The Forbidden Circle (53 page)

“I guess most women think that if they . . . if they have to abstain for some reason, it’s only fair for the man to share the . . . the abstention.” He fumbled. “Look, if Callista’s unhappy too, and I go off to get myself laid—oh, hell, I don’t know the polite words—isn’t it pretty rotten of me to act as if
her
unhappiness doesn’t matter, as long as my own needs are met?”

Ellemir laid a gentle hand on his arm. “That does you credit, Andrew. But I find it hard to imagine that a woman who loved a man wouldn’t be glad to know he was satisfied somehow.”

“But wouldn’t she feel as if I didn’t love her enough to wait for her?”

“Do you think you would love Callista less if you were to lie with me?”

He returned her gaze steadily. “Nothing in this world could make me love Callista less.
Nothing
.”

She shrugged slightly. “So how could she be hurt? And think about this, Andrew. Suppose that someone other than yourself could help Callista break the bonds she did not seek and cannot break. Would you be angry with her, or love her less?”

Touched on the raw, Andrew remembered the moment when it seemed that Damon had come between them, his almost frantic jealousy. “Do you expect me to believe a man wouldn’t mind that, here?”

“You told me only now that nothing could make you love her less. Would you forbid her, then?”

“Forbid her? No,” Andrew said, “but I might wonder how deep
her
love went.”

Ellemir’s voice was suddenly shaking. “Are you Terrans like the Dry-Towners, then, who keep their women behind walls and in chains so that no other man will touch them? Is she a toy you want to lock in a box so that no one else can play with it? What
is
marriage to you, then?”

“I don’t know,” Andrew said drearily, his anger collapsing. “I’ve never been married before. I’m not trying to quarrel with you, Elli.” He fumbled with the pet name. “I . . . just . . . well, we were talking, before, about things being strange to me, and this is one of them. To believe Callista wouldn’t be hurt . . .”

“If you had abandoned her, or if you had forced her to consent, unwilling—as with
Dom
Ruyven of Castamir, who forced Lady Crystal to harbor his
barragana
wife and to foster all the bastards the woman bore—then, yes, she might have cause to grieve. But can you believe it is cruelty, that you do her will?” She met his eyes, reached out, gently, and took his hand between her own. She said, “If you are suffering, Andrew, it hurts all of us. Callista too. And . . . and me, Andrew.”

His barriers were down. The touch, the meeting of their eyes, made him feel wholly exposed to her. No wonder she had no hesitation in simply walking around without her shift, he realized. This was the real nakedness.

He had reached that particular stage of drunkenness where preconceptions blur and people do outrageous things and believe them commonplace. He could see Ellemir, now as herself, now as Callista, now as a visible sign of a contact he was only beginning to understand, the four-way link between them. She bent and laid her mouth against his. It went through his body like a jolt of electricity. All his aching frustration was behind the strength with which he pulled her into his arms.

Is this happening, or am I drunk, and dreaming about it again?
Thought blurred. He was aware of Ellemir’s body in his arms, slender, naked, confident, with that curious matter-of-fact acceptance. In a moment’s completely sober insight, he knew that this was her way of cutting off awareness of Damon too. It was not only his need, but hers. He was glad of that.

He was naked, with no memory of shedding his clothes. She was warm, pliant in his arms.
Yes, she has been here before, for a moment, the four of us, blended, just before catastrophe struck. . . .
At the back of her mind he sensed a warm, welcoming amusement:
No, you are not strange to me
.

Through growing excitement came a sad strange thought:
It should have been Callista.
Ellemir felt so different in his arms, so
solid
somehow, without any of the shy fragility which so excited him in Callista. Then he felt her touch, rousing him, blotting out thought. He felt memory blurring and wondered for a moment if this were her doing, so that for now the kindly haze obscured everything. He was only a feeling, reacting body, driven by long need and deprivation, aware only of an accepting, responding body in his arms, of excitement and tenderness matching his own, seeking the deliverance so long denied. When it came it was so intense that he thought he would lose consciousness.

