Retribution (28 page)

In self-defense, Dominic had come to treat
his enemy with a kind of respect. Even the torture had been, in
part, an expression of our awareness of the attention that had been
paid to us. We had not been simply unlucky; we had been
chosen
as targets for Reynaldo’s evil. And we would not
ignore the defeated adversary after our rescue and victory. This
funeral Dominic was orchestrating would be our last acknowledgment
that we grasped the significance of what had happened. Our reward,
we hoped, would be a future free of any more such personal
notice.

“My lord husband,” I said in formal speech,
“it is fitting that we act together in this service, as we are one
in marriage.”

My answer pleased the two men. Dominic and I
knelt by the pyre, extending our left hands. We snapped our fingers
simultaneously to make the inner flame and held our fiery thumbs to
the tinder. In the still air the brittle, dried stuff caught fire
immediately. Ranulf stood ready to make sure the flames did not
die, blowing on them until they extended to the nearest sticks. In
a short time the whole pile was ablaze, the canvas-wrapped package
on top turning brown around the edges.

When the body began to burn the smell was, if
anything, worse than in the dungeon. We sat upwind, squatting on
flat ground or large stones, changing location when the wind
shifted. As the morning progressed the day became more autumnal,
clouds massing to block the sun, a chill developing in the overcast
sky. The wind picked up, sometimes blowing a downdraft into our
faces, stinging the eyes and gagging us with the stench. There was
no possibility of leaving until the entire body was destroyed and
the fire could be extinguished.

As midday approached, for all the sickening
smell, I discovered with a guilty rumble in my stomach that I was
famished. “It is a funeral, cherie,” Dominic said. “Of course we
have brought the feast.”

Ranulf had packed us a dinner. We had crusty
loaves of fresh bread, hunks of hard cheese and a few crisp, tart
apples. Each of us carried a water skin tied to the saddle, but
Ranulf had had the forethought to bring some bottles of Aranyi wine
from the cellar. We passed them around, swigging from the neck. “To
the destruction of our enemies,” we said before taking our first
drink. Never had the traditional toast held such significance.

I thought of the dead bandit while we
digested and he was consumed. Strange how, with the revelation of
his paternity and Dominic’s and my recognition of his influence, he
had started to seem like a member of the family.

Dominic had held something back from me
yesterday. He had admitted that Reynaldo’s mother was gifted but he
had evaded all my attempts to identify her. There are few enough
gifted individuals with seminary training, who possess a
prism-handled dagger and know how to use it. It was not credible
that this woman had been completely unknown. “Did your father never
tell you anything about the woman, Reynaldo’s mother?” I asked.
“Did he know what became of her?”

“Helios give me patience,” he said. “Can’t
you let it be?”

“No,” I said. “You must tell me the whole
story, as you promised.”

I looked over at Ranulf who sat
expressionless a few feet away. My husband and I could speak in
minds if we wished. Yet I sensed it was unnecessary, that Ranulf
knew everything Dominic could tell me. He had lived through it, had
seen the same events Dominic must narrate.

“This is our last chance,” I said. “After
today we will not speak of it again.”

Dominic frowned at the indignity he must
recall, and I began to sense the answer before he gave it. It was
so scandalous I saw why no one at Aranyi would speak of it, why
there had been a willed collective forgetfulness.

“She was my father’s own daughter,” Dominic
said after a long pause. “He had so many, so many children. There
wasn’t a village or a farm that couldn’t boast of at least one of
the Margrave’s bastards.”

“You mean he had sex with one of his own
illegitimate daughters?” I asked. “He didn’t know her identity and
she hadn’t been told?”

“No,” he said, “It’s worse. Much worse.” He
forced himself to think back, to the years of his young manhood, to
the sensitive, impressionable, teenage Dominic who had had to watch
such crimes, helpless to prevent them or change the results.

“My father brought her into the household
when she was quite young, and she was raised among the servants. I
suppose her mother had died.” The blurry image of Dominic’s own
mother, dead when he was five, came into my mind from Dominic’s
unwelcome memories. The similarity was stark, senseless as all
tragedy, impossible to analyze.

