Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [246]
Remembering, I shook my head. "No. Let them fade, and be forgotten. No."
"Then it is what it is," Joscelin said, "And we are what we are. No more, and no less." He smiled. "Never less. Do you agree?”
I did. I demonstrated to him with a degree of ferocity the extent to which I agreed, until he caught his breath and laughed, and then until he laughed no longer, but tumbled me over with keen desire. And if the presence of Blessed Elua was no longer with us, our own presence sufficed.
I asked nothing more.
For once, it was enough.
SEVENTY-ONE
THERE WERE jests, of course; Jebeans speak with frank delight about the arts of love, and there are no secrets in a small campsite. But they were good-natured and I did not mind, and Joscelin bore it well. Their great fish had been gutted and cleaned, and strips of flesh hung to smoke over a second fire. We had some of it fresh that evening, fried in an iron pan with coriander and wild onion, and I thought it was the most delicious dish I'd ever tasted. Like as not it wasn't, but it seemed so that night.
After we'd eaten, we sat about the fire discussing plans to make ready on the morrow for the following day's departure. Bizan shared around a skin of honey-mead he'd been hoarding, and the taste of it was sweet and fiery in my mouth. I caught Joscelin's eye and he smiled, lacing his fingers with mine.
"There are thorns and there are thorns," Nkuku said judiciously, noting it. "Some are larger than others, but their prick is more pleasant."
At that, there was laughter; such was the manner of jest we endured. Imriel sat with his legs drawn up and his arms wrapped round them, peering over his knees with scarce-disguised joy. I understood it better, now.
Make me whole, I had prayed in the Temple of Isis. Make us all whole.
We had become like family to him.
There are ties that bind more complex than blood. I knew it, who'd been sold into indenture at the age of four; when I think of the family I have lost, I think of my lord Anafiel Delaunay and my foster-brother Alcuin. Of a surety, Joscelin knew it too, he who was an adored stranger in his childhood home of Verreuil.
I'd not thought about the ties we had forged with Imriel, and what they meant to him.
Nor to me.
Well and so; we were a long way yet from home, whatever Joscelin might claim, and our quest was far from over. One day, Elua willing, it would be done and we would be home. Imriel had a destiny that would claim him, with Ysandre's protection extended over him and obligations to House Courcel. And there was Melisande, too. What she would make of this, I dared not think. But I had placed myself in Blessed Elua's hand that day, trusting to his mercy. If it brought love unlooked-for, what right had I to complain? I drew Imriel to join us and he knelt in the firelight between us, leaning against Joscelin's knee, smelling faintly of fish and content for the first time since I had known him.
And Joscelin and I, who had regained the trick of knowing one another's minds without speaking, gazed at each other over Imri's head and wondered.
The next day was a flurry of activity. The new-cured hides must be sewn, the smoked and dried meats gathered, our replenished stores packed, unpacked, rearranged and packed again, boots patched and blades whetted. Tifari Amu showed me on the Ras' map where we would be going, striking out across the mountains to intersect the Great Falls.
"What will happen," I asked him, "when we reach Saba?"
Tifari shrugged, quiet and diffident as always. "As to that," he said, "I cannot say."
So we departed, and left behind our pleasant campsite. I turned in the saddle as we left, watching it vanish behind a bend in the river.
"I never thought," I said to Joscelin, "I would be so grateful to a rhinoceros."
He grinned. "I never thought I'd be so grateful to a fish."
The Jebeans thought we were a little mad, of course, although they didn't mind it. I don't know what Kaneka