Wedding

by Ann Herendeen

  ECLIPSIS

  WEDDING

  Book Three of Lady Amalie’s memoirs

  by Amalie, Lady Aranyi

  edited and with an introduction by Ann Herendeen

  Table of Contents

  Also by Ann Herendeen

  About the Author/Editor

  Dedication

  Part One: ERIS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  Part Two: ARANYI

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  Part Three: FESTIVAL

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  Part Four: HEALING

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  Part Five: BELONGING

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  Preview: BIRTH

  Bonus Excerpt: THE GUY IN FRANKIE’S HATBOX

  Copyright © 2011 by Ann Herendeen

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Smashwords Edition: September 2011

  Cover image by Danielle Jacobs with T.T. Thomas

  ALSO BY ANN HERENDEEN

  Harper Paperbacks (Kindle and Nook versions also available)

  Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (2008)

  Pride/Prejudice (2010)

  Lambda Literary Award finalist, Bisexual Fiction category

  E-Books

  ECLIPSIS: Lady Amalie’s Memoirs

  Book One: Recognition

  Book Two: Choices

  Book Three: Wedding

  Book Four: Birth (October 2011)

  Books Five and Six: Captivity (November and December 2011)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR/EDITOR

  Ann Herendeen is the author of two Harper Paperbacks: Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (2008); and Pride/Prejudice (2010), a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Bisexual Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn. www.annherendeen.com

  To RS, with apologies.

  PART ONE:

  ERIS

  CHAPTER 1

  I woke with a hair in my mouth. Strange dreams were vivid in my mind, images of Dominic and me coupling in a delirious, violent frenzy.

  We were hungry for each other, I thought, anticipation rousing me from my stupor. After months of only telepathic simulation, the chance to make love with our bodies and our minds in communion was all we could think about. But not like that. Why, now, would I have such dreams? A jumble of soulless motion, humping and grunting, whimpering and crying, they had nothing of the love that had made our sexual encounters in communion worth all the trouble of imagining them into the semblance of reality.

  Well, they were only dreams. Best to forget them and ready myself for our first real night of love. Our time together would be briefer than we might wish, and we must make the most of the impromptu visit Dominic had proposed. We could not marry, not in the binding form of aristocratic alliance that Dominic would prefer, but this would be our wedding night all the same. Strange, though, that I was waking from deep sleep and Dominic was not in the bed with me. I couldn’t feel his presence at all. If he were anywhere nearby I should be almost overwhelmed by the communion.

  What did I remember of yesterday? We had left the seminary of La Sapienza at dawn, had pushed our horses to make what speed we could in the slush and mud of the spring thaw. The journey from the city six months ago had been my first time on horseback. I had not ridden since, and I had worried that I would not be able to keep up with Dominic and his men. And I could not.

  Although for much of the trail the poor conditions held us to a pace little faster than a walk, even that had begun to tire me by the time Dominic allowed us a rest and a break for the midday meal. He noticed my shakiness as I tried to remount the little mare he had brought for me, and took me up behind him on his own horse, telling one of his men to lead the mare. I wrapped my arms around his slim waist, resting my head against his straight back. The communion between us then had been better than a hot meal and a soft bed in the way it had replenished my strength.

  We would have made it safely to Aranyi but for the dark clouds that rolled down from the top of the mountain we were climbing in the mid-afternoon, obliterating the weak sunlight. Minutes later we were engulfed by lightning and thunder, and hailstones big enough to stun. Dominic shielded me with his own body, bending over me, he and his men protected by their helmets and heavy leather coats.

  Ranulf, Dominic’s lieutenant, had noticed the little hut, off a bend in the trail a few yards back, and we hurried to it, an awkward file of men and frightened horses, Dominic in the lead, half-carrying me like a precious bundle under his arm. It was a travelers’ shelter built into the side of the mountain, partitioned into hut and stables, and stocked with kindling and dry wood. The men tended to the animals while Dominic shouldered open the door and pushed me in to safety.

  And that’s when it started. I had been trying to light a fire in the hearth, but something was wrong. I couldn’t make the inner flame. Six months of training and I couldn’t manage the simplest trick of crypta. Dominic ducked in at the door then, and I turned around, meaning to ask him for help, but one look at him stopped the words before they reached my throat.

  His eyes with their protective third eyelids lowered were still opaque and reflective; they had not turned glassy in what I knew was a sign of danger. There were no thoughts readable in his mind. He wasn’t shielded, keeping his thoughts in. It was as if he were empty, drained of all emotions or consciousness. The communion that had enveloped us as we rode had vanished, and something else had taken its place, in both of us.

  I ran to him, this new force propelling me the few steps across the room like a marionette hoisted on its strings. With a laugh that was more a shriek of pain than of joy, Dominic picked me up and tossed me on the bed, unbuttoning his breeches as he spread my thighs, bunching my skirts up around my waist and entering me before we had even removed our traveling cloaks. And so we began our long evening that ran into night of mindless sex.

