Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [49]
"Phèdre nó Delaunay."
It was a man's voice that spoke my name, gentle as a breeze. Rising, I turned and saw him, Elua's priest, clad in blue robes the color of the summer sky, with the handsome, austere features of Siovale. His eyes, like the leaves of the poppies, were a pale silvery-green, and his light brown hair fell down his back in a single cabled braid.
"Brother Selbert," I acknowledged him.
"Yes." He smiled. "I have been expecting you."
From the corner of my eye, I saw Joscelin rise from his own obeisance, bowing in the Cassiline manner, crossed hands hovering over the hilts of his daggers. "Me, my lord?" I asked the priest. "How is it so?"
"You," he said. "Or someone. You are not the first." He cocked his head, and I heard in the distance the sound of shepherd's pipes calling and answering across the far crags. "Did the Queen send you?"
Beneath the shadow of Blessed Elua, I gazed at him, a solitary figure drenched in sunlight. "Whose emissary do you think I am, my lord priest?"
"Ah." Brother Selbert exchanged an enigmatic smile with the effigy of Elua. "As to that, I suppose you are Kushiel's. Come." He extended his hand. "We must speak."
So it was that Joscelin and I followed the priest across the field, as obediently as our animals had followed the girl Liliane. At the entryway, we paused to don our boots. Brother Selbert waited, patient and calm. Like the other members of his order, he went unshod, and his bare feetwere calloused and cracked, engrained with the dust of a thousand journeys.
"Come," he said again when we were done.
We followed the priest into his private quarters, where he bade us sit.
"You are here about the boy," he said when we had done so.
I opened my mouth to reply, but it was Joscelin who spoke first, giving voice to his long-held anger. "How could you do it?" he demanded. "How could you betray the realm to aid, that. . . that woman?"
"Melisande." Brother Selbert spoke her name calmly, tilting his head. "Melisande Shahrizai de la Courcel." He smiled in reminiscence. "Why does it offend you, young Cassiline?"
"Yes." The priest held up one hand, forestalling his argument. "These things she has done, Joscelin Verreuil. And not a one of them would have been possible had it not been for the greed, the fear, the unreasoning hatred, the hunger for vengeance, on the part of her conspirators."
The meaning of his words brushed me like the tip of a fearsome wing, and I shuddered. "You say she has not violated the precept of Blessed Elua."
"Yes." Brother Selbert bent his head to me. "Love as thou wilt. For good or for ill, Melisande Shahrizai alone has laid her plans out of love of the game itself."
"But," I whispered, "they are dire."
"They are." The priest nodded gently. "Such is not my place to judge; only the intent." There was a look in his silver-green eyes such as I had seen in Michel Nevers' in Kushiel's temple—a terrible compassion. "Thus are the gifts of Kushiel's scions, to see the fault-lines in another's soul. I can do naught, if it is exercised in love."
I swallowed. "Even love without compassion?"
"Even that." There were oceans of sorrow in Brother Selbert's voice. "I can but feed the spark where I see it. And I saw it, in the Lady Melisande's regard for her child.”
"You lied to the Queen!" Joscelin protested in anguish.
"Yes, of course." The priest gave him a quizzical look. "The Queen sought to claim the child for her own ends. The ends are admirable, young Cassiline, and they are rooted in her love of the realm, her desire for peace. But they do not supercede