Retribution by Ann Herendeen Read Free Book Online

applied over thin
cross-hatching, its features depicted with a few strokes of the
sculptor’s stick. In a surprisingly accurate guess, its face was
shown, not as an infant’s, but as it would look in a few years,
with an aquiline nose and gray eyes.
    There was only one statue in the world
exactly like this one. Silently, in my memory, I recited the words
of the inscription incised around the base. “To Her who is the
Mother of all,” it read, not naming the goddess who watches over
childbirth, “in gratitude for the safe delivery of my wife,
Amalie-Katrin, and for the life of my daughter, Jana-Eleonora. In
fulfillment of my oath: Dominic-Leandro, Margrave Aranyi.” It was a
votive statue, a replica in lesser material of the worked-glass
portrait of me and Jana that Dominic had donated to the goddess’s
shrine after my near-death giving birth to our daughter.
    My room, my bed, my home. Judging by the moon
and the light, it was early morning. How could I have been so
frightened last night, so mistaken in my thoughts?
    Aware of my return to consciousness, Naomi,
the healer who serves Aranyi, rose from the truckle bed at my side.
She laid her hand lightly on my forehead. Lady Amalie , she
thought to me. It is good to have you home again . Her true
meaning, barely concealed, was clear: she was relieved that I was
myself again and knew where I was.
    Even Naomi, practiced in the telepathic arts,
no stranger to the ways in which fear and sickness can derail one’s
thoughts, was uncomfortable. What had I done or said? Or
thought? What had she picked up of Reynaldo’s intrusions? I put
out a feeler. “Did Margrave Aranyi bring a prisoner with him?”
    Naomi lowered her eyes. She could hardly bear
to think of it. “Yes. Margrave Aranyi said he was sorry, but he
must keep this thing in the dungeon. He would not bring such filth
in the house, he assured me, but that he had unfinished
business.”
    “You see,” I said, “the man used his gift
against me, against my children and me. Margrave Aranyi and I must
take our revenge.”
    Naomi agreed without enthusiasm, sharing my
thoughts as I brooded on my sufferings, then withdrew from my mind
in alarm. “You must be careful! You and your lord husband both.
Tell Margrave Aranyi what you have seen.”
    I stared into Naomi’s bright green eyes. The
woman made me uneasy, our encounters always leaving me feeling
inadequate. She was not ‘Graven but a genuine witch, a gifted woman
born of generations of gifted women, healers and sorceresses who
lived isolated in the forest, serving Aranyi when and if they
chose. Naomi’s manner, while necessarily kind in her role as
healer, had a self-sufficiency and aloofness that precluded
intimacy. I didn’t know what, exactly, I had “seen,” didn’t like to
ask Naomi what seemed so obvious to her that she could read it
easily from the top layer of my mind in a brief moment of shallow
communion.
    There were deliberate noises from next door
as Dominic, letting me know he was awake, knocked softly on the
connecting door from the bathroom and entered. Naomi pushed the
truckle bed away and stood to greet Dominic. She is unusually tall
for a woman; like Dominic, she has the alien genetic strain that
makes people grow long and lean with superior strength. She stared
at my husband eye to eye, but he shook his head at her and her gaze
fell. Glancing back at me, she curled her fingers in the sign
against evil as she left the room.
    Dominic sat in the chair beside my bed. My
husband was pale this morning, more from emotion, I suspected, than
from any physical cause. His inner eyelids were neither fully glass
nor completely silver, but a strange smoky in-between state I had
never seen before. “Are you better today, beloved?” he asked.
Unlike Naomi, he did not attempt to use crypta . He had
bumped around in his room rather than thinking to me, and he spoke
aloud, cautiously, watching for my every reaction.
    “I’m not sure,” I said.
    Dominic