  Mindless. That was the difference. Ever since I had arrived on Eclipsis, when I had known Dominic only as a presence in my brain, it was our minds that had connected us, our thoughts that had led us to a love that had overcome all the differences that should have divided us. A connection of crypta, La Sapienza’s sibyl, Edwige Ertegun, had called it, a love that began in the telepathic areas of the brain. Our love had not developed out of an initial sexual attraction; it was the reverse, our conjoined consciousness creating desire, inducing our bodies to imitate what our minds had already accomplished.

  Yet last night’s excess had been truly mindless. When Dominic had caught me in his arms, the touch that should have brought us directly into communion had led only to—fucking. An image of mating insects came to me, the body of the male praying mantis continuing to pump into the female even after she has bitten his head off.

  There was nothing intrinsically wrong with what we had done. Fucking your brains out, we said on Terra, with a mix of contempt and longing, a physical need so intense that satisfying it obliterated all other considerations. But our brains had been gone before we started; our fucking had overridden thought and emotion and common sense. I had wanted Dominic as much as he had wanted me, but my soft flesh, my small frame, my skin that bruises so easily could not withstand the continued pounding of my lover’s vigorous activity. Dominic is blessed with unusual strength and a superior level of ener
gy. Last night he had been like a man possessed, never tiring, rising again soon after each climax. Linked without communion, there had been no understanding between us, nothing to let Dominic know I needed gentleness, that I had reached the limit of my endurance.

  You could have told him, I reminded myself. What had I done, what had I had said? Nothing. I had not protested, or begged, or fought, had not even considered it. It seemed I, too, had been possessed. We had lost the ability to use language, spoken or thought. It had not occurred to me to stop, or to make Dominic stop. Instead I had urged him on, against my usual self-protective nature. I had pressed my body up against his, moaning and growling my encouragement, the bruising and abrasion inside me where Dominic was repeatedly thrusting with such ferocity somehow not registering in the sensors of my brain.

  The night’s events were a blur of tangled limbs and inarticulate sounds. My one clear memory was toward the end, when whatever spell had us in its grip had begun to wear off. I had come briefly to my senses, aware only that I was being roughly handled, and had clawed at the man’s face to make him let go of me. He had grabbed my arms, pinned my wrists together above my head in one strong hand and taken me again—slowly this time, with a practiced skill that showed he had learned something of women’s bodies from his few encounters with the opposite sex. But the change in mood had come too late and I could no longer respond.

  I had let him continue, though, had welcomed it as the one time during the entire night when what we did could be called making love. It was only then that I had truly recognized this man as Dominic. That act of domination had been his first genuine desire. He had chosen to do it, not simply succumbed to an external compulsion. My scratching of his face, perhaps the drawing of blood, had produced the only natural emotion of the entire night, an arousal in him that came from being with me, not from being possessed.

  If only we had begun this way, as Dominic and Amalie, not just two bodies flung against each other like a pair of boots having mud knocked off them, I would have enjoyed it…

  The gods help me. The thought of Dominic pinioning my wrists in gentle restraint while he brought me slowly to the edge of climax still excited me. Bruised and sore as I was, I had only to imagine Dominic making love to me in this way and I wanted him again.

  I huddled under the matted, scratchy blankets, fear and helplessness quickly depleting my little remaining strength. I thought miserably of how everyone in La Sapienza had warned me off Dominic as Aranyi and dangerous, how Raquel Hattori had talked of my “drowning” in my love for him, how Edwige had not wanted me to go away with him. But I had, and the “lifeguard” I had boasted of so confidently appeared to have been off duty.

  I sat up and, moving slowly against the pain, pushed the covers aside, sliding my legs over and down to the floor. I was going to have to find whatever pot or hole in the floor passed for a toilet. Only now fully awake, I realized Dominic was in the room, sitting on one of the rough wooden benches. Something in his posture, the way he was hunched, the muscles tense in his naked back, warned me. I shuffled toward him on wobbly legs and saw that he was holding a short sword, point facing inward, staring at the blade with fixed unblinking eyes.

  With a sudden smooth motion he sat up straight, stretched his arms to their full length, tightened his double-handed grip on the hilt and prepared to plunge the blade into his throat in ritual suicide.

  “No!” I shouted, although it came out more like a croak. I ran to him, battering with both fists to knock the sword out of his hands. My blows landed on metal, on bone and hard muscle, producing little effect besides bruising my knuckles.

  Had he really tried to kill himself? Or had I extrapolated from his active thoughts to read his intentions? Either way, I accomplished something: I broke his concentration. He lowered the dagger and looked at me. His face was gray and worn, his beak of a nose standing out more prominently than ever. There were bloody gashes on his cheeks where I had used my nails. He looked as if he had aged ten years since yesterday. I didn’t like to think how I must look to him, but his eyes told me enough.

