by Lisa Cach
But perhaps everyone felt that way. Separate. Alone even while in a group.
Even more painful than that was my distance from my son. The chalice had given me back my life, and more: there was no evidence upon my body that I had borne a child. It was as if the past year had never happened; even an old scar upon my knee had disappeared. My tattoos, on the other hand, were as crisp and dark as if they had been newly drawn.
This rejuvenated body lacked one thing I longed to give, however: milk for my baby. As close as I held him, and as hard as I wished for my breasts to fill so that I might feel his mouth at my nipple, taking his strength and his growth from me, it was not to be. No milk came, and hunger made him fuss and cry until I bit back tears and gave him to the waiting nurse.
“You know there are ways to avoid pregnancy, don’t you?” Basina said.
I started. Lost in my thoughts, I had forgotten she was there. I turned to find her watching me with her cold, assessing gaze. She seemed to have gained a modicum of respect for me since Theo’s birth and all that happened after. While I don’t think she would have grieved my death, and likely thought me despicably weak for having fallen ill of childbed fever in the first place, my sudden leap to vibrant health had convinced her that I did have access to a power she could not ken.
And if there was one thing Basina respected, it was power.
“I’ve heard of some,” I said. “Watching one’s monthly cycle. A pessary of herbs, wine, and wool. The man withdrawing before spilling his seed.”
She shook her head. “The first method assumes you have a choice over when you have sex. The second is messy and unpleasant, and not likely to be at hand. The third is laughable. A man withdrawing, and robbing himself of that last moment of pleasure? Only an idiot would put her faith in that happening.”
“There are other ways?” She had my interest now. I had learned from gossip among the servants, but no older woman had ever sat me down to explain female secrets.
“The seed of the wild carrot. Chew and swallow a spoonful a day, and you won’t conceive.”
“As simple as that?” I asked, astonished.
“Simple if you have the seeds. If you don’t, and the worst happens, then a dose of meadow rue will uproot what is growing inside you.”
I narrowed my eyes, wondering now what her point was in telling me this. “Would you have had me uproot Theo?”
She made a noise of annoyance. “Don’t waste my time with stupid questions and mother-bear emotions. I’m telling you this because you were taken against your will by Sygarius, and the lot of woman is to always be vulnerable to the thoughtless lusts of men. It may happen to you again, and I doubt you would want to risk your life a second time, to birth the child of a man you do not respect.”
“Oh.” I looked on her hard face and set jaw, and wondered if that had befallen her. I didn’t dare to ask. “Thank you. I’ll keep both the wild carrot and the meadow rue in mind, though I don’t expect to need them under Clovis’s protection. He won’t let harm come to me.”
She looked at me sideways.
“What happened with Sygarius . . .” I said, feeling defensive. “Clovis wouldn’t let anything like that happen again.”
Basina shifted to the edge of her chair and stood. A smile touched her lips as she watched Audofleda lay the finished garland across Theo’s forehead. A stray breeze blew a strand of Basina’s ash-blond hair across her cheek, softening her features. She turned and looked down at me. “Don’t trust your fate to any man, Nimia. Not even to my son.”
As she walked away, the sunny warmth of a moment before turned to a chill of foreboding. That had sounded like a warning. Basina knew something.
Was that the reason for the lesson on preventing unwanted pregnancy? I feared so, and it spoke ill of my future.
The only question now was how soon I’d be told what she knew.
I didn’t have long to wait.
That evening, Clovis arranged for us to eat together privately—an intimacy we hadn’t shared for countless months. In the first few days after my recovery, he had rarely let me out of his sight and constantly had his hand on my thigh, my hand, my hair—as if reassuring himself that I was still there, still alive. We hadn’t talked much, though, and he had avoided situations where we might have to. It was the question of Theo’s parentage that held him back, I knew. He didn’t want to think about it, or fight about it.
Something momentous must be afoot for him to lounge across from me over a long meal, where conversation must be made. I waited, letting him talk of administrative duties and the bickering between Franks and Romans, both in the army and in the city. The Franks taking control of Soissons had not been so much an invasion as a shift in the balance of power. Franks had been living among the Romans, even fighting alongside Roman soldiers, for decades, so they weren’t wholly unfamiliar. There just happened to be a lot more of them in Soissons now, and they were the ones in charge. Ostensibly.
The reality was that Clovis couldn’t—and didn’t wish to—create entire new systems for running the province and the city. Roman nobility, Roman administrators, and Christian priests and bishops were needed to keep the wheels of both commerce and taxation turning, the markets running, the water flowing, the roads repaired. Being king wasn’t all hacking off limbs in battle and wearing a jeweled crown, fun though they might be.
His venting on the tiresome details of ruling finally petered out, and conversation flagged. When he shifted on his couch and glanced at me, I sensed that he was finally coming to the point of this dinner.
I suffered my own moment of wishing to avoid a topic. “There is nothing that tastes so much of summer as a perfectly ripe strawberry,” I said, pressing yet another between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Perfumed sweetness filled my head and I closed my eyes in pleasure.
“You’ve left me none.”
“I left you all the quail. You’re a man; you eat meat. The berries are mine.”
