Wedding

by Ann Herendeen

  As Midsummer approached, the ’Graven Coalition hurried to finish the political work of peacemaking, and the household labored to provide a suitable homecoming for triumphant heroes. It had been half a year since that unfortunate Midwinter celebration at La Sapienza. Preparation had been going on for days, activity I had not noticed in my worry over Dominic. Musicians had arrived and extra food had been coming in by the wagonload, all awaiting the return of the realm’s lord and the greatest festival of the Eclipsian calendar.

  I couldn’t imagine anything worse for Dominic—wounded but hiding it, exhausted from pain and depressed at loss of ability—forced to preside over a gargantuan meal and what I could not help thinking of as an orgy the minute he arrived home. Surely, it seemed to me, the exact day mattered little here, where frequent minor holidays and seasonal observances break up the monotony of the eight-day stretches that have no weekends. I decided to consult Eleonora first. Couldn’t we put off the festival for a day or two, I asked, give Dominic a rest and a chance to be healed?

  “Miss the day?” Eleonora said, as if I had proposed canceling the entire observance. “The longest day of the year, the day of abundance, of fruition?” Her eyes narrowed and her mouth sneered in a frightening resemblance to her handsome, cruel father whose portrait hung next to Dominic’s. “If you want to humiliate Dominic, that’s the surest way to go about it, canceling the principal feast of the year in his name.” Since she wasn’t totally convinced that I didn’t want that, she added, “I warn you, if you propose it, the household will rise up in a revolt that will make this Eris nuisance look like a wedding party by contrast.”

  The absent men apparently agreed with her, scheduling their journey home to arrive at midday on the day itself. Eleonora and I would greet them at the inner gate, the traditional reception that she had given her brother and me on our arrival. Between our respective gifts, we knew to the minute when we could expect them to reach the outer gate, and had ample time to make ourselves presentable.

  Fattened by pregnancy, leisure and rich food, I had to stuff myself into my formal gown that had made so notable if unwelcome an impression at La Sapienza. Katrina worked painstakingly at my hair. “See, my lady,” she said triumphantly, “if I use a few extra pins, you can wear the comb.” She had managed to bunch my hair thickly enough at the back of my neck that, with a little ingenuity in placing hairpins, it would support Dominic’s betrothal gift. She held a hand mirror so I could see the effect. I looked like a real ’Gravina now. Like ’Gravina Aranyi.

  Eleonora inspected me as I came running out at the last minute, in my mad scramble forgetting to put on my boots or wear a shawl. She had been ready early, had thrown a light cloak over her shoulders and had stood enjoying the warm fresh air while I was still fussing with my hair and clothes. The glass comb made her eyes widen in surprise. “Did Dominic tell you the history of that piece of jewelry?” she asked.

  I shook my head, felt a hairpin give way, and tried to maintain a dignified, motionless composure. “Not completely,” I said. “He thought I understood when he gave it to me.”

  “And did you?” She pursued her quarry, unsure if she really wanted to catch it.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “Not then.” I caught my breath after all the rushing around and heard the sound of approaching horses. “But I figured it out eventually,” I added, just in time for Eleonora’s glare to give way to a smile of welcome as Dominic returned the salute of the guard at the inner gate and rode in.

  The men came through the narrow gate in groups of two and three, Dominic and Josh and a younger man in the lead, and stopped in front of Eleonora and me. Dominic wore riding gloves, and I could see he controlled the horse with his right hand. When he dismounted he put his weight all on the right, an unnatural posture for him, and his descent was not as graceful as usual. The young man who had been riding beside him jumped down to help Dominic, who frowned at this exposure of his disability. Dominic softened the harsh look, however, giving the boy an affectionate pat on the rear, and moved to embrace first Eleonora, then me.

  Seeing Dominic at last, I could hardly contain all my emotions. I hugged him tightly, working my right arm in between his left arm and his body so as not cause him any more pain. Our communion was odd, stronger than I had dared to hope, but with more hidden places in Dominic’s mind. My love, I thought to him, looking up into his face, so many questions I couldn’t ask in front of everybody. I touched a fingertip to his gloved left hand that hung useless at his side. The sense of burning was as intense as on the day it happened, the image of Eris shimmying in front of Dominic’s face for one awful moment before he shook his head and stepped gently out of my embrace to introduce the boy. “Stefan Ormonde, my companion.”

