"In secrecy..."
"I cannot," he said again softly. He saw her remember, and realize. He could take no sacraments, nor wanted to. He only felt sorrow for this to come to an end, these brief days of serving her at any ruthless delight or sin she desired. When she was cleansed of it, and penitent, he did not think she would command him again that way. As well for that, too, for he had no defenses left to him if she did, and the world outside would make no games of weakness.
She lowered her lashes. He leaned on his elbow, watching her, taking pleasure in animal sensation; in their legs entangled warmly under the sheets, in her hand resting in light possession on his waist. She was thinking, and he could expect some unforeseen slant to her thoughts when she spoke them—he would be amused or confounded or alarmed, he did not know which.
She had discovered things in him. Things he had not known himself until she touched them.
"You fix my penance," he murmured, burying his face in her shoulder, his arm across her breasts. "Your punishment is like bliss for me."
She turned her body full toward him, so that he could not hide his face in shame for what he wanted. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. Her eyes were very close; he could feel her lashes on his skin when she blinked, the brush of butterfly wings.
"Is it so for all men?" she asked shyly.
"No," he said. "You know it is not." He heard the trace of helpless anger in his own voice.
"Only you?"
"Oh, God." He turned away onto his back. He stared upward, looking into the abyss of himself that he had not known existed. "I know not. Haps all the angels despise me, and give me pain for pleasure."
She raised herself over him, her hand splayed across his chest. He bore her contemplation like a blade against his soul. Even her position, subtly governing, her light touch a mastery, made his body stir again. "I love your pleasure," she said.
"Jesu," he whispered, tilting his head back, his bare throat exposed to her, his rod growing stiff against her hip.
She slid her hand down and covered the tip. He stilled, with fear humming through his veins. She pinched the tender hood between her fingers until he panted, gripping the sheets beside him. Then she drew down his sheath and scored fire across the head with her nails. He made a hoarse sound, arching to her.
They both knew, they both had learned these small cruelties and delights quickly, as if demons whispered instruction in their ears. His body wanted to roll and take her down and cover her, but she would kill him then, she would tie him to the wall and he was more afraid of that than of the pain. The vision of it sent him near to spending in her hand.
She let go, the only thing that saved him. But she rose over him, sitting across his chest. Her hair fell down in waves over his throat. The scent of their couplings drowned him as she held him, his body pinned within the compass of her spread legs while she reached back with one hand and caressed and pinched and tortured his cullions and shaft with her fingernails. She made the tip of his rod slide over the velvet skin of her buttocks, exquisite pleasure as she hurt him. He thrust into her palm with a rough sob, his muscles working hard against the pain that was utter bliss.
Then she brought her body forward, releasing him just as he could no longer endure it, and knelt over him with her hands against the wall and her rosy slit to his mouth, allowing him to suck and worship her. He felt it like a gift, that he could taste the depths of her and make her tense and rock and arch back in ecstasy.
His shaft throbbed and burned for her, still sore from her hand. When she moved back with an eager panting he followed her, turning over, rising with fervent obedience as she commanded him to serve her. She took a stance before him on her knees and arms, to be mounted like a lovely she-demon. She had abused him so that it hurt to enter her, but he was lost in it, gloried in it, his mind gone near to roaring blackness as he looked down at the sight of her pale back and sable hair, her round buttocks and his rod plunging in. He held her hips and shoved deep; he heard her whimper and cry, but it was delight and demand, and he answered fully, commanded by her even as he spilled his seed in blinded ecstasy.
Afterward he lay with her close in his embrace, curled around her body. His pulse still beat loud in his ears. She was soft and warm and delicate. He felt it fiercely, that she was under his protection, and the idea mingled and twisted in his mind with the way he submitted to her rule, a strange and sweet confusion, hardly bearable.
Lethargy tried to creep into this limbs. He drew a breath, to deny it and clear his brain. He threw back the sheets, setting her away as he rose. She made no protest, only watching him from amid the dark tumble of her hair as he sat on the edge of the bed.
He looked across a space of infinity to where his daggers lay.
With another deep breath, he stood and dressed himself in clean breeches and gray hose of Gerolamo’s provision, aware all the time that she observed him. He tied off the laces. His belt and bracers lay tangled in his father’s chair. Without looking at her, he crossed to them and drew his stiletto, gauging the edge with a stroke across the back of his arm, shaving a patch of hair sheer as a razor. He sheathed the blade and took up the arm guards one by one, strapping them on.
"What manner were you punished as a boy?" she asked suddenly. "With scourging?"
He gave a slight laugh, like a harsh breath, and shook his head. "That is not punishment."
"Worse?" she asked.
"I was not punished," he said. He reached down for the waist belt. "Not as you mean."
She lifted her brows. "Never?"
"If I erred, he would have killed me," he said simply.
He felt her gazing at him as he drew each dagger and inspected their points. She hugged the pillow and made a grieving sound.
He had a sudden dread that she would shed tears for him. He girded on the belt and buckled it. "It was what I thought, at least," he said, sliding leather through the keeper. "Doubtless only a boy’s fear."
