Belinda nodded, and then broke down, speaking all her words in a rush. “Oh, serra, do you think it’s true? Is she—would she—is she the kind of person who would take another woman’s husband?”
Kirra almost could not speak. She had to try twice before she could get the words past her constricted throat. “No,” she said truthfully. “Casserah would never do such a thing.”
For a moment, Belinda looked hopeful, then her face crumpled again. “If not her, then someone,” she said, despondent. “He was not at all happy to see me when I arrived. He was not cruel—you should never think that, but he—he was not there with me. He did not really kiss me when he kissed me. His heart is with someone else. I’m sure of it.”
Kirra was sure of it, too. She absolutely could not think of a thing to say.
Belinda straightened her shoulders, gave her head a brisk little shake. “And if he loves her, he loves her,” she said. “I cannot change that. But I am still his wife, and if he wants a legal heir, he must have a child with me. So, if he—when he—I want to be able to give him a baby. I want to be able to do that much for him. Can you fix me? If I am broken?”
This was her punishment for loving where she had no right to love. Now she had to feel compassion where she only wanted to feel hatred. “I will do what I can,” Kirra said, finally coming deeper into the room. “Take off your gown. Lie on my bed. I will see what I can read in your body.”
Belinda dutifully undressed, modestly leaving on her undergarments, and stretched out face up on the mattress. She was so small she looked like a child herself, her expression a mix of hope and fear. She looked like Lyrie. She looked like someone it should be impossible to heal.
But Kirra had healed Lyrie Rappengrass.
“Will it be painful?” Belinda asked as Kirra leaned over her, running her hands along the smooth skin of the other woman’s arms and shoulders.
Kirra shook her head. “I don’t think so. You might feel—something like a tingle. Something a little sharper than that eventually. Not real pain.”
“Because I can stand pain. Don’t be afraid to hurt me.”
Sweet gods. “I won’t hurt you.”
The blood seemed clean. The heart was strong. Kirra could find no ruptures in the bones. She ran her hands impersonally over Belinda’s ribs, brushed the hips, let her palms rest on the soft little mound of Belinda’s stomach. All sorts of organs in this general area, some of them cantankerous and quick to malfunction. All sorts of places for trouble to burrow.
There. Kirra pressed a little harder. There. In the red cavern of the womb. A sticky darkness, a hungry blackness, a thin, twisting rope of malice. That was the problem. That was the troll, the ogre, that chased away any small life when it tried to pass. Not an infection, precisely. Not some poison administered from the outside. This was an indigenous malady, cultivated from within, a cozy, clever and catastrophic disease. Kirra could read its potential even in its nascent form. This was an illness so virulent that it would, if unchecked, destroy its host within a year.
If Kirra did nothing, Belinda would die.
Her hands trembled, her whole body trembled, as Kirra stood there with her palms against Belinda Brendyn’s body. It would be easy, so easy, to step back, fold her arms, shake her head. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can detect. I see no reason you and your husband can’t have a whole houseful of babies. So easy to do nothing. She had crossed enough boundaries already on this latest trip, contravened both personal and mystical standards of behavior, it should not be hard to do it one more time. Step back. Lace her fingers together. Shake her head.
“Hold still,” Kirra said, her voice sounding rough to her own ears. “You might feel this.”
Her hands arched against Belinda’s white lacy underthings; perhaps her fingernails bit through the thin silk. She could feel the magic lance through her, playing like domesticated lightning from her shoulders to her wrists. She heard Belinda gasp, then catch her breath. If the room had been a little darker, it would have seemed that phosphorescence puddled around Kirra’s hands, making a faint luminous cloud over Belinda’s small stomach.
The tarry black evil in the other woman’s body was gone.
Kirra lifted her hands and folded her arms. Too late, too late, she heard a voice in her head cry. You should have broken contact before the magic flowed through your fingers. “I did find something,” she said, keeping her voice as cool as she could. “I believe I pushed it away. I would think your body would respond now as it should—I think you and your husband should be able to have a baby.”
Belinda sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She was too short for her feet to reach the floor. “What can I do to thank you?” she asked. “Do you charge a fee?”
“No. This is how I pay off my debt to the Wild Mother, who lavishes me with her gifts.”
“The Wild Mother,” Belinda repeated. “One of the old gods.”
Kirra let herself be impressed that Belinda recognized the name at all. “She’s the one I honor.”
Belinda nodded. “Then I will thank her tonight in my prayers.” She reached for her gown. “But you are the one I am truly, truly grateful to.”
Kirra forced a smile. “Thank me when you’re pregnant.” Belinda pulled her dress back on, and Kirra turned away and began rooting through personal items she’d scattered over the dresser. Here was a little vial of lavender scent; this would do. “I have something else to give you,” she said, closing her fingers on the glass until the cologne inside had been transformed into harmless water with no taste, no odor.
“Something to keep me healthy?”