Dominic’s face slowly relaxed as he resumed
the narrative. “She turned out to be a real beauty,” he said of the
child, “and she looked like her father, my father. She had his
gift, too, and his curse.” At my questioning look, Dominic said, “I
could detect it in her as she matured, the madness. I think she
guessed it too, that it was part of her legacy.”

I thought of Dominic, born of his father’s
early marriage, when Zoltan had been still a man, not a monster.
Dominic had grown up watching his father degrade himself further
each year, fathering bastards, sinking into madness, while his son
attained manhood, became an officer in the Royal Guards and managed
Aranyi as regent. Dominic had stared his own legacy in the face
every day he spent at home, and had succeeded, for the most part,
in conquering it.

Dominic grimaced at my sympathetic thoughts.
“Sometimes my father talked vaguely of acknowledging her,” he said,
“but he never did it. She had no other family, no one to fight for
her rights. And for a girl the difference between being recognized
as
natural-born
or remaining illegitimate is not as crucial
as it is for a boy.”

I understood the implication. Unacknowledged,
there was no actual proof the girl was old Margrave Aranyi’s
daughter.

“Still, my father was proud of her. She had
the inner eyelids, and with the resemblance between them, her
Aranyi look, it was likely she’d have a powerful gift. At her first
monthly bleeding he sent her to a seminary. When she came
back—still a child really, but wearing women’s clothes, a
prism-handled dagger at her waist— he wanted her. He made no secret
of it, saw no reason to be ashamed. He was Margrave Aranyi. Who
could deny him?”

I fingered the belt that held my own dagger’s
sheath. “What about her?” I asked. “She had
crypta
, had been
trained to use it. Couldn’t she fight him, or at least hold him
off?”

“Whether she could or not, she didn’t.”
Dominic averted his eyes from mine as he spoke. He knew I wouldn’t
like this next part. “Amalie, please don’t take this the wrong way.
I mean no disrespect, but she did not object. She was not forced or
raped, not in the physical sense.”

Still I tried to protect her memory. “Perhaps
she hadn’t been told directly who her father was.”

“No,” Dominic said. “She boasted of her
parentage, to any who would listen. No, I think the truth is ugly
and obvious. She was his daughter, with his vices. She liked the
idea. He was still relatively young, he seemed handsome and clever.
Their child would be doubly Aranyi, Aranyi on both sides. She
bedded him willingly and when she conceived she threw her weight
around in the household. ‘I will be ‘Gravina Aranyi,’ she would
say. ‘And my son will be the next Margrave.’ ”

“She would say that in your presence? To your
face?”

“Only once.” Dominic shrugged. “I was not
often home in those days.” His voice was strained. “She had my
father’s protection. He would taunt me with it, say if I wasn’t a
dutiful son he’d put the true Aranyi heir in my place.”

My love
, I thought to him.
My
dearest love
. I put my arm around his bowed shoulders. “You
must have wanted to kill him. Him and his daughter and their inbred
bastard.” I wasn’t speaking merely my own thoughts; I was reading
Dominic’s that blasted like shouts from his mind, every emotion
explicit and unambiguous.

I understood at last why Dominic had so
resisted this immolation. He was remembering his old murderous
thoughts, was fighting, even now, the immoral but natural feelings
of patricide that had once obsessed him; had hoped to atone for his
imagined sin against father and half-sister by treating the body of
Reynaldo as family, as Aranyi. Thank all the gods, I prayed to the
empty sky, that I had not known Dominic’s motives when I had
insisted on the burning. In my love for him, my sympathy with his
unavoidable sense of guilt, I might have gone along with his idea
of the family vault, let him do what he would only have come to
regret far more than this strange funeral.

“What happened that your father didn’t do
what he threatened?” I asked, when Dominic seemed able to speak
again.

“He had a brief moment of sanity,” Dominic
said. “He woke up one day, decided that his legitimate son, born to
a mother who was not a blood relative, was a safer bet to inherit
Aranyi. He told his daughter he had reconsidered, that she would
not be ‘Gravina Aranyi, that he already had an heir. She ran away
the next day.”