"How well you lie," she said.
He strode across the room and caught her hand and gripped it hard in his fist, holding it up to his mouth to kiss her fingers. "Dress for travel, my queen. The time has come for me to prove it."
* * *
The old priest was loyal, a Navona himself, distant blood-tie still clinging to this poor remote sanctuary in the hills beside the lake. The house of Navona had been scattered and decimated, the castles razed, the villages burned. It lived in hiding now, a veiled web of shared hate for Riata, a promise of revenge and blood and fidelity to the bastard son of Gian Navona.
But he did not let himself be seen; he wanted no eyes to recognize him, no more acquaintance or complications than he must have. Gerolamo had arranged it; the priest would shrive a veiled woman of her sins and give her communion and ask no untoward questions of who she might be or why she sojourned here. For the character of the sins she had to confess, Allegreto thought, it would seem plausible enough that she came here because she dreaded to voice them to any but a stranger and God Himself.
He stood with her at the water’s edge, under a tangle of reeds and overhanging olive bushes. The lake lapped softly, rocking the little barque as he held it ashore with his boot at the prow. What village had once clustered about the pale stone church was deserted now, the houses burned, the small piazza gone to goats and weeds. At the last moment, as his man made a signal from the arched shadow of the church door, Allegreto held her back. "When you confess—do not say that we adultered," he said, leaning down close to her heavy veil. "Do not mistake that we committed such a sin."
She turned her face toward him. He could not see her beneath the cloth. It had only occurred to him in that instant, that she might remember the island, the false bedding, and think she had fornication, too, on her soul. He did not want any speculations or guesses of such a thing, even by ancient silent priests, but mostly he found that he did not want her to believe it.
"We are wed before God," he said. "You had no troth to the Riata, no free consent.
"
The moment that he said it, with such insistence in his voice, he wished it taken back. He could see her pause, and think of things that she had not before. He cursed himself for a sotted fool, that he had even spoken to deny it, to remind her that she had never given free consent to him, either.
She bent her head without reply. In full black, her face hidden, she could have been any widow from city or countryside, come to light a candle for her husband’s soul. She carried a small basket of eggs for the priest, with a gold coin in the bottom of it.
He felt a wave of desire for her, a wild thought that he would go down on his knees and beg her not to go away from him into light and grace. She would return a stranger, made innocent again as she had been when she first came to him. She might even forget, or not want to remember. He thought of forcing her into the boat and back to the tower, a dream of locking her into it forever with him as her servant and defender; so satisfied with all he did for her that she would never want to leave.
Such thoughts were a blink in time. He did not touch her. "Go now," he said. "I will wait here."
He watched as she walked out into the sunlight. It was a small church, and old; bare white stone with blunt corners and a single slit for a window above the door. He knew it inside, knew what it would be to step from glare into the sudden murk, to pause a moment and kneel, accustom his eyes to the golden pinpoint light of a few candles. The odor of incense, the stone floor, the massive columns marching into shadow, painted with spirals of red-and-white that led upward to a few faded saints who smiled down at the center aisle.
He stood there exiled from it, with a longing at the back of his throat. As she reached the door that Gerolamo held open for her, and passed under the arch, he turned away.
She would come back. If she did not, he would go and seize her, and the old Navona priest would be no bar if it came to that. Better in haps if he did seize her, for then none could claim that she bore his society willingly, or defied the decree to shun him from any Christian relations.
He stepped aboard the boat, making a final tally of their provisions—clothing sufficient to see them into the mountain passes, small coin and walking staves, a tinder-pouch. Clouds had begun to roll over the peaks to the north where the steep flanks plunged into the lake. Gerolamo stood guard by the church door.
It creaked open again, far sooner than it should have. Allegreto glanced up, looking through the tall reeds.
She appeared in the entry with the priest at her side. The old man held the basket. They paused for a moment at the door, the priest speaking urgently to her as Gerolamo drew respectfully away.
She shook her head beneath the veil and put her hand on the cleric’s sleeve with a small reverence. Then she left him, her head bowed low, and walked rapidly across the open ground toward Allegreto, her feet kicking aside her skirts with determination.
He stepped back onto the sandy bank, signaling Gerolamo to retire with a jerk of his chin. "What passed?" he asked sharply, as she came under the tangled shade.
She put back the veil and looked up at him. "I will wait to confess," she said.
"Wait? Nay, there will not be another chance," he hissed. "I cannot vow safety elsewhere."
The priest was still standing under the church portal, looking after her. She could not have done more than tell him she would not make confession; there had been no time for more. Allegreto could guess that the old man’s pressing words had been strong advice to clear her soul. He took her shoulder, reaching to turn down the veil again. "I know it is difficult," he said more gently. "But he does not know you, nor will ever."
She threw the cloth back. Under the black hood, her skin was like ivory, her eyes the hue of the deepest lake. The shadows of reeds and branches played over her face. "Nay, it is not for shame." She lifted her chin. "I will wait for you."
"Wait for me?" He stood with his hands on her shoulders.
