Healers wedding, p.4
Healer's Wedding, page 4
He laughed softly. “Do as you wilt, Elder.”
She huffed, amused, and vanished back into the kitchen.
/I like her,/ Vasiht’h said. /Keep reading?/
We have a great deal to learn from our own people, particularly those far from our cities.
/Because you have so many of those./
Most of all, what I have learned is that we are strongest when we rely on our own strength. We have barely begun to tap the depths of our people! Our culture, preserved here in the wilderness from those who would change or shape it, for ‘our own good.’ We don’t need to be taught what is good. It’s right here, in the mother who shared her soup with me when she had so little to give.
We have nothing to be ashamed of. I had wondered why we had so many saints, and I am beginning to understand. It’s because we breed amazing people on this world.
Tomorrow I shall arrive at the convent. No doubt I will find it beautiful. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
* * *
—Bethsaida Emil Galare
/Is she affecting the juvenile tone, do you think?/ Vasiht’h asked.
/I don’t know./ Jahir folded the paper and tucked it under his plate. /I have not met her since her excursion to the Chatcaavan Empire./
/But?/ Vasiht’h asked. /There’s a ‘but’ there, I can feel it./
Jahir looked out over the greensward, watched the sun gilding the backs of the children dashing away from him while their elders strolled after them. All Pelted. /I don’t know, ariihir. I wish I did./
Vasiht’h’s shiver communicated very well indeed through the mindline, chilling Jahir’s fingertips. /If you’re feeling it, I hope Liolesa’s feeling it twice as much, and far more clearly./
/You and me as well./
Vasiht’h left him to his studies, which soon cleared the miasma of his unease at the contents of the broadsheet. He ate, because Mistress Ivali returned twice to clear away plates and refill his cup, and then again to bring him sparkling water as the day waxed and the sun grew pleasantly warm. When the alarm on his tablet chimed, he was surprised at how quickly the time had flown. Sitting back, he considered the café, which had swelled with clients at noon and then quieted again for the sleepy hours between the Pelted lunch hour and the mid-afternoon hours the Eldritch traditionally used for walking out with friends. There were only a few patrons in the café now, one table of Eldritch and one of Tam-illee.
“All done for the day?” Mistress Ivali said.
“Alas. I must go home.” He smiled at her. “You take very good care of me, Mistress. You will convey my regards to your daughter as well? Her cooking remains sublime.”
“You should eat more of it, then you’d know.” The elder took up his last plate and cup. “How do your studies go, then, Lord?”
“Well enough. They should send me to the exam by the end of the year.”
“Another physician!” The woman beamed. “And how we’ve needed them. It’s a blessing to have you all here. Particularly the lady and lord up at the castle. We’re still the only hospital on the world, you know.”
“I do,” he said, charmed by her pride in it.
“And to think there are some who’d prefer we die in childbed, or starving while giving our bread to a stranger.” Ivali’s eyes narrowed. “I hope you don’t believe everything you read, Lord Seni.”
“No,” he said quietly. “No, Mistress, I don’t.”
“Good. Keep in mind that not all of us do either.”
He looked up at her.
“Just… so that you’re aware,” she said. “Go on to your day then, young one. And come back soon.”
“I shall.”
He thought about it all the way to the Pad that connected Firilith’s town with the nascent network of modern cities and estates throughout the kingdom. They’d installed it in an abandoned house on a corner… because there had been plenty of those to choose from. Many, many people had died here for lack of adequate nutrition and medical care. Many more had failed to thrive or produce children to keep the town alive. By the time Lady Eddings had arrived to see to Laisrathera’s rebirth, there had been twenty-eight residents… twenty-eight, in a town that had obviously been built to house at least five hundred.
