by Janet Morris
He let loose the tether, a wrap at a time. I sat back from him.
“Tell me,” he suggested, “about Sereth.”
“What do you want me to say? I wear your band, your brand, your couchbond. He, as I, live at your whim.” My eyes beseeched him, prayed his mercy upon us. “I beg you, do not hold us to task for our feelings, for what has gone in the past. Do not take vengeance upon him for what failings you find in me.” I blinked, his form gone blurry before me. “Estrazi meant me for you,” I whispered, my mouth stumbling over the words. “Your will, and his, brought me here. I have loved you, freed of my past. If you allow me life, I doubtless can repay you in service. Perhaps, in time, I can come to terms with my ambivalence. I am more than she whom you have known in my stead.” I stopped. He only regarded me coldly. “I have borne the child you desired, Khys. Within the limitations you have put upon me, I could still be more to you than any other you might come to use.” My nails bit my slippery palms behind my back. My breath came hard to me. He cocked his head ever so slightly.
“Now,” he said at last, “you are beginning to see.” And his quietly triumphant tone brought a moan to my throat. I swallowed it, and the taste was bitter.
“Is there need for you to gloat over your success with me?” I flared.
“It pleases me, to see you finally aware. What think you your arrar might say, could he see you petition me so wholeheartedly for my favor?”
I said nothing, shifting upon my aching knees before him.
He slapped me across the mouth. I tasted my own blood.
“I know not,” I whispered. “Khys ...” I hesitated, stopped. I remembered the shield Esyia had taught me upon Mi’ysten, tried to build it. I could not hold the image. I had not the power.
He sighed, reached beyond me, hooked the tether to its ring. He turned me roughly, so that my buttocks faced him. I did not scream as he entered me abruptly, not even stripping off his robe. Tears ran down my face and stung upon my cut lips as he tore his way into my rear passage. One arm around my waist, so that I could not ease myself, he serviced himself with me.
When he released me, I fell forward and lay there sobbing softly. My wrists jerked convulsively in their bonds.
I heard him at the door.
I rolled to my knees. “Khys, do not leave me here!”
“After you have had some practice upon your old skills,” he said, “I may collect you, if you have come to wish it.”
“Please, dharen, do not punish me. Take me with you.” He paused in the doorway. I felt his probe. He stood there longer than was his custom. Then he came and unsnapped the tether from the band of restraint at my throat. I leaned against him, sick with relief, as he unshackled my wrists. He did not let the bracelets fall, but safed them in his robe. I dressed before him, clumsy, and retrieved, as he ordered, the strings of fire gems I had strewn petulantly upon the mat.
My fingers toyed with the chald he had put upon me. Its testimony was no longer obscure.
He took me, through untraveled corridors, out of the forereader’s keep.
The night lay soft upon the Lake of Horns. We walked it, he intent upon my thoughts, silent. I, buffeted by the wind from the abyss that brought with it dawning comprehension, hardly noticed his presence. Along the lakeside we walked, the sharp Brinar breeze whistling around us.
“Khys, may I speak?” I petitioned him, knowing he would allow it.
“Surely,” he affirmed, he who had so long awaited this moment.
“It is of Estrazi I would speak to you,” I cautioned him.
“I know,” he said, hesting a stone up into the air, out across the lake. The spume it made, skipping, glittered in the moonlight.
“If you had come to me in Arlet, before Sereth, before Raet, and gotten me with child then, you would have had from me all that you desired. You would have needed to put no band of restraint upon me. You would have had, then, more than I can offer you now.” My fingertips ran over the band pulsing warm against my throat. If he had not wanted more from me than my unknowingness could provide, he would have kept me free of remembrance. I sought his face, but the moon’s light sat like a mask upon it. How I craved my skills, with this man, before whom I was so little without them.
“And you would have borne my son upon Mi’ysten. That way, in all its variations, provided a lesser yield. Only as regards what might have been between us was it a superior path. As you found, yourself, such selfish choosing must often be sacrificed for the greater good.” And I heard the loneliness, the bitterness in him that I had often felt when concerned with choosing between possible futures. Khys, much older than I, bearing upon him a world’s weight for so long, must have often made such decisions. I felt an empathy for him, a tightness in my throat, over burdens I presumed to think only the two of us had ever borne.
