoken aloud what I had seen only too well to be the truth. Struan Ndoko was, as Val had correctly stated, Dominic’s natural-born son, conceived and born out of wedlock, but acknowledged as his. The boy had his mother’s surname, my nemesis, Lady Melanie Ndoko. He had been there in Stefan’s house along with his mother, had been able, for the first time, to meet his father and his half siblings. For some of them, it had been love at first sight.
It was ridiculous, I told myself, shameful, but I couldn’t help it: I had not taken to the child, although there was nothing objectionable about him, either in appearance or in substance. He was tall and slim, like both his parents, with his mother’s looks and coloring, pale red hair and a long aristocratic face of strongly carved yet delicate features. Only something about the set of his thin mobile lips and the round, direct stare of his blue-green eyes betrayed the identity of his father. A handsome, well-behaved child of eight, quiet and intelligent, he obeyed his mother without fuss, yet possessed all the proper boyish virtues. He handled weapons skillfully for his age and enjoyed the outdoors. I had looked at this model child with distaste.
Lady Melanie had introduced him to us, leading him forward to receive Dominic’s fatherly blessing. Struan bowed gracefully to Dominic and recited the ritual greeting, “My lord, please accept the service of a loyal son,” while Dominic glanced from mother to son in tacit amazement. He kissed the boy on both cheeks and responded with the appropriate reply, “I welcome, with a father’s gratitude, so courteous an offer,” but adding his own little embellishment: “from such a worthy young man.” Dominic had not seen Lady Melanie or their son since shortly after the child’s birth. This reunion, unexpected as it was, had not displeased him.
> I had felt it then, Dominic’s twinge of guilt. Struan had been fathered deliberately. Eight years ago Dominic had had no thought of marrying. His adopted son, Tariq Sureddin, vir like his adoptive father, was no more eager to marry than his adoptive father was. In his love for Tariq, Dominic had decided to provide an heir of the next generation so that Tariq need feel no pressure to marry without affection or to father a child in a semi-commercial relationship.
Dominic had less delicacy than the younger man; such an obligation did not disgust or trouble him. Meeting Lady Melanie had changed the duty to a pleasure. Her brother had been Dominic’s companion at the time, and the strong resemblance intrigued Dominic. It had been no hardship to extend the affair to include the sister, a joy to know that she had conceived, an easy task to stay with her, helping her through the pregnancy and birth, as ‘Graven custom demands. Then, duty satisfied, desire fulfilled, Dominic had not been sorry to part. The child would stay with his mother until it was time for Dominic to take him and rear him as the heir to Aranyi.
By then the situation had changed. Despite all expectations, Dominic and I had met and, linked in an intense, irresistible connection of crypta, had married and produced Jana—a daughter, beloved and desired, but not an heir. It was through my actions three years later, choosing to bear another child, a boy, without consulting my husband, that the balance had been upset. Val, the legitimate son, conceived and born within the ‘Graven Rule, displaced Tariq and Struan with his first breath. And while Dominic loved and accepted Val, had assured me that our child meant more to him than his child with anyone else, he knew he had not done well by his former lover or their son. Still, with eight years of absence, the problem had faded from his mind. Now here was the boy himself, and his mother, in the flesh, in gentle reproach.
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