Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey [13]
Despite the good-natured curses directed his way, he was considered lucky, for he had spoken truly, and his mother was the lone Tsingano fortuneteller in Night's Doorstep. As dark as her son and more so, eyes sunk in weary hollows, she wore gold, always; coins dangling from her ears, and a chain jingling with gold ducats about her neck. Hyacinthe told me it was the way of the Tsingani, to carry their wealth so.
I learned much later what he did not tell me; that his mother was outcast from the Tsingani for having done homage to Naamah with a man not of her people-who do not, anyway, reverence Blessed Elua, although I have never understood fully what they do believe-and that Hyacinthe himself, far from being a prince of the Tsingani, was street-born and a cuckoo's child. Still, she kept the customs and I believe indeed she had the gift of dromonde, to part the veils of what-might-be. I watched once while a man, a painter coming into some fame, crossed her palm that she might read his. She told him he would die at his own hand, and he laughed; but the next time I escaped to Night's Doorstep, Hyacinthe told me that man had died of poisoning, from wetting the tip of his paintbrush with his tongue.
Thus was my secret life, out from beneath the eye of Cereus House. The Dowayne's Guard, of course, knew where to find me; if Hyacinthe's trail of mischief was not easily traced, they merely did as I had come to do, and asked about of the brothel-keepers and at the wine-shops. Someone, inevitably, knew where to find us. It came to be something of a game, to see how long I might remain at my freedom, before I was caught up by a gauntleted hand and slung ignominiously over the pommel of a saddle to be returned to Cereus House.
The Guard, I think, saw it as such, for life in the Night Court was dull for a swordsman. I at least offered a challenge, albeit a small one.
The Dowayne was another matter.
After my third such escapade, she was rightfully infuriated and ordered a chastening. Straight from the pommel, struggling and squirming, I was brought to the courtyard before her. I had never seen, before that, a whipping post used for its purpose.
Other occasions blur before that vivid memory. The Dowayne sat in her chair, looking above my head. The guardsman who had brought me hither forced me to my knees, grasping my wrists together in one hand. In a trice, my wrists were bound above me to the iron ring atop the post. The Dowayne looked away. Someone behind me caught the nape of my gown and tore it open, all down the back.
I remember the air was warm and scented with flowers, a touch moist from the fountains that played freely there. I felt it upon the bare skin of my back. The marble flagstones were hard beneath my knees.
It was not a hard whipping, as such things go. Mindful of the fact that I was a child, the Dowayne's chastiser used a soft deerskin flogger and a delicate touch, pizzicato style. But child I was, and my skin was tender, and the lash fell like a rain of fire between my naked shoulders.
The first touch was the most exquisite, the fine thongs laying rivulets of pain coursing across my skin, awakening a fiery shudder at the base of my spine. Once, twice, thrice; I might have thrilled for days at the ecstatic pain, nursing the memory of it. But the chastiser kept on, and the rivulets swelled to streams, rivers, a flood of pain, overwhelming and drowning me.
It was then that I began to beg.
I cannot recall, now, such things as I said. I know that I writhed, bound hands extended in a rigid plea, and wept, and pledged my remorse and promised never to defy her again-and still the lash fell, over and over, inflaming my poor back until I thought the whole of it was afire. Adepts of the House stood by and watched, faces schooled not to show pity. The Dowayne herself never looked; that fine, ancient profile all she would give me. I wept and pleaded and the blows fell like rain, until a warm languor suffused my body and I sagged against the post, humiliated and beaten.
Only then was