He looked weary, haggard, and Andrew thought, in shock, that here was the best friend he had ever had, and here he was, in bed with his wife.
Ellemir sat up quickly. “Callista—?”
Damon’s sigh seemed dragged up from the roots of his body. “She’s going to be all right. She’s asleep.” He stumbled and almost fell on top of them. Ellemir held out her arms, gathering him to her breast.
Andrew thought he was in the way there, then, sensing Damon’s exhaustion, how near the older man was to collapse, realized that his preoccupation with himself was selfish, irrelevant. Clumsily, wishing there was some way to express what he felt, he put his arm around Damon’s shoulders.
Damon sighed again, and said, “She’s better than I dared hope for. She’s very weak, of course, and exhausted. After all I put her through . . .” he shuddered, and Ellemir drew his head to her breasts.
“Was it so terrible, beloved?”
“Terrible, yes, terrible for her,” Damon muttered, and even then—Ellemir sensed it with heartbreak—he was trying to shield her, shield them both from the nakedness of his own memory. “She was so brave, and I couldn’t bear having to hurt her like that.” His voice broke. He hid his face on Ellemir’s breasts and began to sob, harshly, helplessly.
Andrew thought he should leave, but Damon reached out for Andrew’s hand, clinging to it with an agonized grip. Andrew, putting aside his own discomfort at being present at such a moment, thought that right now Damon needed all the comfort he could get. He only said very softly, when Damon had quieted, “Should I be with Callista?”
Damon caught the overtone in the words: You and Ellemir would rather be alone. In his worn, raw-edged state it was painful, a rebuff. His words were sharp with exhaustion.
“She won’t know whether you’re there or not. But do as you damn please!” and the unspoken part of his words were as plain as what he said aloud: If you just can’t wait to get away from us.
He still doesn’t understand . . .
Damon, how could he? Ellemir hardly understood herself. She only knew that when Damon was like this it was painful, exhausting. His need was so much greater than she could meet or comfort in any way. Her own inadequacy tormented her. It was not sexual—that she could have understood and eased—but what she sensed in Damon left her exhausted and helpless because it was not any recognizable need which she could understand. Some of her desperation came through to Andrew, though all she said was, “Please stay. I think he wants us both with him now.”
Damon, clinging to them both with a desperate, sinking need for physical contact which was not, though it simulated it, the real need he felt, thought, No, they don’t understand. And, more rationally, I don’t understand it either. For the moment it was enough that they were there. It wasn’t complete, it wasn’t what he needed, but for the moment he could make it do, and Ellemir, holding him close in despair, thought that they could calm him a little, like this. But what was it he really needed? Would she ever know? She wondered. How could she know when he didn’t know himself?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Callista woke and lay with her eyes closed, feeling the sun on her eyelids. In the night, through her sleep, she had felt the storm cease, the snow stop, and the clouds disappear. This morning the sun was out. She stretched her body, savoring the luxury of being wholly without pain. She still felt weak, drained, though it now seemed to her that she had slept for two or three whole days without intermission, after that dreadful ordeal. Afterward she had remained abed for a few days, recovering her strength, although she felt quite well. She knew that the first thing necessary was to recover her health, which, always before, had been excellent, and it would take time.
And when she was well, what then? But she caught herself. If she began to fret about that, she would have no peace.
She was alone in the room. That was luxury too. She had spent so many years alone that she had come to crave solitude as much as she had once dreaded it during the difficult years of her training. And while she was sick she had never been alone for an instant. She knew the reason—she would unhesitatingly have ordered the same treatment for anyone in her condition—and she had welcomed their care and unceasing love. Now, however, it was good to wake again and know herself once more left alone.
She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. Andrew’s bed was empty. Dimly she remembered, through her sleep, hearing him moving around, dressing, going out. With the storm over, there would be all manner of things to be attended to around the estate. Around the house too. Ellemir had spent so much time at her side during the days of her illness that she had neglected the running of the household.
Callista decided that she would go downstairs this morning.
Last night Andrew had been with Ellemir again. She had sensed it dimly, by the old discipline turning her mind away from it. He had come in softly, near midnight, moving quietly so as not to disturb her, and she had pretended sleep.
I am a fool and unkind, she told herself. I wanted this to happen, and I am honestly glad, yet I could not speak to him and say so. But that line of thought led nowhere, either. There was only one thing she could do, and she must summon up the strength to do it: to live every day as best she could, recovering her health, trusting Damon’s promise. Andrew still loved and wanted her, though, she thought with a detachment so clinical she did not even know it was bitter, she could not imagine why he should. Again, why dwell on the one thing they could not yet share? Resolutely she got out of bed and went to bathe.
She dressed herself in a blue woolen skirt and a white knitted tunic with a long collar which could be wound about her like a shawl. For the first time since she could remember she actually felt hungry. Downstairs, the maids had cleared away the morning meal. Her father’s chair had been rolled to the window and he was looking out into the heavily drifted courtyard, where a group of serving men, heavily bundled, were clearing away some of the snow. She went and brushed his forehead with a dutiful kiss.
“Are you well again, daughter?”