“And no one went after her?” The question was
absurd. If Margrave Aranyi hadn’t wanted her back, no one else
would have pursued her. “Did you know she’d been captured?”

“My father received a demand for ransom,”
Dominic said. “At least I assume that’s what it was. But he didn’t
share it with anyone.”

The thought was appalling: the abused girl,
rejected by her mad lover—and father—pregnant with his incestuous
child and captured by bandits. That she had lived to give birth and
to raise the child was, in a way, admirable, for her tenacity and
strength of will if for nothing else.

Dominic laughed scornfully at my thoughts.
“I’m sorry to burst your bubble, Amalie. But she was not admirable,
only desperate. Bandits can judge the value of
crypta
along
with everything else they scavenge. The men who captured her knew
they had a real prize, and could speculate on the quality of the
child she carried if it lived. Even if they were never ransomed,
they had an intrinsic worth of their own, and she gambled on it.
She communicated with my father telepathically. I couldn’t help
picking up some of it. She boasted that their son would be a great
outlaw, a leader, would wreak vengeance on Aranyi. She kept it up
for months, until she realized it was useless. And that was the
last we heard of her.”

“Until I met the son,” I said, shuddering at
my narrow escape. “Until he almost succeeded in achieving that
vengeance.”

“Yes.” Dominic wouldn’t meet my eyes and he
blocked our full communion.

I remembered Reynaldo’s thoughts and words
that had not made sense at the time, his assertion that he had “the
right,” his claim to Aranyi. His obsession with killing Dominic,
usurping his title and taking first me, then Jana, as his
consorts.

“You knew!” I shouted. “You knew, and you
didn’t tell me! You let me spend five days and nights with that
madman, at his mercy. And you brought him back to our house, alive,
and you never told me what he was, who or what he was.” How many
times had Reynaldo voiced his wishes to me?
Let me die
in
Aranyi
, he had said. “He got what he wanted!”

Dominic threw his voluminous sable-lined
cloak over me, wrapping me in his arms, holding me as immobilized
as he had been in the frozen force field of two nights ago. He
enclosed me within a warm circle of man and cloak, while I cried it
out of me, the hopelessness, the injustice and the filth and the
madness.

As my weeping subsided, I heard Dominic
whispering words to me. “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t think
it would matter. Once I rescued you, I thought you’d never have to
know.”

I hiccupped a couple of times. “But maybe I
could have fought him better if I’d known who he was. I might have
been better prepared for what I was up against.”

Dominic loosened his embrace under the cloak.
“I thought it would scare you too much,” he said. “I thought you’d
be braver if you didn’t know.”

My mind went back to the terrible fears of
captivity, alone with the children, surrounded by people who hated
me, wanted us dead. Dominic was right. As so often, he knew me,
inside and out, as well as he knew himself.
What would I have
done if I had known that this madman with crypta, who commanded a
small army of bandits, was Dominic’s own relation twice over, with
some of his real power and abilities?
The panic would have
paralyzed me.

Dominic was still excusing himself. “Even I
didn’t know for certain until I saw him, face to face, and entered
his cesspool of a mind.” He shook himself all over at the unclean
memory with an elegant flexing of his muscles, like a glossy
thoroughbred flicking flies from its skin. “And by then I was in no
mood to proclaim the facts, not to you or to anyone.”

But then, I know you, don’t I?
Dominic’s words came into my head, the thought I had heard in my
strange communion with him, as I had emerged from the
crypta-death
, and Dominic had confronted his defeated enemy.
He had learned of Reynaldo’s identity at that moment, or confirmed
his suspicions, and what had seemed at the time to be the end of my
ordeal had instead become the beginning of a strange new kind of
captivity.

There was a whoosh and a crash, an explosion
of sparks. The pyre collapsed, the charred wood and the body
crumbling into the hot center of the blaze. Reynaldo was only bones
now, hard black bones that would be reduced to ashes by the intense
heat of the charcoal. It would be over soon, all of it. As the day
wound to a close, we could taste our freedom in the cool moist
air.