He put his hand upon my neck, propelled me forward toward the keep where I had been so long a prisoner.
“Many will walk that path, lit as it has come to be by the light of so many helsars. That, also, could not have been, had we blazed a different trail.”
“There are things about my father you do not know, Khys.”
“And will you give me that knowledge?” he asked softly, for he and his council had tried, and failed to obtain it.
I opened to him a certain portion of my memory, stepped aside. Without comment, he absorbed what was there, what had been denied him, even with all his power. What his council, in their assessment, had tried to take from me, I gave him. Not by my skills had that information been withheld from him, but by Estrazi’s. The fathers’ shaping sequences I gave up to him, my own child’s father, lest the boy be denied his heritage, should I not be enfleshed when he came of age; and that Khys would know I harbored no resistance to him. If the man would stand against the fathers, he would need them, and more. And I had nothing else to give. I could provide him with little else—I might have, once, been a formidable ally, but no longer. I had not the power to put those skills to use,
“Do you want to see the child?” he asked me after a long time.
“No,” I said. He squatted down, drew in the soft sand.
“I will not take the band from you.”
“I did not expect it,” I said. He looked up at me, and I knew his mind weighed the change he saw in my carriage, my voice, my heart. I saw his hesitant smile, not meant for my eyes, that his hest had come in. All this time, though he had my form, he had not possessed what had driven him to seek me. I knelt down before him, throwing my hair off my shoulders. His mark sparkled upon my breast.
“This way,” I said softly, “surely as you intended, none but yourself may be so tempted.” Shaping skills had been no blessing to me. I knew, even then, the importance of that moment, when Khys received from me what Estrazi had meant for him, and him alone.
“Estri,” said Khys, very low, “you should see our son.”
“No, Khys.” I shook my head, got to my feet. Avoiding his hand, I stared out across the lake. “Not until we take him before his grandsire.”
Then he rose also. Had I kept the thought within, he would have marked it as complicity against him.
“Do you not see it, dharen?” The wind caught my words and carried them back to him. His arms encircled my waist. “Estrazi will have his fruits.”
“I have gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid such a confrontation,” he said in my ear. “It has been long since you have sorted. Much has changed since you set your last hest. Let me worry about owkahen. I have managed alone a very long time.” His words were sharp, but his tone was pleased, prideful.
My fingers went to my chald, caressed the gol drops there. I shivered, and he propelled me toward the keep, solicitous. I almost laughed. Deep within me, my rage growled, rose, and circled, seeking a smoother spot to sleep. I heard it, muttering, settle once more.
Though I tried not to think of him, my thoughts turned again to Sereth. As we mounted the steps to his tower, Khys asked me what I would have him do.
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�Let us settle it between us. Only a woman can ease a man about such things. Or allow him my use periodically. You might, in time, tire of me. It would be not unfitting to cede me to him, if such came to be the case.”
“It is not in the sort,” he said shortly, as the guardians of the doors held them open for us. He stopped just within to speak with them, as was his custom.
“If harm comes to him,” I said when he again paced beside me, “I will bear the weight of it. You would not use him so recklessly, but for his feelings for me.”
“It would be worse upon him if I gave him nothing with which to occupy that mind.” I heard the warning there, knew I trod near the edge of his patience.
“He is no match for Gherein.” I sighed, fretful.
Khys smiled bleakly, said nothing. Up the back-passage stairs of brown taernite he guided me. And into his keep, where the rumpled couch silks answered for me a question I had felt it importunate to ask. I moved away from him, to the couch, and stripped it.
He stared at me as I did so. When all the coverings lay upon the rust mat, I turned to him and asked where I might find fresh couch clothes. He told me. I redressed the couch. It is not my practice to sleep on another woman’s sweat.
“How did you find her?” I asked, smoothing back the outer cover.