“Much better, I think,” she said, and he motioned her to sit beside him, scanning her face carefully, narrowing his eyes.
“You’re thinner. Zandru’s hells, girl, you look as if you’d been gnawed by Alar’s wolf! What ailed you, or shouldn’t I ask?”
She had no idea what, if anything, Andrew or Damon might have told him. “Nothing very much. A woman’s trouble.”
“Don’t give me that,” her father said bluntly, “you’re no sickling. Marriage doesn’t seem to agree with you, my girl.”
She recoiled, saw in his face that he had picked up the recoil. He backed off quickly. “Well, well, child, I have known it a long time, the Towers do not easily let go their hold on those they have taken. I remember well how Damon went for more than a year like a lost soul blundering in the outer hells.” Clumsily he patted her arm. “I won’t ask questions, chiya. But if that husband of yours is no good to you . . .”
Quickly she put out her hand to him. “No, no. It has nothing to do with Andrew, Father.”
He said, his frown skeptical, “When a bride of a few moons looks as you do, her husband is seldom blameless.”
Under his concentrated study she flushed, but her voice was firm. “On my word, Father, there has been no quarrel, and Andrew is no way to blame.” It was the truth, but not the whole truth. There was no way to tell the whole truth to anyone outside their closed circle, and she was not sure she knew it herself. He sensed that she was evading him, but he accepted the barrier between them. “Well, well, the world will go as it will, daughter, not as you or I would have it. Have you breakfasted?”
“No, I waited to keep you company.”
She let him call servants and order them to bring her food, more than she wanted, but she knew he had been shocked by her thinness and pallor. Like an obedient child, she forced herself to eat a little more than she really wanted. His eyes dwelt on her face as she ate, and he said at last, more gently than was his custom,
“There are times, child, when I feel that you daughters of Comyn who go into the Towers take risks no less than those of our sons who go into the Guard, and fight along our borders . . . and it’s just as inevitable, I suppose, that some of you should be wounded.”
How much did he know? How much did he understand? She knew he had said just about as much as he could say without breaking one of the strongest taboos in a telepathic family. She felt obscurely comforted, even through her embarrassment. It could not have been easy for him to go this far.
He passed her a jar of honey for her bread. She refused it, laughing. “Would you have me fat as a fowl for roasting?”
“As fat, maybe, as an embroidery needle,” he scoffed. Her eyes on his face, she saw that he too was thinner, drawn and worn, and his eyes seemed set deeper behind cheekbones and brow.
“Is there none here to keep you company, Father?”
“Oh, Ellemir is in and out, about the kitchens. Damon has gone to the village, to see to the families of the men who were frostbitten during the great storm, and Andrew is in the greenhouse, seeing what the frost has done there. Why not join him there, child? I am sure there is work enough for two.”
“And it is certain I am no help to Ellemir about the kitchens,” she said, laughing. “Later, perhaps. If the sun is out they will be doing a great wash, and I must see to the linen rooms.”
He laughed. “To be sure. Ellemir has always said that she would rather muck out barns than use a needle! But later maybe we can have some music again. I have been remembering how, when I was younger, I used to play a lute. Perhaps my fingers could get back their skill. I have so little to do, sitting here all the day. . . .”
The women of the household, and some of the men, had dragged out the great tubs and were washing clothes in the back kitchens. Callista found her presence superfluous and slipped away to the small still-room where she had made her own work. Nothing was as she had left it. She remembered that Damon had been working here during her illness, and, surveying the disorder he had left, she set to work to put everything to rights. She realized too that she must replenish stocks of some common medicines and remedies, but while her hands were busy with some of the simplest herbal mixtures, separating them into doses to be brewed for tea, she realized that there was a more demanding task before her: she must make some kirian.
She had thought when she left the Tower that she would never do this again; Valdir was too young to need it and Domenic too old. Yet she realized soberly that whatever happened, no household of telepaths should be without this particular drug. It was by far the most difficult of all the drugs she knew how to make, having to be distilled in three separate operations, each to dispose of a different chemical fraction of the resin. She had set everything to rights in the still-room and was taking out her distilling equipment when Ferrika came in and started, seeing her there.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, vai domna.”
“No, come in, Ferrika. What can I do for you?”
“One of the maids has scalded her hand at the wash. I came to find some burn salve for her.”
“Here it is,” Callista said, reaching a jar from a shelf.
“Can I do anything?”
“No, my lady, it is nothing serious,” the woman said, and went away. After a little while she returned, bringing back the jar.
“Is it a bad burn?”
Ferrika shook her head. “No, no, she carelessly put her hand into the wrong tub, that is all, but I think we should keep something for burns in the kitchen and washing rooms. If someone had been severely hurt it would have been bad to have to come up here for it.”
Callister nodded. “I think you are right. Put some into smaller jars, then, and keep it there,” she said. While Ferrika at the smaller table, began to do this, she frowned, opening drawer after drawer until Ferrika finally turned and asked, “My lady, can I help you to find something? If the Lord Damon, or I myself, have misplaced something for you . . .”
Callista frowned. She said, “Yes, there were kireseth flowers here . . .”