Kirra turned to face her. “Something to help you keep your husband’s attention.”
Belinda almost smiled, but this was not a subject she could joke about. “A love potion?”
Kirra also found herself unable to smile, though she tried. “Not exactly. It’s a—a potion of forgetting.”
Belinda took the sealed jar from Kirra, looking uncertainly between the lavender water and Kirra’s face. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s old magic. Folk magic,” Kirra said. Completely improvised-at-the-moment magic. “Take the liquid in this jar and—and—one of your own tears. Put them into something your husband is about to drink. It will make him forget any woman but you. So the legends say, anyway. I’ve never had cause to try to use this particular potion before. I don’t know if it will work.”
Belinda looked again at the vial in her hand. “Will it make him forget other things? Important things?”
“No. Only—only any woman he has ever been interested in except you. It will take a day or two before it is totally efficacious. But soon he won’t think of that other woman at all.”
“I would like to believe that,” Belinda said wistfully.
“I think you should try it, anyway,” Kirra said. Her throat hurt when she spoke. The slivers of her heart had sliced her chest to ribbons; she was having trouble breathing. “But use it today. Tonight. Before tomorrow morning, anyway. The ingredients don’t last long once they’ve been spelled.”
Belinda watched Kirra with her dark eyes. “I don’t know how I can thank you,” she said.
Kirra shook her head. “I wish you wouldn’t even try.”
IMPOSSIBLE that there was still the dinner to get through. Impossible that there was one more task, even harder, she would have to do. Impossible that the gods had added this to her list of trials.
CHAPTER 40
SENNETH was at Kirra’s door, dressed in the dull bronze that seemed to be her favorite color for formal wear. Melly had insisted that Kirra wear Danalustrous red. Its reflected fire was all that put any color in Kirra’s cheeks. Even so, she was still too pale.
“Tell yourself, ‘Six hours, and this is over,’ ” Senneth suggested, leading the way downstairs. “That’s what I do. ‘I can endure another five hours. Look, only four more hours to go.’ ”
“Six hours seems longer than I can manage.”
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Senneth glanced at her and shrugged. “Then don’t go. I’ll tell Baryn you were sick. He’s got plenty of other highborn ladies to fill his tables.”
“No. I have to go. It’s—I have to—I’ll be fine.”
Anyone would wonder at the significance of that disjointed sentence, so surely Senneth did, but she did not comment. “I was out with Cam today,” she said instead. “Buying him some decent clothes. And all of a sudden he turned to me and said, ‘What’s happening to Kirra? Right now?’ Of course, I didn’t know.”
There was a question in her voice. Kirra shook her head. She couldn’t possibly answer that without breaking down, and she could not break down as they were twenty yards shy of the dining hall. “How can he do that?” Kirra asked. “And what else is he capable of?”
“Very good questions,” Senneth replied. “I don’t know the answer to either.”
They had scarcely stepped inside the salon when Valri approached to guide them to Baryn’s side. He was standing with a contingent of strangers who were dressed in odd clothes and looking very fierce. By contrast, Baryn himself appeared tall and elegant. For a change, his gray hair was smoothed down under a thin gold circlet and his silken clothes were perfectly arranged. He almost looked kingly.
“Ah, there are two of my favorite serramarra!” he greeted them. “My dears, let me introduce you to some very distinguished guests.”
He rattled off names and titles so quickly that Kirra could not keep track of which collection of syllables denoted which short, scowling man. Or perhaps she just was not paying attention. Senneth seemed to manage just fine, engaging the most ferocious of the strangers in a conversation about shipping and even winning a smile from him. Kirra, too, lived on land that bordered a coastline; she knew all about the value of ocean trade. But she couldn’t think of a thing to say. She audited Baryn’s conversation with two of the other men, smiled when anyone looked at her, and thought, Five hours and forty-five minutes.
Much too long.
Finally they all went in to dinner. She thought this would be better because she was sitting down, but it was worse. Senneth was not at her table, so she had to fight through the conversational thicket on her own. Toland Storian was seated on her right, so she had to pretend, for the whole interminable meal, that she could tolerate him. And from where she was sitting, Romar Brendyn was in her direct line of sight. She had to spend the entire meal watching him.
When she could not stand it, she watched his wife instead.
Belinda wore a deep pink gown, edged with the Merrenstow checkerboard at the neckline and the wide wrists. Very pretty; a flattering color for her, a flattering cut. She seemed fully engaged in the conversations around her, her dark eyes narrowed with intelligence, her comments brief but apparently informed. Now and then she glanced at her husband as if for reassurance or approval, and then her face was so hopeful and so full of love that Kirra felt her own face grow tense with the effort of holding back tears.