“Sufficient,” he allowed from the kifra stand. He turned from it, offering me a bowl. “I was, I am afraid, somewhat preoccupied with you and Chayin. She is a talented forereader, if a trifle melodramatic by nature.”
“Why are they here?” I queried him over the edge of my bowl.
“Things in the Parset Lands change too fast for some of its inhabitants. Also, he being Raet’s son, his spawn deserved better than the schools of Nemar.”
“It is a little young, is it not, for school?” I asked innocently.
Khys drained his bowl, put it down. “There is no temporizing with you, is there? If you please me, I may update your information. I have told you that I abhor questions, I have spent long teaching you your place. I adjure you: do not forget what you have learned.”
I took my bowl and set it, half-done, upon the stand. I stripped off the lucent web-cloth he had given me, walked past him, and put it in its place, a small space he had allowed me in his wardrobe. It had taken longer than I had expected to come to the end of his tolerance. Khys had bestowed upon me a great latitude, along with my memory. I was not displeased.
When I emerged, he was in the alcove, stripped down to breech, leaning with one arm against the window frame, his eyes upon the waning moon as it bid farewell to its twin on the wind-ruffled water.
“Tomorrow evening,” he said, not turning, “we shall sup privately with the cahndor and his mate. At sun’s rising I have an appointment with the high chalder. Then some rather dreary business in which I will not involve you. I will collect you at mid-meal, and we will discuss the situation in the south. Your observations might be valuable, you having more extensive experience with tiasks than most.”
“Your will is my life,” I acquiesced, waiting, reading the tension in his muscles as easily as my skills would have given it to me from his mind.
“It is what I said to you about Estrazi that troubles you, is it not?” I asked.
He made no move nor answer.
“I had a dream in which he identified himself to me, expressed his intent, though I could make nothing of it at the time.”
“Do not give it credence. You know better, do you not?” he snapped. “Go to sleep!”
And yet, for a probability he would shun, he himself posited too much attention upon it. I shrugged and turned to slip between the fresh couch silks. He darkened the keep, all but for two stars in the alcove. From his library he got the charts he had lately been studying and took them there, settling back among the cushions in the dim light.
“I do not need dark to sleep,” I offered.
“It will be light soon enough. I know them by heart. I use them as a focus. Do not concern yourself.”
So I turned upon my side, my back toward him, and sought the restorative waters of the sea of Spirit.
But though I walked with determination along that shore, as I chased each wave, it receded before me. I could not sleep. From my memory of the gathering in the common keep, I conjured a tune, that I might have what little privacy such a simple ploy would afford. Beneath the melody, I took note of his regular breathing, its deep slow rhythm, and knew Khys worked upon his projects from a vantage point not afforded by his keep’s window.
I pushed myself deeper, slowing my respiration, my life processes. But I could not slip my flesh’s hold.
Khys, in the alcove, muttered to himself. He was all that once I had adjudged him, in my hate, and more. Yet he was also what Khys’s Estri had seen—a man who had slipped entropy’s hold and lived twenty lifetimes, a man of obscure but unquestionable morality, who had made the adjustment I had sought and not found between life enfleshed and life overwhelming. Khys was an extremely successful organism. His fruits lay ripe and bountiful upon Silistra, and near a million were nourished thereby. When I had refused him, he had afforded me a lesson in perspective the magnitude of which was only beginning to come clear to my sleep-befuddled sensing.
I wished desperately that I could seek my father’s help. I could not slip Khys’s band of restraint. The dark beyond my closed lids was dark only; the silence, but for my rustling mind and the tune I proffered as flimsy shield—the silence was deafening. He had gotten his child from me. I had invited him, in my ignorance. He had used my life more efficaciously than any band of restraint upon my former couch-mate, Sereth. And Chayin, also, did Khys’s will. All three of us he had bent to his purpose as easily as if he were a chalder melding strands of soft gold. What purpose? Even the cahndor knew not, and Chayin had been, even before we rode to battle upon the plain of Astria, formidable in his forereading skills.