He chuckled.
I opened my eyes. “Do you know, I think you’re the only person in this villa who isn’t afraid of me.”
“Terix isn’t.”
“Isn’t he, a little?” Terix knew me better than anyone, with the bond that only two people who had grown up beside each other could share, but that bond also meant he was the only one who knew how I had recovered. He had heard my spell casting—if that’s what it was—and had seen me drink his blood. His unease around me came as no surprise, but it still hurt.
“You startled everyone, coming back to life like that. It was not . . . natural. How did you do it, Nimia? When I visited you earlier, you were all but gone. I’ve seen enough death to know.”
I hadn’t told Clovis about the power of the crystal chalice. Instinct had made me swear Terix to silence, and I was glad that I had. If Clovis knew what the chalice could do, he would never leave it in my hands, and would demand to drink from it himself. Even assuming I could dredge up the unknown words I’d spoken to draw forth its power, too many questions remained. I didn’t know the extent of the changes the chalice had wrought on my body. Nor did I know if it would be right or wrong to bestow those unknown blessings on a man with the burning desire to conquer all of Gaul.
“I don’t know what happened—not entirely,” I said, settling on a version of the truth. “I saw a vision of my mother, and then I somehow knew how to call forth my healing.” I shrugged and took a sip of wine. “It’s a blur to me now. If asked to repeat it, I don’t know that I could.”
“I pray to Wotan that if ever I am so near death, you remember the way of it.”
“So I’m not only your seer now,” I said with a smile, “but your physician, as well. See how I make myself indispensable to you.”
His gaze settled on me with a strange, almost sad longing, as if I were out of reach even though I was only an arm’s length away. “I want to chain you to my s
ide with shackles that have no key, so you can’t ever leave me.”
My wine goblet halfway to my lips, I stared at him. Did he speak of marriage? Is that what this was all about? Basina may have been trying to dissuade me from becoming her daughter. From becoming queen. A role she surely thought fit only for a princess, not a former slave. “I am not entirely averse to bondage,” I whispered, my heart fluttering with excitement.
He grinned, his sad look lightening. “I remember.”
My cheeks heated. I hadn’t been speaking of that. “Do you fear I will leave you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t fear it. I know it.”
I set down my goblet. “Why do you say such a thing? What cause have I given you to doubt my loyalty and—and affection?” I was about to say “love,” but after all we had been through together, still he had not said that he loved me. I would not bare my heart to him first and give him that power over me, though surely he had long guessed it.
“I do not doubt them. I trust you, Nimia, more than I trust anyone.”
“That is not saying much.”
He laughed. “You’re right.” He got up and came over to my couch, surprising me by lying down beside me, then pulling me half under him so he could look down into my face while his hand toyed with my breast. “It would be better to say that I trust you more than I trust myself. I trust you more than is wise or cautious.”
“Why?”
He pinched my nipple, then brushed his lips against mine. “It’s something in your eyes. Even when you’re angry at me—angry enough that if you were a man, I would reach for my sword and shield—I can see that you still want me.” He nudged my thighs apart and pulled up my skirts. “Not just like this, either,” he said, dragging his fingers lightly over my folds. My sex tingled to life, throbbing in instant arousal.
“You’re saying you can abuse me as you wish, and I will still crawl on my belly like a dog to lick your feet.” I sniffed.
“I’m saying you’ll try to twist my balls off when you don’t like what I do, but you’ll stay while you twist them.”
I grinned. “Only to make sure I hurt you.”
His fingertip played at my gates, dipping inside to gather moisture that he spread up along the crest of my folds and over my stamen. I felt my breasts and cunny swell, and my interest in what he was saying faded away. It had been too long since we’d had sex, and my body was hungry for it.
I reached under his tunic for the ties to his breeches. A tug on the cord, a shove on the waistband, and then I had his rod in my hand, heavy, warm, and thick. I closed my grip on it, and felt my cunny pulse, wanting to do the same.
“Nimia,” he breathed into my neck, and settled his hips between my thighs.
I parted my legs wider and drew him toward my entrance, aching to feel the blunt head of his mentula parting my folds. My passage felt unbearably empty. I needed him inside me.
Clovis lifted his head and looked down at me. “You have to do something for me,” he said, holding himself back.
“I’m trying to,” I said and tugged on his rod, bringing its rounded end to kiss my gates. I was so close to what I wanted . . . I mewed in the back of my throat and squirmed beneath him, trying to bring him closer. I felt the tip of him slip inside, and I reached around to grip his muscled buttocks, squeezing them.
He groaned and I felt his hips flex involuntarily, dipping inside me before withdrawing again. “You might not want this after you hear what it is,” he said, his voice strained.
“Then you’d better fuck me first.” I bent one knee, my foot flat on the couch, and used the leverage to impale myself on him.
“Gods help me,” he gasped, and gave himself over to my cunny.
This was what I wanted from him: total loss of control, his desire for me erasing all thought, all plots, all motivations except to thrust, thrust, thrust. The power of it shook my body, my breasts bouncing, my legs helpless as he scooped his arm under one of my knees, holding me open the better to pound himself within me. I let the tide of his passion sweep over me, drowning me, then lifting me up on a wave of mounting pleasure.
