Wedding by Ann Herendeen Read Free Book Online Page B

think you can make love to me gently, but if you
can’t, if you try to hurt me, I can stop you.”
    Dominic was not so easily conquered; he had
merely been caught off guard. As I snuggled into his embrace,
lifting my face to be kissed, expecting any moment to be picked up,
deposited on the bed and ravished, not in an unthinking fog of
lust, but with love, I did a stupid thing. I shut my outer eyelids,
hiding the inner ones and loosening the tie of communion. Dominic
seized the moment of freedom, pushed me away and ran for the door,
pulling it shut behind him.
    “We will talk when I return,” he said from
the safety of the corridor. “About this, and the child, and—”
    I tugged on the doorknob, but Dominic was
holding the door fast shut. A woman’s voice sounded from the far
end of the hallway. “Let Dominic go to bed, Amalie,” Eleonora said,
her voice rising and falling with the exaggerated emphasis one uses
in dealing with a badly-behaved child. “You may sleep in, but the
rest of us must rise early tomorrow.”
    Dominic released the knob suddenly and the
door flew inward, exposing me, naked and flushed, to Eleonora’s
sardonic gaze. Most of my bruises were gone, but my thighs retained
the last yellow-green traces of their rough treatment. Eleonora
looked me over, seeming to zero in on these areas. “Very lovely,
Amalie,” she said. “But not the sort of thing to attract Dominic,
as you will discover.” Her tinkling laugh grated on my nerves all
night.
    Reluctantly I acknowledged another reason for
Eleonora’s dislike. She and Josh had not been able to have
children. They had tried for years, every false hope ending in
disappointment, her seminary work never quite making up for the
deprivation, no child to show for their brave marriage of working
partners. My being Terran was not just an excuse for Eleonora’s
prejudice. It was the reason for my immediate conception of
Dominic’s child. We were not closely related, through centuries of
intermarriage between the same few families, and were not cursed
with the resulting infertility that had afflicted so many marriages
between the ’Graven, like Eleonora’s, and Edwige Ertegun’s.
    My pregnancy now could only exacerbate
Eleonora’s bitterness, and my own nature had enough in common with
hers that I sympathized with her more spiteful emotions, understood
them all too well. And I could admire, even share, her genuine care
for her brother’s happiness. It was her way of showing it, as if I
wasn’t fully human, or not an adult, not fit to be Dominic’s
companion, that had created an immediate enmity between us.
    I tossed and turned most of the night,
feeling, in a faint hangover of communion, some of Dominic’s
choking frustration from our failed reconciliation. Sometime around
dawn I fell into a disturbed sleep and when I awoke, late in the
morning, Dominic, and Eleonora and Josh, were long gone.

PART TWO:
ARANYI

CHAPTER 3
     
    T he next week passed with
the speed of a holiday in paradise. Pregnancy enhances one’s gift
and its effects; despite our unsatisfying farewells, the powerful
mental connection between Dominic and me remained, stretching and
thinning like plastic film as the physical distance between us
increased, but not breaking. I could enjoy the comfort of it,
unspoiled by any immediate worry for his safety. It would take
several days for the Aranyi party to cross the mountains and reach
Andrade, more time after that for all the ’Graven forces to join up
and coordinate their counterattack on the rebels.
    My condition revitalized my body as well.
Once I had slept out the exhaustion of travel, I adjusted to the
altitude and I had no morning sickness. With my energy restored,
and with no demands of work, I had leisure to explore another kind
of existence, what few Terrans had ever had the privilege to
observe: the daily life of a ’Graven lord’s realm.
    Aranyi Fortress with its extensive grounds
was more like a small town than one