Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [222]
"And look where it brought us. Still, neither of us had to endure Daršanga."
Some choices must be made swiftly, lest the enormity of them overwhelm the chooser. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eye-sockets. "All right," I said. "All right, all right, all right! Imriel."I lifted my head. "If we let you stay—if we sanction this—do you swear to me that you will obey us? Joscelin and me both—yes, and Kaneka, too—every word, every whim, as if Blessed Elua himself had crossed the boundary of Terre d'Ange-that-lies-beyond to give voice to a new sacrament?"
Imriel was nodding with every word I spoke, not listening, agreeing to it all. "I swear," he said breathlessly. "I swear, I vow, I promise, Phédre, every word!"
I spent the remainder of our voyage composing the letter to Amaury Trente.
It was a foolhardy decision, and one I daresay I wouldn't have made half a year ago. Still, great distance and great events have a way of changing one's perspective. As mad as our quest might be, it was nothing to what Imriel had undergone in Daršanga, and Kaneka was right; no one in Jebe-Barkal wanted him dead. Once he set foot on Terre d'Ange, he would always, always have enemies, the shadow of his mother's vast treachery hanging over him, every move watched and scrutinized.
Even so.
"I can't believe you sided with him," I said to Joscelin that night. Imriel was sleeping in Kaneka's cabin, which held a spare cot. After three days of scavenging for scraps and sleeping wedged in a dark corner of the hold, he was grateful for it. If she hadn't caught him at the water-barrel, he might have held out till Iskandria. "Amaury will be like to kill us. And Ysandre ... I don't want to think of it."
Joscelin shrugged. "You're the one thought you saw an assassin aboard his ship."
"Thought!" I lowered my voice. "Even I admitted it was probably my imagination playing on my fears. It's not like you, that's all. Honor, duty, loyalty—all those Cassiline virtues, that should demand we send him back."
"I'm tired." Lying on his side, he regarded me across the cabin. "Phédre, all my life, I've had to make that choice, over and over. I'm tired of it.”
Daršanga, I thought, had changed him, too; it had changed us all. "Then love is reason enough? Because he willed it?"
"I don't know. Blessed Elua says it is. Imriel followed you—us— out of love. I know that much is true; there's no other reason for it." Joscelin rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling. "Phèdre, did you tell him how his mother escaped from Troyes-le-Mont?"
A chill ran the length of my spine. "No," I whispered.
Incredible as it seems, I had not thought, until then, how very similar were the means, even down to the concealing cloak. In Troyes-le-Mont, Melisande had traded places with her cousin Persia and walked out of captivity under the very noses of the men set to guard her. And her son had played nearly the self-same trick. It would not go unremarked, not by the men who'd been duped by it, who were doubtless on their way back to Tyre even as we spoke, taut and furious, holding in custody a disappointed Akkadian serving-lad.
"He did it for love," Joscelin said softly. "That's the difference. And I don't have it in my heart to betray him for it. Phèdre . . . this boy could be dangerous. Or he could be something else. I can't forgive Melisande. But I can forgive her son."
"Someone should," I murmured. "It might as well be us."
"Why not?" He laughed, the sound blending with the rhythmic ripple of waves against the ship's hull. "One way or another, it seems it usually is."
And so our journey passed. In the morning and the evenings, his seasickness faded, Joscelin performed his Cassiline exercises on the foredeck of the ship, sweating under the bright sun as he sought to regain his old balance, the steel daggers weaving intricate patterns—slowly, so slowly. After the first day of his discovery, Imriel joined him, using a pair of wooden practice-blades whittled for him by a bored sailor. With infinite patience, both for his own infirmity and Imri's ineptness,