The Gazels

Chapter 14

“Please,” he pleaded, “sit down. I spoke clumsily, but I meant well. The situation cannot be that bad.”

Linnea turned, her gray eyes pools of shadow, and lowered herself to the divan beside him. She was still trembling, but she was no longer weeping.

“I know you care for me,” she said, her voice rough, “but I don’t think it is enough.”

“What would you have me do?”

Linnea took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. “I do understand. But you must also understand that I have needs and feelings, too. Even if—even if I could make a life for myself in the shadow of your love for Dan—always second, never allowed to forget that you two are sworn to one another, bredhin, that no woman could ever come between you—even then, there are others to consider.”

He raised his head.

“There is Kierestelli . . .” she said gently, “and our unborn son. I must provide for both of them—”

“As my wife, you will want for nothing—”

Impatiently, she brushed aside his offer. “I meant that I must provide for their emotional needs, not their physical comfort. What do you think it would do to them, growing up in a family where their parents merely tolerate one another? It would be a cold house indeed, and I alone cannot change that.”

In a moment of insight, the words cold house echoed through his mind, and his own childhood came rushing up. He had grown up in such a cold hou

se, starved for affection, constantly measured and censured, first by his grandfather and then by the monks at Nevarsin. Surely, she must be wrong—he would never allow that to happen to his own children! How could she believe such a thing?

“I can’t court you with fancy words,” he said, wrestling his anger under control. “Linnea, look into my heart and see if I am such a monster. I love you . . . and I would love our children.”

And give them a better home than I ever knew.

“You say that now, when I have something you want, when I still have it within my power to say no!” Her fury had returned, edged with desperation. “Once I give in, you will make me an appendage, an ornament. You said so yourself—an official consort for ceremonial occasions! A toy to be paraded before the court and then set aside. I will sleep like a prisoner every night, while you—you—I will not have even half of your heart, I will have none!”

What did the woman want? How could he make her understand? Was there any woman in the world worth this kind of humiliation?

Again, he tried. “You spoke of my heart. Is a heart divisible? Can it not be big enough for more than one person? Do we not each love many people in our lives—parents, cherished friends, children, lovers?” The words came rushing out from deep within him. “Can one beloved ever truly take the place of another? I have already said that I love you as much as I can love any woman. Is that not enough to build a life together?”

Eyes glittering like ice, wild mood spent, she turned back to him. “But you did not ask me to marry you out of love, Damion. You asked out of duty, out of convenience, out of political necessity.”

“I made a mistake. I spoke badly, I admit it! Does that matter if the love is there?”

“I hope that you and Dan find the happiness you deserve, or at least a measure of peace,” Linnea said, striding to the door and laying her hand on the latch. “But you must find it without me. I shall always be your friend, as you will always be the father of my children.”

“I suppose I had no right to a better answer,” Damion muttered. “If that is your final word on the subject, then I wish you a long and prosperous life and that you may find more joy in it than I have found in mine!”

He bowed to her, his cheeks burning with anger and shame. Then he withdrew from the chamber without another word, vowing that he would never put himself through such an ordeal again.

6

Wrapped in his fur-lined travel cloak, Damion stormed across High Windward’s courtyard. Dan stood talking with one of the grooms and the headman’s son from the village. The ponies and pack animal were saddled and ready to go. The Red Sun was well up, radiating a tentative warmth.

Dan smiled pleasantly as Damion approached. “Good morning, my lord. Did—”

“Let’s get out of here!” Damion snapped. He did not wait for any assistance but grabbed the reins of his pony from the groom, thrust the toe of his left boot in the near stirrup, and swung into the saddle.

Dan’s eyes widened for an instant. He gestured to the headman’s son and handed a small purse to the groom. Damion had already booted his pony into a trot, headed for the outer gates, when Dan caught up with him. The ponies, fresh and eager, jogged down the ice-hard trail.

Despite the easy gait of his mount, each step jarred his clenched teeth. He knew he should not press the ponies so early in the day, that they would require their strength to reach the village or risk having to camp overnight in the open. The need to get away as fast as possible consumed him.

“Damion! Vai dom, what is wrong?” Dan’s voice held a note of true concern. “Has something happened?”

“She said no!”

“No? I don’t understand. Will you slow down and talk to me? You’re upset . . .”

A harmonic of distress in Dan’s voice brought Damion back to himself. When he touched the reins, the pony dropped back into a walk and heaved a sigh at this return to sanity.

“She said no,” Dan prompted. “She will not come to Thendara and work with Lawt’s son? Why not?”

