Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [331]
"You think it will matter to Rahab?" Hyacinthe asked. I glancedsharply at him, and found him grinning; unexpected, as welcome as light in a dark place, his old grin, irrepressible, white and merry against his brown skin. He laughed at my ire, dodging a well-aimed blow and catching me in his arms. "Ah, Phèdre! You've not changed."
"Neither have you," I whispered, laying my head on his chest. "Not really, not underneath. I still know you, Hyacinthe."
We stood like that for a long time.
"You gave me a gift," he said eventually, his breath warm against my tangled hair. "That last night, on the isle, before you left me here alone . . ." His mouth curved in a smile. "It gave me something beautiful to remember. Sometimes, it was the only thing that kept me going."
"It wasn't a gift," I murmured. "I remember it, too."
"Phèdre." Hyacinthe cupped my face in his hands. "I'm going to miss you."
I met his dark, sea-changing gaze and could not pretend he was wholly unaltered. "You'll go with Sibeal."
He nodded. "She has seen, in dreams, something of what I've become. And I have watched her, too, in the sea-mirror. We understood one another from the beginning, Phèdre, Necthana's daughters and I. Sibeal isn't you. But she's someone I could love. And you . . . I've watched you, too."
"Joscelin," I said.
"Joscelin." His smile was rueful. "That damned Cassiline, yes. Even on Alba, I saw it in both of you. I told you as much. Elua must have laughed when he bound your hearts together. Whatever power I have, it's naught to that. I'll not challenge that bond."
"This is good-bye, then? To you and I?" I asked him.
"To the Queen of Courtesans and the Prince of Travellers." Hyacinthe traced a line along the curve of my left eye, the dart-stricken one. "It's what you became after all, isn't it? And I ... I will have to acknowledge the claim of the Tsingani. If I cannot rule them as Tsingan kralis, still, I shall have a say in the succession, and what we become as a people. That much is owed."
"Then it is good-bye."
"Mayhap." Something moved in the depths of his sea-dark eyes, containing something of Hyacinthe's merriment and something of the Master of the Straits' power. "If it came to pass, on the odd year or three, that the night breezes called your name in my voice, Phèdre nó Delaunay, would you answer?"
I put both arms around his neck and kissed him hard in reply.
It was at once familiar and strange, that kiss, and I tasted in it my own lost childhood, the legacy of a whore's unwanted get, raised by a reluctant Night Court, finding friendship for the first time. All of our history was in it, scrapes and mishaps, confidences shared, and the darker shadows of adulthood; the losses of the battle of Bryn Gorrydum, where I had learned there is healing in the sharing of Naamah's arts, and the terrible sacrifice Hyacinthe had made here upon this isle. And I tasted too the strangeness his life had become, the alien knowledge of elemental forces, the salt-surge of seawater, the tidal depths, the roiling clouds and the forked violence of lightning, the pure music of the unstrung winds.
"I was wrong." Hyacinthe laughed aloud, unfettered and joyous. His black eyes danced. "You have changed. Is that what it does, to hold the Name of God within you?"
"Yes," I said, and kissed him again.
His grin was pure wickedness when I stopped, and pure Hyacinthe. "And what did Melisande Shahrizai make of it?"
It may be he guessed because he was the Master of the Straits, and privy to arcane knowledge; it may be because he was Anasztaizia's son, and had the gift of the dromonde. But like as not, it was because