I felt the chald, the gol drops pressing into my back as my agitation tighter-fleshed my mind. Miccah, the high chalder, had remarked it a pity that I knew not the chald’s significance. He could have meant by that only one thing. A man receives a couchbond strand to bestow as he pleases upon reaching puberty. Low chaldra is such a strand; and no invocation, no Day-Keeper’s hand, is needed to add a couchbond chain to a woman’s chald. But Khys had not had such a strand to give. He had had Miccah make one. That he might once have had one, and lost it somehow, occurred to me. But I did not think so. I shifted, adjusting the chald so that no drop lay against my backbone. I recollected how he had treated one woman upon whom he had brought child—she who bore the mark of his favor, she who had served us a meal. She, surely, had never worn such a strand at her belly. The dharen had amended his custom to enchald me thus. I wondered if I were enough of my old self to be able to turn his interest to my advantage.
I heard him again, the rustle of his movement about the keep. I wriggled upon the couch, rolled onto my side, facing the sound of him.
“Khys,” I whispered, breath-soft, opening my eyes to the coloring dawn. “Tell me a thing, lest sleep never come to me.”
“Ask it,” he said, sliding back the book wall, safing his charts within. His back was to me. He had dressed as if he might work his body, in a practice breech and light weapons belt. He turned finally. I had waited, that I might see his face.
“What is the significance of this chald, that upon which the high chalder remarked? I still do not see.”
“If you did not see, you would not have asked,” he remarked. “But I will give you the acknowledgment you seek. I would not want you to lose sleep over it. As you surmised, I had not such a strand to give.” He pushed away from the book wall and came to the couchside. “Silistra has never before had a dhareness.”
I stretched under the couch silks.
“Do not make more of the fact than it is,” he advised sternly. “It is your bloodright, procured for you by your father’s grace, by your genetic strengths and the potential inherent in the son you produced for me.
It is him I honor, not you.” The sun invaded the keep, fanning the fathers’ fire upon his skin.
I laughed softly at him. Honor his son, would he? I saw no honor in the band of restraint I wore, but I saw a look upon his face I had seen often before upon other men’s. Fleeing, it hovered there, before he chased it from his countenance.
He stared a moment longer at me, in the rising light, then turned and strode from the keep.
When I judged him gone down the stairs, I threw off the couch silks and went into my old prison. In the mirror there, I regarded myself. I spent a time coming to terms with that image, with his works upon me. I saw the painful thinness of my frame. I saw a tone to my muscles that did not please me. I would, I vowed, get Khys’s permission to work my body into some kind of fitness. My inner thighs did not suit me. My skin did not have the healthy tone it normally carried. But those things I could remedy. His device upon my flesh, I could not. I tried one final time to loose Khys’s band of restraint. An enth, I sought the power to interrupt the flow of energy that held it there. I failed totally.
I wondered what I might wrest from this situation, what might be gained. One must know where one stands, and what one wants, to even peg the time. So I was, nominally, dhareness. The title did not assuage my exacerbation. Estrazi, how could you allow this? My father did not answer me. Was Khys, truly, enough to stand against the fathers? “Have you joined with those who oppose me?” my father once asked me. And I had threatened that I would do so. He had told me then, truly, of all that would occur—even of my subjugation, my loss of memory, at Khys’s hand. And he had come to me, in a dream, even before I had recalled myself. I turned from the mirror and hastened out from the prison that had so long contained me.
I had, at least, the run of the dharen’s keep. I took up his book upon helsars, and that of hesting, and sat with them in the alcove. I could not read. Sereth, and the cruelty Khys had shown him, obsessed me. I could see no reason in Khys’s actions. If, as Carth had said, Sereth was resigned to my loss, why had Khys given me to him, and brought more pain upon him? You are, after all, only his servant, I had said to Sereth, and Khys had laughed and hugged me close. I sighed, rolled upon the cushions. Was this how M’ksakkans felt among Silistrans? Short so many senses, I found myself unable to use my reason effectively. It will come, I told myself, in time. One can adjust to anything. But my spirit shriveled at the things I had done and said in my ignorance, and my reason had no salve for the pain in my heart. Somewhere in that sea of tears, I drowned, and slept.