  As Dominic clearly wished to turn attention from himself, I accepted the postponement, yet again, of meaningful communion with him, and looked at Stefan. He was a small young man with dark, curly hair, the type Dominic had always preferred. Regular, neat features, the promise of compact muscularity not yet fully realized, the growth spurt yet to come—I had seen him before. He was the handsome cadet Dominic had been with when I had intruded on him telepathically from La Sapienza.

  Relief made my heart skip, the blood not reaching my brain for a beat or two. Dominic had not had to suffer alone in his strange wounding. And if he felt confident enough to keep a lover with him, especially so young a man who would be unlikely to be capable of real empathy, things were perhaps not as terrible as I had imagined.

  Stefan had meanwhile bowed properly low to Eleonora, sibyl and sister to Margrave Aranyi. As he made his bow to me, I smiled and, in my pleasure at recognizing him, extended my hand in the usual Terran way while repeating my name.

  The young man stood momentarily paralyzed by my strange gesture. On Terra there is no graceful way to avoid the handshake. I had simply had to put up with it, and initiating it had become automatic with me. Stefan, needing guidance, looked to Dominic, who nodded for him to reciprocate. By then I had realized my mistake but thought it discourteous to withdraw. It wasn’t simply my own comfort that mattered here, as with Magali or Katrina. Stefan was gifted too, or Dominic would not have chosen him as a companion. But he followed Dominic’s unspoken command, touching my hand briefly with the tips of his fingers while he muttered something I couldn’t catch.

  Our encounter was a revelation to both of us. Unexpectedly cool and pleasant, his touch had none of the usual shock effect, but was almost like a muted version of what I felt with Dominic. In a way it was as if Dominic was involved; the link seemed to encompass him, passing through him and bringing Stefan and me together in a completion of something that until now had been unfinished, imperfect, insubstantial. Only later, however, what with all that followed, did I trace back to this event as the moment when my sympathetic pain from Dominic’s wound ended.

  Stefan and I looked into each other’s eyes as the surprising sensation enveloped us, and we formed an immediate communion. Intimate scenes displayed in our minds before we could shield our thoughts: Dominic seducing me in the barracks of the ’Graven Military Academy, Dominic making telepathic love to Stefan in a bedroom in La Sapienza. No, we had things reversed, had swapped memories for our moment of connection. It was like my meeting with Dominic, when we had seen ourselves through the other’s perceptions. Now Stefan and I shared with each other our first occasions of love with Dominic, an unconventional method of introduction that our bodies had apparently dictated and our minds obeyed.

  Horses stamped on the cobblestones and jingled their harnesses; men coughed and spoke in low voices. Lost in familiarity, reaching toward a young man who was already shrinking from the closeness, I was brought back to real life by prosaic sounds and impatient thoughts from the growing crowd of arrivals. Stefan and I dropped our hands and straightened from our slight bow and inclination to the other, blushing at the knowledge that every gifted person present, unless very polite indeed, had partaken of our memories. “Welcome to Aranyi Fortres
s,” I said in a faint voice, imitating Eleonora’s original greeting to me. “I hope you did not find the journey tiring.”

  People were staring, some open-mouthed in astonishment, others expectantly, as if waiting for the punch line of a long joke I had been telling. My gesture and the subsequent communion must have been unspeakably rude, especially as they had led Stefan into error as well, although no one appeared to be angry. Perhaps I had simply omitted an essential expression of hospitality that by saying now I could make things right again.

  In desperation I turned to Eleonora; I could rely on her to correct me, if no one else would. But she was not looking at me. Dominic, a triumphant gleam in his eyes, and Eleonora, who appeared almost humble, were engaged in an intense moment of non-verbal communication. It was useless trying to figure this one out.