“Lord Damon used some of those, my lady, while you were ill.”
Callista nodded, remembering the crude tincture he had made. “I have allowed for that, but unless he wasted or spoiled a great deal, there was far more than he could have used, stored in a bag at the back of this cabinet.” She went on searching cabinets and drawers. “Have you used any of it, Ferrika?”
The woman shook her head. “I have not touched it.” She was smoothing salve into a jar with a small bone paddle. Watching her, Callista asked, “Do you know how to make kirian?”
“I know how it is done, my lady. When I trained in the Guild-house in Arilinn, each of us spent some time apprenticed to an apothecary to learn to make medicines and drugs. But I myself have never made it,” the woman said. “We had no use for it in the Guild-house, though we had to learn how to recognize it. You know that the . . . that some people sell the by-products of kirian distillation, illegally?”
“I had heard this, even in the Tower,” Callista said dryly. Kireseth was a plant whose leaves, flowers and stems contained various resins. In the Kilghard Hills, at some seasons, the pollen created a problem, having dangerous psychoactive qualities. Kirian, the telepathic drug which lowered the barriers of the mind, used the only safe fraction, and even that was used with great caution. The use of raw kireseth, or of the other resins, was forbidden by law in Thendara and Arilinn, and was regarded as criminal everywhere in the Domains. Even kirian was treated with great caution, and looked on with a kind of superstitious dread by outsiders.
As she counted and sorted filtering cloths, Callista thought, with a peculiar homesickness, of the faraway plains of Arilinn. It had been her home for so long. She supposed she would never see it again.
It could be her home again, Leonie had said. . . . To dispel that thought, she asked, “How long did you live in Arilinn, Ferrika?”
“Three years, domna.”
“But you are one of our people from the estate, are you not? I remember that you and I and Dorian and Ellemir all played together when we were little girls, and had dancing lessons together.”
“Yes, my lady, but when Dorian went to be married, and you to the Tower, I decided I did not want to stay at home all my life, like a plant grown fast to the wall. My mother had been midwife here, you remember, and I had, I thought, talent for the work. There was a midwife on the estate at Syrtis who had been trained in the Arilinn Guild-house, where they train healers and midwives. And I saw that under her care, many lived whom my mother would have consigned to the mercy of Avarra—lived, and their babies thrived. Mother said these newfangled ways were folly, and probably impious as well, but I went to the Guild-house at Neskaya and took oath there. They sent me to Arilinn to be trained. And I asked leave of my oath-mother to come here and take employment, and she agreed.”
“I did not know there was anyone at Arilinn from my home villages.”
“Oh, I saw you now and again, my lady, riding with the other vai leroni,” Ferrika said. “And once the domna Lirielle came to the Guild-house to aid us. There was a woman there whose inward parts were being destroyed by some dreadful disease, and our Guild-mother said that nothing could save her except neutering.”
“I had thought that illegal,” Callista said with a shudder, and Ferrika answered, “Why, so it is, domna, except to save a life. More than illegal, it is very dangerous as it is done under a surgeon’s knife. Many never recover. But it can be done by matrix—” She broke off with a rueful smile, saying, “But who am I to say that to you, who were Lady of Arilinn and know all such arts?”
Callista said, shrinking, “I have never seen it.”
“I was privileged to watch the leronis,” said Ferrika, “and I felt it would be greatly helpful to the women of our world if this art was more widely known.”
With a shudder of revulsion, Callista said, “Neu tering?”
“Not only that, domna, although, to save a life, t
hat too. The woman lived. Though her womanhood was destroyed, the disease had also been burnt out and she was free of it. But there are so many other things which could be done. You did not see what Lord Damon did with the crippled men after the storm, but I saw how they recovered after—and I know how men recover when I have had to cut off their toes and fingers to save them from the black rot. And there are women for whom it is not safe to bear more children, and there is no safe way to make it impossible. I have long thought that partial neutering might be the answer, if it could be done without the risks of surgery. It is a pity, my lady, that the art of doing such things with a matrix is not known outside the Towers.”
Callista looked dismayed at the thought, and Ferrika knew she had gone too far. She replaced the cap on the jar of burn salve with strong fingers. “Have you found the kireseth that was missing, Lady Callista? You should ask Lord Damon if he put it somewhere else.” She put away the salve, glanced through the herbal teas Callista had divided into doses, and looked along the shelves. “We have no more blackfruit root when this is gone, my lady.”
Callista looked at the curled scraps of root in the bottom of the jar. “We must send to the markets at Neskaya when the roads are clear. It comes from the Dry Towns. But surely we do not use it often?”
“I have been giving it to your father, domna, to strengthen his heart. For a time I can give him red-rush, but for daily use this is better.”
“Send for it, then, you have the authority. But he has always been a strong, powerful man. Why do you think he needs stimulants for his heart, Ferrika?”
“It is often so with men who have been very active, domna, swordsmen, riders, athletes, mountain guides. If some injury keeps them long abed, their hearts weaken. It is as if their bodies developed a need for activity, and when it is too suddenly withdrawn, they fall ill, and sometimes they die. I do not know why it should be so, my lady, I only know that very often it is so.”
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