He paused at the door to the Pad facility and looked over his shoulder. What had been a moldering wreck, from the stills High Priest Valthial had shown him, had become a clean, tended place, with people in it to ring the church bells and walk the paths of an afternoon to see friends. The aliens who’d settled it had named it, affectionately, ‘Acorn.’ The Eldritch could have found it encroaching—foreigners renaming their town?—but instead, they’d taken to mentioning themselves as nasainirilin. It meant ‘tenders of an orchard.’
Sometimes, Jahir thought what they were creating here would be better, even, than what he’d found in the Alliance.
3
His mother had outdone herself with the table. Nothing in its setting implied formality, but there were grace notes in every corner. Little flowers, no doubt picked herself, for he recognized them from the fields behind the estate. A perfume lingering in the room, some delicate floral water, perhaps. Cards written for each attending person, not just with their name but with something about them: Vasiht’h’s said, “exquisite caretaker”, for instance. Marevhe’s, “curious and questing mind.”
Jahir’s and Amber’s said the same thing: “beloved son.”
Their family dinner would involve nine people: Jeasa and Amber, Vasiht’h’s parents, Sehvi and Kovihs, their aunt Sattri, and Jahir and Vasiht’h. Resting a hand on the back of one of the chairs, Jahir supposed it could be called too large a gathering for coziness; what he felt, seeing it, was joy that his family was growing rather than shrinking. And when he and Sediryl married and added their children, and Vasiht’h brought his home from Anseahla, then they would truly be on their way to revivifying the tree that for too long had been fading.
“I had all his favorites put on the menu,” Jeasa murmured, joining him. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.” He smiled at her. “He deserves to be made welcome. We have missed him.”
She studied the clean linen, the unlit candles. “Your father was a good man. He would have loved to see what is becoming of the world.” Jeasa glanced up at him, smiled. “Of Escutcheon, I suppose I should call it now. How odd it is to have a name for it after so many years of knowing it only as ‘the world’.”
“Or ‘home,’” Jahir said, shading it white.
“Is it home?” she asked. “Truly, my dear?”
He rested a hand on hers. “Lady-mother… home is wherever those I love are. And most of them are here.”
She sighed, smiled. “You know there is a matter we must discuss now that he has returned. About the succession.”
He could sense her uncertainty like a cold drizzle on her aura. “I don’t think there is anything to discuss,” he answered, silvering the words. “The Empress cannot administrate a family’s estate, and Sediryl will be her successor. Seni belongs in Amber’s hands, now that I am marrying into the royal succession.”
“The imperial succession,” she corrected, and laughed at his expression, and it was relief. “I’m so glad… I thought…”
“You didn’t.” He patted her hand, gentle. “But you mislike the thought of me losing something important to me. But I haven’t lost Seni, mother. I’ve gained the entire world.”
She leaned on him, and of all the gifts the mind-talents had given him, that his most trusted might do so without fear was among the most precious. He rested an arm around her shoulders and reposed there, and all the universe felt right.
“Milady?” A servant at the door. “There are riders on the lane.”
“Riders?” Jeasa straightened, perplexed. “Not a sole rider?”
“No, milady. At least ten, and only two have come forward.”
The jolt that ran his mother’s spine was so close to his hand that he soothed her reflexively, even as he turned to the door. “Let us go see.”
/I’m on my way, if they’re here,/ Vasiht’h said, the sending accompanied by a picture of him playing board games with one of his nephews.
/I don’t know that they are,/ Jahir replied.
/Then I’m on my way, because I don’t like how that feels in your head./
Jahir didn’t like how it felt in his head, either, or how it felt when he reached outward and found something that abraded his mental fingertips. Not belligerence, but… what? He went to the nearest window, and from it saw the two riders reported, and the remainder stopped at the distant head of the lane leading to the estate. They looked almost like a guard? But who would guard Amber, and from what?