  Somehow we all got inside, and the men went upstairs to bathe and change their clothes. Eleonora used this opportunity to take me aside. “In case you are not as familiar with our language and customs as you pretend,” she said in her old superior manner, “Stefan is Dominic’s lover. You must seat him at Dominic’s left hand at the high table, and give him the Companion’s room next to Dominic’s.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I was going to put Stefan at the last table with the youngest servants and tell him to bunk with the stable hands. I’m so glad you caught my mistake in time.”

  My sarcasm made her laugh. “All right, I underestimated you,” she said. “But a companion is more than just a sex partner. You really don’t know what you’re up against with my brother.”

  So that was the mystery. She still thought I didn’t know Dominic, that his having a male lover would upset me. “Maybe not,” I said, remembering similar conversations with Edwige. “But I know more than you imagine.” I had learned some control, was unwilling to pick a fight with Eleonora the minute Dominic came home. “Believe me when I say that I love him as he is.” The statement embraced both his fundamental nature and his new, damaged condition. “And please, let’s try to be, if not friends, at least not enemies.”

  “Agreed,” Eleonora said, knowing what such a request cost me. “Not enemies.” She held up her left hand, palm out, in the traditional sign of peace. “The feast will begin shortly. We mustn’t keep people waiting.”

  Now that Eleonora had guaranteed my bad temper her satisfied smile returned, and she glided back to the crush of servants and guests assembling outside the great hall. I followed uncertainly, wishing I had accompanied Dominic upstairs. He might need my help for bathing and dressing now that he was essentially one-armed, I told myself, conveniently forgetting Stefan and Ranulf, who had stood a few steps behind Dominic during that whole strange scene in the courtyard, saying nothing but observing all. Before I had made up my mind to fight the crowds on the stairs, Dominic appeared on the landing wearing a fresh uniform, his hair damp, an equally scrubbed Stefan beside him.

  The crowd parted for Dominic to descend. He spoke softly to Stefan, offered me his right arm, and was escorting me into the hall while I was still too flustered to speak. I looked up at his face, the furrows that ran from nose to chin deeper than I remembered, from pain no doubt, the silvery inner eyelids somewhat clouded. Communion flickered around us like flames with the touch of my hand on his arm.

  There was little of the depression and bitterness I had expected to find in Dominic after his debilitating wound, only a slight embarrassment, more of a half-buried excitement, shame mixed with a discovery that made the whole incident into a temporary inconvenience, worthwhile in the end because of an expected, but still most welcome result. What is it? I wanted to ask. Tell me. But in the noisy, laughing crowd of the Midsummer feast it was difficult for me to block all else out and concentrate on him. Gods! I wished we could be alone for a while.

  Beloved, Dominic answered my wish, projected far too forcefully considering our proximity, it will not be much longer, I promise. His mouth turned up at one corner as I remembered, ironic and amiable at the same time. He noticed the glass comb in my hair. “I am glad to see,” he said, “that my gift is no longer wasted on you.” There was a slight catch in his deep voice as he quoted my own words back to me. We were seated before I could think of an appropriate response, and by then it was too late.

  Tonight, with the return of the men, there were five of us from the family, along with local gentry, to make up a party at the high table. While I had been the only ’Graven in residence, sitting there alone had been insupportable, apart from all the other diners, exposed and self-conscious. After the first miserable dinner, Magali had acceded to my request to sit instead at the head of the first servants’ table. I could maintain my status there, while enjoying companionship and conversation. Eleonora, on her return, had accepted this arrangement for both of us, with the excuse that it saved the work of setting and clearing an extra table and laundering the additional tablecloth.

  Now we were forced back to the regular practice. With the full household restored, a substantial contingent of guests from the surrounding manors and the allied troops who would celebrate the festival at Aranyi, the room was filled to capacity, three rows of tables running down toward the entrance instead of the usual two. Dominic occupied the carved, throne-like chair at the center of the high table. Stefan sat, as had been made clear, on Dominic’s left; I sat on his right. Eleonora and Josh occupied a corner, partly facing each other.