  “The gods forgive me,” he said with a groan. “I thought I had killed you.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Even if he had lost his wits enough not to notice whether I was breathing or if my heart still beat, the crypta must have shown him the truth. If one of us died, the void, the gaping hole left in the survivor’s mind would be excruciating. Until he experienced such desolation it was a safe bet I was alive, regardless of injury.

  “Dominic,” I said, “How could you think—” I paused, at a loss. If the communion that should have told him I lived, that I was merely in the deep sleep of exhaustion, was not functioning, there was nothing I could say. It was the communion that had brought us together, the communion that had made us “lovers.” What were we without it? Enemies? Strangers?

  While I considered, Dominic followed his own logical progression. He held the blade of the sword and extended the handle to me. “If you prefer, ’Gravina, take revenge yourself. As you are alone here, with no man to act for you, it is your right.” He spoke coldly, in the formal language of court and ’Graven Assembly, the appropriate style for the formula of vengeance central to ’Graven life—and death.

  I stared, once again confronting the gulf between his world and mine that always reopened to part us each time we thought we had bridged it. Dominic knew he had wronged me and that, by his code of behavior, only revenge would make things right. His death for my injuries. The equation seemed unbalanced. He hadn’t killed me or raped me, but he was acting as if he had. In his mind, I suppose, he thought he had, that he had tried, that the intent was what mattered.

  “And how will that help me?” I asked, my voice scratchy with early-morning fatigue, unable to scream my rage. I hadn’t been angry with him until hearing this idiotic idea. “Leaving me here with your corpse, holding a bloody knife, for your men to find.” I recoiled at the thought: Dominic dead, his men knowing only that this Terran woman had killed their lord…

  Dominic shut his eyes in order to avoid seeing me and the evidence of his mistreatment. “You are ’Graven, gifted. My men would not forget themselves so far as to lay a finger on you.” He pushed the sword toward me, lifting his head to expose his throat. “Do it, Amalie,” he said, his voice breaking. “It is your right.” I no longer have any reason to live, he was thinking, despair unlocking the strong shield he had erected in his mind. And I would rather die at her hands than my own, my last sensation her touch…

  I backed away in horror. If you insist on killing yourself, kill me first. My thoughts bubbled up naked and honest from my exhausted mind, with no pretense of courage as spoken words can provide. I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t want to live without him. However unlikely the pairing, we were still a couple, each essential to the other. Dominic was like a second self, a part of me that had been missing all my life. Last night hadn’t altered the uncomfortable fact that being truly solitary was worse than anything else I could imagine. Don’t leave me alone, separate again, not now, I begged Dominic in thought.

  Dominic appeared to reach full consciousness at last, catching the emotions behind my thoughts rather than any specific words. He looked at me—naked, bruised and cold in the unheated hut, ready to fall in a faint except for the shivering that kept me in motion—and he actually saw me for the first time since the storm brought us here. With another groan, this time of pity, he lifted me gently in his arms, took one of the foul-smelling blankets from the bed and wrapped it around me. He found the pot I needed and, with a lover’s care for his beloved, supported me while I squatted to use it.

  The touch brought on our communion as it should have last night but had not. Dominic experienced the same burning pain I felt when my traumatized flesh opened to relieve myself. As the sensation ran through us in tandem, he began to weep, the wracking, shoulder-shaking sobs of a man for whom the act of crying is so rare that the forces of suppressed emotion tear him apart like an ear
thquake when they break through.

  After I finished with the pot I sat beside him on the bench where he still wept, his head in his hands. The return of communion was worth a thousand tears, I thought. I stroked his hair, wiped his wet face with my fingers. “It’s not as bad as all that,” I said. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

  Dominic’s howl of laughter was like an assault. “How can you say something so stupid? You claim to know me, yet you deny this essential truth. You should have killed me. I have proved them all right, your friends at La Sapienza, that smug ’Gravina Ertegun.” He let out another wail that I was sure would bring his men on the run, Ranulf in the lead, to defend their lord. But we remained alone.

  Dominic gulped in air and let it out several times. “Amalie,” he said when he was able to speak, “I swore to myself, six months ago, that I would not lose you, that I would do nothing to make you hate me, to frighten you off.” He looked into my eyes, but resisted the communion, so that he saw nothing of my feelings. “And the first night alone with you, my first chance to show that I could keep my word, I destroyed any hope I had of deserving your trust. Or your love.” He stared down at his own naked body as if it had betrayed him.

  Again I recalled the lectures that Edwige and my coworkers had given me, worried at my choice of a lover. And I considered Dominic’s “essential truth,” as I had resisted doing fully up to now. For most telepaths, men and women alike, sexual relations with an unsympathetic partner are at best unpleasant, more often impossible. Nothing is more literally deflating for a man than the hostile or merely uninterested thoughts, however inadvertent, of a potential lover.