"I know you cannot. Not yet." She wet her lips. "But I will wait until you can be absolved, too."
He let go of her abruptly. "Do not be a fool."
"I thought on it these many hours," she said. "By chance I am a fool, but I cannot say I am full sorry, or ask for pardon alone."
"Why not?" he demanded. "I thought it was what you wanted."
"Because I thought on it—and thought—" She looked away from him, toward the lake and the dark clouds rising. "What if something goes wrong? What if we are slain?"
"So much the more cause to be in grace!" He caught her arm, giving her a little shake. "These are deadly sins, you know it. You’re in danger of damnation for such."
She looked down at his feet. "Aye, and ’tis pain of excommunication for me only to converse with you. I asked him, and he said me so."
"You asked him!"
"I did not say your name. I only asked it as a doubt I had, as if it were some neighbor."
He set his jaw. "And he answered rightly, but that we are wed, and so you may speak to me and such common things without penalty. I have inquired into all of those matters well enough myself."
She lifted her eyes to him. It was true that a wife need not shun her own husband—that much was certainly true.
"We are wed!" he exclaimed, with mulish resolve. "We will have it blessed in the church when we can." He looked toward the sanctuary. "But the other need not wait. Here is a confessor; you wished to repent and be shriven. It is foolish and...and"—he searched for sufficient words—"sinful to delay!"
She smiled then, as if she knew a secret that he did not. "I will wait."
"Elena!" Her easiness about it made him strangely angry. "It is your immortal soul at peril!"
She tilted her chin downward, like a wayward child, and looked up at him aside from beneath her lashes. "Are you a priest now, to be so alarmed for my immortal soul?"
He gave a huff of disapproval and stepped back. "Nay, I am no priest. But Hell is not a game of morra, for you to smile at me that way about it. I will not see you in danger of damnation; do not put that on my conscience, too."
"And neither do I wish to enter Heaven while knowing you could not. So I will wait."
"Elena! And risk—"
"Aye!" she snapped. "I understand what is at risk. And this is what I choose."
He heard her words as if they slipped through his mind without catching—sounds come and gone, senseless—and then their meaning struck him full, like a clout across his face.
The reeds bowed and rustled around them. An olive leaf fluttered down, a silvery thin shape, catching in a black fold of her veil. Her lower lip trembled as he gazed at her.
"I would miss you for eternity," she said. "I would grieve."
He shook his head, all the feeble movement he could summon. If she had held out jeweled cities, riches, towers of gold, all the stars and the sun and the moon offered to him in her hands, he could have spoken. But he could not. She would miss him in Heaven. She would grieve.
She did not know what she was saying, in truth. What she risked. He had read every poem and sermon and hymn about it; he had studied all the ghastly frescoes that portrayed the kingdom of Hell in terrifying and perfect detail. But that she would hazard the chance for an instant, or even think of it, for him...
He feared for a long moment that he would die where he stood, only from confusion. He put his hand on his dagger, for something solid, something he could understand in the roaring flood that engulfed him like water rushing from a broken dam of ice. "I pray you," he said helplessly. "This is madness. Go and repent. And then stay there. Stay away. Don’t come back."
She did not turn. She did not flee to safety and grace and the priest still standing in his infinite beckoning patience at the door of the church. "No," she said. "I will wait for you."
NINETEEN
Elayne knew when she was in disgrace. She was familiar with the averted eyes and compressed lips after she had not been sufficiently contrite over some misadventure. He said nothing of it, or anything more of his brief perverse comma
nd to her to remain with the priest. But he had desired her to be shriven, and she was not. And so the long hours of the journey on the huge lake passed in a silence that was more than mere stealth.
A cold breeze funneled out of the north, creating small sharp waves that splashed against the prow. Clouds rolled over the cliffs and tumbled down the sides like foam pouring from a vessel. Shrouded under the pointed hood of a peasant’s mantle, Allegreto took up oars, bending into the pull in time with Gerolamo’s efforts. His face was set in an unchanging scowl. He never once looked at her.
He was armed now. She would not be suffered to touch him. Unspoken, that pact held between them, and she had no wish to breach it. Instead she looked at his soft boots braced against the thwart, at the way the muscles in his legs worked as he rowed, and the things that came into her mind were sufficient cause in themselves to make the preachers spit and rage.
The boat seemed small, a mere chip bobbing and skimming below the terrible beauty of the mountains. The cliffs passed slowly nearer, closing upon the lake like the walls of some giant’s castle. She craned her neck as the gray crags grew steeper, the summits taller, masses of rock pitching straight into the water without even a narrow shore for relief. Ledge mounted upon precipitous ledge on overhangs that no man could climb.
Gerolamo kept them to the center of the lake, far from any barges or boats or the towns and castles perched along the cliffs. It was darkening to late afternoon as they passed close under a vast spur of stone that thrust far into the lake. But the sun broke through looming clouds, lighting the water below the headland with a sheen of silver. The brisk wind dropped suddenly to a ripple over the surface.
A bright bay came into view. Across the water the sails of small boats drifted like white birds flocking toward the towers and walls and quays of a great city.