  The highest-ranking independent landowners took the remaining seats. Lucretia, Lady Ladakh, the widow of a local gentleman with a substantial estate, was escorted by her eldest son, Myron, a young man of twenty. The other honored guests were Stefan’s parents, Sir Karl Ormonde and Luisa, Lady Ormonde, a dignified middle-aged pair; and a handsome couple from the northern border, Sir Nicholas Galloway, with the loudest voice I had ever heard that was not electronically amplified, and his wife, Clara. Niall, their son, Sir Nicholas explained to us, the rest of the room, and everyone else within a five-mile radius, had recently begun his training at La Sapienza, or he would not have missed so glorious a celebration.

  “Our loss,” Dominic murmured politely through gritted teeth, as his wayward thought, I hope it’s still standing, entered my mind. If the son were as loud as the father, the reverberations from within might bring down the seminary’s walls that had been designed only to withstand assault from without.

  When everyone was assembled Dominic rose to give a toast: “To the destruction of our enemies.” The entire company, men and women alike, stood up and drained their tankards and glasses, banging them on the table with a great thump when they were emptied, then giving a loud, boisterous cheer that almost matched Sir Nicholas’s speaking voice.

  Dominic continued to stand, signaling there was more to come, and waited patiently for all the glasses to be refilled. When it was quiet enough for him to be heard, he turned to me, lifted his glass and said, “To Amalie Herzog, my betrothed.” There was an even louder cheer, much shouting and laughing at this announcement.

  While I swayed in shock with the way all my brooding fears on this subject had been slapped aside by a proclamation to the entire Realm of Aranyi, someone yelled from the far end of the hall, “And a son in nine months’ time!”

  Dominic laughed and shouted back in his officer’s roar that could penetrate the sound of battle, “A daughter! And sooner than that!”

  The room resounded with jokes and good wishes, laughter and blessings. “I don’t have to wish you luck,” Sir Nicholas bellowed across the table. “A bride with a loaf in the oven will give her husband a warmer wedding night than a virgin who hasn’t yet put wood in the stove.” He smiled at Lady Galloway, who laughed as if she had been complimented and shook her head. My face went as hot as on a summer day on Terra and I felt the hair lift from my scalp. Somehow I managed to control my fury, looking down at the table and pretending to blush with modesty.

  Eleonora had warned me, I thought. This was a side of Dominic I hadn’t known existed. After all my worries, my
dead-of-night, heart-stopping wondering what was to become of me and Dominic, to have him shout out our impending marriage and my pregnancy as if we had had weeks to discuss them – I took a deep breath when the toast was finished, and sat down. What Dominic had done in the travelers’ shelter hadn’t accomplished what this announcement had. I wanted to kill him.

  CHAPTER 6

  The festival meal was raucous and noisy from the beginning; Midwinter at La Sapienza had been decorous by comparison. The musicians didn’t wait for the dancing but played some loud, nasal instrument, a leather bag connected to wooden pipes, throughout the meal. The sound was grating, more appropriate for outdoors, for marching in parade, but the laughter and shouts of the diners almost drowned it out.

  Conversation with anyone except Dominic was difficult, and I could not trust myself to say anything to him in this public setting that wouldn’t start another war. Stefan ate with a boy’s ravenous speed, not talking unless addressed, intent on his plate. Josh and Eleonora, off to one side, were so engrossed in each other they didn’t speak out loud, just shared their thoughts like breathing as they spooned up their food and drank from the same cup.

  Lady Ladakh and her son, the Ormondes and the Galloways kept up an easy, running discourse. They had all participated in the crypta cell that had fought the Eris weapon, and they were old acquaintances from living at the edges of Aranyi, seeing each other at festivals and weddings, naming days and funerals. Most were about my age, a few years older or younger, yet they had a settled, middle-aged outlook, married for years, parents of broods ranging from adults and teenagers down to toddlers. Even Myron, the young Lord Ladakh, at twenty the father of an infant, seemed more of an adult than me. I felt like a schoolgirl allowed to sit with the teachers on a field trip, wishing I was back with my friends, giggling and cracking silly jokes.