After a time he stirred, carefully shifting his weight. She smiled and brushed her hair from his face. He felt calm, released, grateful. No, it was more than gratitude, it was a closeness, like . . . yes, like the moment they had met in the matrix. He said, quietly, “Ellemir.” Just a reaffirmation, a reassurance. For the moment she was clearly herself, not Callista, not anyone else. She kissed him lightly on the temple, and suddenly exhaustion and release of long denial all fell together at once, and he slept in Ellemir’s arms. An indefinable time later he woke to see Damon looking down at them.

He looked weary, haggard, and Andrew thought, in shock, that here was the best friend he had ever had, and here he was, in bed with his wife.

Ellemir sat up quickly. “Callista—?”

Damon’s sigh seemed dragged up from the roots of his body. “She’s going to be all right. She’s asleep.” He stumbled and almost fell on top of them. Ellemir held out her arms, gathering him to her breast.

Andrew thought he was in the way there, then, sensing Damon’s exhaustion, how near the older man was to collapse, realized that his preoccupation with himself was selfish, irrelevant. Clumsily, wishing there was some way to express what he felt, he put his arm around Damon’s shoulders.

Damon sighed again, and said, “She’s better than I dared hope for. She’s very weak, of course, and exhausted. After all I put her through . . .” he shuddered, and Ellemir drew his head to her breasts.

“Was it so terrible, beloved?”

“Terrible, yes, terrible for
her
,” Damon muttered, and even then—Ellemir sensed it with heartbreak—he was trying to shield her, shield them both from the nakedness of his own memory. “She was so brave, and I couldn’t bear having to hurt her like that.” His voice broke. He hid his face on Ellemir’s breasts and began to sob, harshly, helplessly.

Andrew thought he should leave, but Damon reached out for Andrew’s hand, clinging to it with an agonized grip. Andrew, putting aside his own discomfort at being present at such a moment, thought that right now Damon needed all the comfort he could get. He only said very softly, when Damon had quieted, “Should I be with Callista?”

Damon caught the overtone in the words:
You and Ellemir would rather be alone.
In his worn, raw-edged state it was painful, a rebuff. His words were sharp with exhaustion.

“She won’t know whether you’re there or not. But do as you damn please!” and the unspoken part of his words were as plain as what he said aloud:
If you just can’t wait to get away from us.

Damon, how could he?
Ellemir hardly understood herself. She only knew that when Damon was like this it was painful, exhausting. His need was so much greater than she could meet or comfort in any way. Her own inadequacy tormented her. It was not sexual—
that
she could have understood and eased—but what she sensed in Damon left her exhausted and helpless because it was not any recognizable need which she could understand. Some of her desperation came through to Andrew, though all she said was, “Please stay. I think he wants us both with him now.”

Damon, clinging to them both with a desperate, sinking need for physical contact which was not, though it simulated it, the real need he felt, thought,
No, they don’t understand.
And, more rationally,
I don’t understand it either.
For the moment it was enough that they were there. It wasn’t complete, it wasn’t what he needed, but for the moment he could make it do, and Ellemir, holding him close in despair, thought that they could calm him a little, like this. But what was it he really needed? Would she ever know? She wondered. How could she know when he didn’t know himself?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Callista woke and lay with her eyes closed, feeling the sun on her eyelids. In the night, through her sleep, she had felt the storm cease, the snow stop, and the clouds disappear. This morning the sun was out. She stretched her body, savoring the luxury of being wholly without pain. She still felt weak, drained, though it now seemed to her that she had slept for two or three whole days without intermission, after that dreadful ordeal. Afterward she had remained abed for a few days, recovering her strength, although she felt quite well. She knew that the first thing necessary was to recover her health, which, always before, had been excellent, and it would take time.

And when she was well, what then? But she caught herself. If she began to fret about that, she would have no peace.