Romar did not often cast glances at his wife. He was in what Kirra sometimes thought of as his professional mode. He was here to do a job—represent the king—and he would do it well even if he found it unpleasant. So his own expression was guarded, though his eyes were alive with interest. When he spoke, the very set of his mouth was decisive; he illustrated points with quick, controlled gestures. Once he picked up his knife and fork and held them like weapons, demonstrating something that Kirra could not determine. His dark blond hair was tied behind his head, so the defined angles of his face were exposed. Not a courtier’s face. Not a soft one. This face belonged to a man who would stand fast against any attack, who would fight to the death for his most cherished beliefs.
A man who would not give up something he wanted without a long and bruising battle.
While she watched him, he leaned closer to the man across the table from him, arguing some detail. He pulled a small red rose from one of Valri’s centerpieces and plucked off one petal at a time, then arranged them on the white tablecloth before him as if amassing troops for a skirmish. The other men nearby bent forward to watch his armies of rose petals march into formation.
Kirra’s face was hot with wonder and desire. The plucked rose, the scattered petals. The old Danalustrous signal. Meet me in the garden tonight. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it, hoping to calm her fevered pulse.
Someone was talking to her. Someone close by. She blinked twice and tried to concentrate on her near surroundings. “Perhaps I could come visit you and your sister at Danan Hall,” Toland was saying in her ear.
Kirra gave him a winsome smile, completely false. She was still breathless. “I’m sure Casserah would like that,” she said. “But I can’t promise I’ll be there.”
“Someone said you were leaving for Danalustrous in the morning.”
“I am. But I never stay anywhere for long. It is never wise to count on me.”
THE meal went on and on. More courses, more wine, a welter of after-dinner sweets. Then speeches. A few toasts. More wine. Finally, the slow, disorganized migration to one of the drawing rooms, where a pale young boy was already seated, playing at a harp, and servants were circulating with more trays of food.
Kirra was one of the last to enter the room. One swift glance around was enough to tell her Romar was already gone.
She stepped back across the threshold and practically ran down the brightly lit hallways. This was Ghosenhall. She knew every twist and turn. She could sneak in and out of the palace by any number of circuitous routes and not worry about running into curious servants or gossiping young serramarra. There were a dozen gardens at Ghosenhall, which could have been problematic, but only one was really near the palace itself and offered a formal maze of rosebushes, lilies, and fountains. She had no doubt that that was where she would find Romar.
It was cool outside, but the rain had temporarily stopped. Grumbling black masses of clouds overhead promised that the storms would return soon enough. Kirra ran lightly down the wet flagstones of the garden, her red skirts gathered in her hands, a shadow herself among the spindly shadows of bushes and ornamental trees. It was so dark she could make out almost nothing. If Romar was already here, would he be able to see her?
A figure stepped out of the darkness and snatched her against a warm body. She recognized his scent, his shape, great gods, the texture of his skin beneath her hands. She was crying; she knew she was crying, and laughing, too, as he kissed her and broke away to whisper her name and kissed her again.
“Kirra. Dear heart, I am so sorry—Kirra. Not this way, never this way, I swear to you I would not have let this happen—”
“I know—it’s all right—I know, I know—”
“As soon as I said her name, I knew you did not realize she was here—but I could not—how could I—and then I had no way to tell you—”
“I know. I know. Shh, it’s all right—”
He was crying, too. She could feel his cheek damp with tears when she brushed his face with her fingers. For the first time since she had met him, she had to hope she was stronger than he was. She had been drawn to him partly because of his strength, his restless energy, his quick male pride. But these were the very traits that would work against her now. She knew before he said it that he was not going to give her up.
“This changes nothing,” he said. “I know it is dreadful, it is a shock to all of us, but I still love you. I will not leave her, but I love you, I have to have you. When can you meet me? Where? I am returning to Merrenstow for a few days, but I will be leaving again in a month or so. You can come to me wherever I am.”
She kissed him, pulling his head down to hers, pushing her fingers through his hair till they encountered the ribbon tied at the back of his head. Like a mischievous child, she tugged on the bow, and his hair came loose, spilling over her shoulders, over his face. “I love you,” she said against his mouth.
He kissed her urgently, then pulled back, trying to see her face in the darkness. “You will me
et me? You will come to me?”
“Send me word of where you are.”
“At Danalustrous? I should write you there?”
She kissed him again. “Yes. Danalustrous. That’s where I always return.”
That seemed to satisfy him; he didn’t realize she had not promised. He kissed her again, holding her so tightly that she almost could not breathe. But that didn’t matter. She didn’t want to breathe. She almost did not want to live.
She kept her hands laced in his hair, as if all she cared about was feeling its subdued radiance beneath her palms. But her fingertips were tracing the contours of his head, and her fingertips were dense with magic. This was a form of healing, she had decided, a way of seeking out a disease and destroying it. But now she was searching for memories, hunting down emotions. Now she was planning to excise images, cauterize the sharp, bloody wounds of desire. She looked for a specific kind of poison that had lodged in his body, had slipped past the hard shield of his skull, webbing itself throughout his mind so that he could hardly have a thought that was not tainted.