His brother he easily discerned, not just from the aura trailing off him like orange and silver mist, but from the body language that years of growing up together could not have hidden. It was the rider alongside him that he did not recognize… and in fact couldn’t, because as with Sediryl he couldn’t sense so much as an aura surrounding them. He could have forced himself into the stranger’s mind, but that was an act of violence, and his time in the Chatcaavan Empire had inculcated a code of conduct he refused to violate. He no longer denied that violence was sometimes necessary, but there were rightful times for it… and for their powers in particular, against which so few could fight—
Joining him at the window, Vasiht’h asked, softly, “But why are you thinking of using them now?”
“I wish I knew, and I fear we are about to discover.” Jahir glanced at the distant riders.
Following his gaze, Vasiht’h said, “What are they doing out there, anyway? Isn’t the custom to come and ask for hospitality? They can’t just… wait out there for hours, can they?”
“They can. But it’s considered impolite of us not to offer them a place to rest.”
“But we didn’t not offer. Did we? They didn’t come close enough for us to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.”
“That is correct.”
Vasiht’h glanced up at him, eyes narrowed. “So are they threatening us? Or insulting us?”
Jahir considered, slowly. Said, finally, nothing.
“Right,” Vasiht’h said. “That would be ‘both’.”
They heard Jeasa’s footsteps as she headed toward the front hall, and followed her. By the time they arrived, the servants were bolting the doors open and rolling out the carpet. Jeasa came to a halt at the topmost stair and they joined her. Amber had already dismounted and gone to the other horse to help its rider down… by holding the horse’s reins, Jahir noted, not by touching. An invalid? Or… he spotted the dainty foot. A woman. One he continued to not touch as they ascended the steps.
Stopping at the secondmost, Amber bowed. “Lady-mother. I am home.”
“I see, and I rejoice in the sight,” Jeasa said. “Oh, my dear! It’s so good to see your face again. Dinner is set out in your honor.” She glanced. “Who is your guest, my son?”
Bethsaida pushed her hood back and smiled. “Good evening, Lady Jeasa Seni.”
Vasiht’h’s mental groan could not have been more heartfelt, and thank the God and Lady, more hidden by the mindline. Which was for the best, as the mindline also hid his own sinking heart.
/This is going to go well, I can see,/ the Glaseah said, resigned.
/I fear it’s not going to go even as well as you imagine./
It began immediately with the table.
“Lady-mother?” Amber said. “Why so many settings?”
Jeasa had not betrayed the hurt that Jahir felt strobing off her like the pain of a burn, not by so much as a single inflected word… that her son should bring a guest, and this guest in particular, to a family reunion without warning her. Had she been properly notified, she could have prepared a chamber for Bethsaida, so she could have changed out of her riding dress and refreshed herself before the meal. To be robbed of that opportunity had forced her to the solecism of poor hospitality, bitter enough to someone of Jeasa’s giving nature. But none of that mattered as much as their mother’s perception that Amber had brought a stranger to her house, and her belief that her own hurt was unfair. They all knew Amber’s feelings for Beth. Jahir most of all, for they towered off Amber’s aura like a bonfire.
If love had been the only flame in that bonfire… but it wasn’t. There was guilt there, and anger, and resentment, and any number of other emotions entwined in it.
Their mother had moved to the head of the table, where she’d planned to seat Amber as the guest of honor. “For the rest of the family, of course. They’ll be arriving shortly.”
“The rest of…?”
“Your brother’s partner, and his sister and her mate, and their parents.”
“My brother’s partner…” Amber trailed off and glanced at Vasiht’h. “You cannot mean it, Mother. To force Lady Bethsaida to sit at a table with strangers, and aliens, who would remind her of her experiences abroad.”
That silence had all the jagged edges that followed someone dropping an armful of porcelain plates.
“I… beg your pardon, my dear?” Jeasa said carefully.
“She’s suffered enough,” Amber answered, his eyes glittering. “I brought her here where she might be treated with dignity and kindness. So many others have answered her pain with derision or mockery….”