Glancing back, Damion made certain that the headman’s son was far enough behind so that they would not be easily overheard. “I asked her to marry me, and she refused, quite emphatically.”

With his nerves still raw from the interview with Linnea, Damion felt Dan’s emotional reaction, astonishment and anger.

“I am surprised to hear it,” Dan said, his eyes focused between the ears of his mount. “Indeed, I cannot imagine what she must be thinking. I was under the impression that there was not a woman in all the Seven Domains, except a few among the Renunciates, who would not leap at the chance to become Lady Carmen.”

Damion could think of no reply. He did not know if he were more angry at Linnea or at himself, for having mishandled the proposal so badly. For good or ill, the words were spoken, the offer rejected.

You can’t put a banshee chick back into its egg, ran the old proverb. At the moment, he would much rather have tackled one of the giant carnivorous birds than his own feelings.

Several minutes passed in silence, broken only by the muted clop of the ponies’ hooves and the creak of the leather harnesses. The breath of men and beasts made plumes of mist in the cold dry air. The trail steepened, and the animals slowed.

Their way wound along the side of the mountain, from which sprang an enormous knuckle of bare rock, the outcropping on which High Windward perched. From time to time, they caught glimpses of the peaks beyond, the sloping meadows draped in layers of hardened snow. Morning sun turned the ice-encased trees into confections of crystalline beauty.

Damion sensed Dan’s storm cloud mood. “Let’s have it. Are you glad she rejected me?”

“When were you going to tell me?” Dan said tightly. “On your wedding night? Or when you ordered me to find housing elsewhere?”

“I am telling you, now. I swear to you I did not come here with the intention of proposing marriage to her, or even asking her to become my ceremonial consort—”

“Or your seamstress, for all that matters! You owe me no explanations, vai dom.”

“Dan, don’t go all formal, my-lord-this, my-lord-that, on me. I only decided on it last night.”

I know what you were doing last night.

“Stop it!” Damion cried. “If I’ve given you cause to be jealous, tell me. I won’t have it festering between us. If all the malicious gossip of the court, not to mention Grandfather’s machinations, could not drive a wedge between us, how can one failed marriage proposal?”

“You think I’m jealous?” Dan turned to him, and Damion saw the hurt in his paxman’s eyes. “That’s not it at all! I know very well that you are expected to furnish the council with as many sons as you can. I accepted your liaisons with women over the years, even the malicious gossip you spoke of. Did I complain when you and Linnea became lovers? Did I do anything to make life more difficult for you? Did I ever—once—ask you to set her or any other woman aside?”

“No, you have ever been faithful to the vows we swore to one another.” If there has been a failing, it has been mine.

“Then why this sudden change?” Dan demanded. “Why, when you were so opposed to marriage, when you consistently defied your grandfather and the entire Council on the matter, did you suddenly take it into your head to propose? Why did you keep it secret? Do you have so little trust in me? What else are you hiding?”

Damion rocked back in the saddle, causing the pony to flick its tail in protest. Dan’s anguish brought back the wretched fight surrounding Crystal Di Asturien’s pregnancy. Damion ought to have told Dan himself, but the news had come, in the most spiteful manner, from Dyan Ardais. Dan had been hurt and outraged, then as now. His sense of betrayal had not arisen from Damion sleeping with a woman but from the secrecy about an event that had the power to drastically alter both their lives.

“I’ve never kept my relationship with Linnea secret,” Damion protested. “You knew that if I ever gave in to Grandfather’

s demands, she would be the one. You and she get along tolerably well, and I thought of her as a friend. More than that, she is of my own choosing, not some brood mare selected for me by the Council.”

“What a nice, convenient solution!” Dan barked. “You get your grandfather and the Council off your back, and council Castle gets a chatelaine, all at very little trouble to yourself!”

Damion bit back a hot reply. His temper had been in shreds when they began this conversation, and it was increasingly difficult not to take out his frustration on Dan.

“I suppose what decided me,” Damion said, trying his best to speak calmly, “was seeing little Kierestelli. I had no idea a child could bring me such delight. I don’t want her to grow up not knowing me.”

“And this is why you proposed to her mother, without so much as mentioning the possibility? Excuse me, vai dom, but that is nonsense. You could have ordered the child to be fostered in Thendara, where you might see her at your convenience.”

In his memory, Damion saw the snug little room, heard the lilt of Linnea’s harp and the sweetness of Kierestelli’s flute. In a low voice, he said, “It would not be the same.”

Had he finally encountered something in life in which Dan had no part? Sadness shivered through him.

How can I choose between them . . . the man I love, to whom I am sworn, and the family I never knew I longed for?