With the pleasure came the hum of bees, and the golden swarm that bespoke a vision. I rose higher and higher on the wave of my body’s joy, and just as the wave crested and I felt Clovis stiffen with his own release, the gold that suffused my gaze shattered, and for one hideous moment I felt the burning slice of steel on my throat, the taste of blood in my mouth, and my own hands pressing at my neck as the life spurted out from between my fingers.
“Nimia!” Clovis cried. “What’s happening? Are you choking? Nimia!”
I blinked, his panicked face coming into focus. I heard the last of the noises coming from my own throat—a gagging, bubbling cough, as if I had been underwater, suffocating.
His hands held the sides of my face. “Are you all right?”
“I think you’d better tell me what this thing is that you want me to do.”
Sygarius has taken refuge in Tolosa, at the court of Alaric, king of the Visigoths,” Clovis said.
I sucked in a breath. “So he lives.”
We were back on our separate couches, clothes arranged, and the food had been cleared away by servants. My cunny felt warm and well loved, but my mind couldn’t let go of the sensation of having my throat cut. I kept feeling it over and over, and dreaded what it meant.
My visions couldn’t be counted on to be literal representations of the future, yet sometimes they were. I needed to keep this one to myself until I had a better sense of what it meant.
“I never doubted he survived,” Clovis said. “Nor am I sorry: it would have been too easy a fate for him to crawl off under a bush and die of his wounds. I’d like the pleasure of gutting him myself.”
“There are times, Clovis, when your bloodthirstiness makes me melt with adoration.” I meant it, too. Bastard Sygarius, forcing me, trying to breed on me as if I were his farm animal. And then ordering his soldier to kill me as a distraction so he could flee from Clovis, tossing me aside to save his own skin. I had hated him before that, but despised him after. My emotions for my former master had once been a mixture of sexual desire, resentment, and awe, even affection. It was probably that former tenderness that made my emotions so violent now. “I want to watch while you gut him.”
“Once I have him, you can do it yourself if you wish.”
I blinked at that; a mental flinch against the thought of cutting into human flesh. I’d never wounded anyone before, much less disemboweled someone. “Is Alaric giving him to you?”
Clovis sighed. “No. Not yet, anyway. Letters and emissaries have been going back and forth for months, but Alaric says it is his Christian duty to give sanctuary to those who seek it; especially to the ‘rightful’ ruler of Soissons.”
The majority of Visigoths were Christian, although not the same type of Christian as Remigius and the other bishops I had encountered here in the north of Gaul. The Visigoths were Arians, whatever that meant, while the Roman Christians were Catholic. I had no notion of what this great religious divide was, but it was a point of friction between the Visigoths who ruled central and southern Gaul, and the Romans—both noble and common—who still lived among them.
Whether Arian or Catholic, followers of the old Roman and Greek gods, or of the Frankish, all peoples I knew of shared this belief: that their rulers were either chosen by the gods, or descended from them. And the Romans had once believed that their rulers became gods. It was all very odd. Any woman with sense could point out that all rulers were but men, who drank too much, fucked whomever they could, and took a peculiar joy in farting.
“What will you do?” I asked. “Leave Sygarius there?”
“To form an alliance with Alaric, and attempt to retake Soissons? No. I can’t leave him free. Nor am I ready yet to invade Visigoth territory.”
I held out my hands
, palms up. “Then what?”
He smiled, though it looked more like a grimace. “You.”
I shook my head, not understanding.
“I want you to be my ambassador. Go to Alaric’s court, and persuade him to hand over Sygarius.”
“Me!”
Clovis leaned forward, his gaze intent. “Yes. If righteousness is truly such an issue with Alaric—though I have my doubts; he’s probably using it as an excuse and intends to join forces with Sygarius—then you, who have been so wronged, can argue that Sygarius must return to Soissons to face justice.”
“He won’t listen to a woman! No king would, and especially not a Visigoth. I lived among one of their tribes when I was child, and they did not impress me as men who valued the opinions of women.”
“You speak their tongue, don’t you? That is another reason to send you.”
I pressed my lips together.
“If you went alone,” he said, “then, yes, I could see how Alaric might not give you the degree of attention you deserve. However, I’m arranging an illustrious escort for you—or rather, Remigius is. He still feels badly about his inadvertent role in your abduction.”
So this plan was already in motion. Had he come up with it as soon as I recovered? “Who is this illustrious personage?”
“Sidonius Apollinaris.” He looked at me as if that was supposed to mean something.
I raised my brows in question.
Clovis gave a short, dry laugh. “I hadn’t heard of him, either. He’s a Roman bishop in central Gaul, in Clermont. Old now, but for a brief moment he was the son-in-law of the emperor in Rome, and he is a poet of great fame. More importantly, he once spent time at the Visigoth court, and wrote several famously glowing letters describing Alaric’s grandfather. Alaric will be eager to please him, and will not want to appear a hypocrite in front of such a witness. He will want to be immortalized in Sidonius’s writings as a righteous ruler, as his grandfather was.”