/So many others?/ Vasiht’h asked incredulously. /What others is he talking about? All those nice poor people who give her their last piece of bread when she rides past?/
“It’s… it’s fine.” Bethsaida’s words shivered with an edge of unshed tears. Jahir couldn’t find them in her aura, though now that she was in the room with him he could detect one… barely. It clung tightly to her form like a shell, and only the faintest of emanations escaped it. He sensed effort on her part, but not more. “I… please, don’t get in a fight because of me. I’ve… I’ve seen enough fighting.”
/She has got to be kidding./ Vasiht’h’s fur bristled. /She’s seen enough fighting? Really?/
/You know as well as I do that not everyone responds to conflict in the same way, ariihir. Being reprimanded can affect one person as powerfully as being tortured can another./
/I don’t care how she feels. I care how she’s making everyone else here feel. Everyone who actually did suffer. Do I need to point at your scars?/
/I wish that you wouldn’t./
Vasiht’h looked up at Jahir. /Ariihir?/
/I don’t know why she’s here. Her own purposes, surely. I am only concerned about not creating a break between Amber and my mother. It would grieve her. We are all she has of our father and the life they made together./
/If there’s a break to be made here, it’s not going to be made by us or your mom, Jahir./
Jahir glanced at him, pained, and felt his partner’s regret, and his resolution not to add to the Eldritch’s grief. “I’ll tell them, Lady Jeasa.”
“Vasiht’h!”
Vasiht’h smiled, and his anger and resignation vibrated in the mindline like a sympathetic tone to the overriding surge of his love for his partner. “It’s fine. There will be other times. Enjoy your meal, aletsen.”
/Thank you,/ Jahir whispered.
/I hope it makes a difference,/ Vasiht’h said quietly. /But ariihir… I wouldn’t hold my breath./
Jahir would have enjoyed a dinner with his mother and brother, alone, like the many they’d taken while growing. It would have served as a reminder of the pleasures that attended the obligations of family, particularly a family as small as theirs. Jeasa had always called herself blessed, for she’d had two healthy children in a row, close enough to grow up together. Even after—particularly after—they’d lost their father, she’d nurtured those bonds, and many a breakfast or supper had been spent laughing over broken bread, handed to one another with less care for accidental touch than most and more disregard for formality than any.
This dinner was not like any of those meals. Perhaps if Bethsaida had been animated by anything other than tragedy… but she sat primly in her chair, ate little, sighed much. Kept her eyes lowered. And this from the woman who had been Liolesa’s heir?
Amber’s behavior was worse, somehow, for he doted on her. Urged her to eat in a way that should have endeared the couple to him, for who among his beloveds had not done the same to him? Except that he thought that his love for those cosseting him was clear. In no fashion did Bethsaida seem to encourage these displays. When Amber cut her food for her, as if she was a child incapable of using a knife, she simply watched with dipped lashes.
The conversation was no better. Amber spoke of their journey through the wilderness, and if it was not a blow-by-blow repetition of Bethsaida’s letters to the broadsheet printer, it was close enough to make him wonder whether they were collaborating on them. But no, that would require Bethsaida to have made an ally of Amber, and Jahir suspected, observing and cataloging the minutia of their body language, that what Bethsaida had made of his brother… was a fool. A fool who loved her, and would not profit by it.
As the last remove was carried from the table, Jeasa said, hesitantly silvered, “I thought we might retire to the library, as we did in times past…?”
“I would not want to alienate my lady by requiring her to attempt to fit herself into our memories and our routines,” Amber replied. “And we cannot tarry long, anyway. We must be away ere dark, so we can resume our work.” He rose so he could pull Bethsaida’s chair back.
“But… you won’t stay? Even overnight?”
“I would not have stopped by even for this long had we not been riding past,” Amber said in a brusquely shadowed mode, and Jahir felt his mother’s inner bubble of forced calm collapse.
It was so unjust that his response was reflexive. “I had not thought that you would become cruel in response to the injuries done you by others.”