She was alone in the room. That was luxury too. She had spent so many years alone that she had come to crave solitude as much as she had once dreaded it during the difficult years of her training. And while she was sick she had never been alone for an instant. She knew the reason—she would unhesitatingly have ordered the same treatment for anyone in her condition—and she had welcomed their care and unceasing love. Now, however, it was good to wake again and know herself once more left alone.

She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. Andrew’s bed was empty. Dimly she remembered, through her sleep, hearing him moving around, dressing, going out. With the storm over, there would be all manner of things to be attended to around the estate. Around the house too. Ellemir had spent so much time at her side during the days of her illness that she had neglected the running of the household.

Callista decided that she would go downstairs this morning.

Last night Andrew had been with Ellemir again. She had sensed it dimly, by the old discipline turning her mind away from it. He had come in softly, near midnight, moving quietly so as not to disturb her, and she had pretended sleep.

I am a fool and unkind
, she told herself.
I wanted this to happen, and I am honestly glad, yet I could not speak to him and say so.
But that line of thought led nowhere, either. There was only one thing she could do, and she must summon up the strength to do it: to live every day as best she could, recovering her health, trusting Damon’s promise. Andrew still loved and wanted her, though, she thought with a detachment so clinical she did not even know it was bitter, she could not imagine why he should. Again, why dwell on the one thing they could not yet share? Resolutely she got out of bed and went to bathe.

 

She dressed herself in a blue woolen skirt and a white knitted tunic with a long collar which could be wound about her like a shawl. For the first time since she could remember she actually felt hungry. Downstairs, the maids had cleared away the morning meal. Her father’s chair had been rolled to the window and he was looking out into the heavily drifted courtyard, where a group of serving men, heavily bundled, were clearing away some of the snow. She went and brushed his forehead with a dutiful kiss.

“Are you well again, daughter?”

“Much better, I think,” she said, and he motioned her to sit beside him, scanning her face carefully, narrowing his eyes.

“You’re thinner. Zandru’s hells, girl, you look as if you’d been gnawed by Alar’s wolf! What ailed you, or shouldn’t I ask?”

She had no idea what, if anything, Andrew or Damon might have told him. “Nothing very much. A woman’s trouble.”

“Don’t give me that,” her father said bluntly, “you’re no sickling. Marriage doesn’t seem to agree with you, my girl.”

She recoiled, saw in his face that he had picked up the recoil. He backed off quickly. “Well, well, child, I have known it a long time, the Towers do not easily let go their hold on those they have taken. I remember well how Damon went for more than a year like a lost soul blundering in the outer hells.” Clumsily he patted her arm. “I won’t ask questions,
chiya
. But if that husband of yours is no good to you . . .”

Quickly she put out her hand to him. “No, no. It has nothing to do with Andrew, Father.”

He said, his frown skeptical, “When a bride of a few moons looks as you do, her husband is seldom blameless.”

Under his concentrated study she flushed, but her voice was firm. “On my word, Father, there has been no quarrel, and Andrew is no way to blame.” It was the truth, but not the whole truth. There was no way to tell the whole truth to anyone outside their closed circle, and she was not sure she knew it herself. He sensed that she was evading him, but he accepted the barrier between them. “Well, well, the world will go as it will, daughter, not as you or I would have it. Have you breakfasted?”

“No, I waited to keep you company.”

She let him call servants and order them to bring her food, more than she wanted, but she knew he had been shocked by her thinness and pallor. Like an obedient child, she forced herself to eat a little more than she really wanted. His eyes dwelt on her face as she ate, and he said at last, more gently than was his custom, “There are times, child, when I feel that you daughters of Comyn who go into the Towers take risks no less than those of our sons who go into the Guard, and fight along our borders . . . and it’s just as inevitable, I suppose, that some of you should be wounded.”

How much did he know? How much did he understand? She knew he had said just about as much as he could say without breaking one of the strongest taboos in a telepathic family. She felt obscurely comforted, even through her embarrassment. It could not have been easy for him to go this far.

He passed her a jar of honey for her bread. She refused it, laughing. “Would you have me fat as a fowl for roasting?”