Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey [165]
Having nigh emptied them with his bath, it was Joscelin's job to refill the house cisterns. He did it with quiet grace, making trek after trek with the yolked buckets across his shoulders, stamping the snow from his boots before he entered the hall.
Ailsa, sewing in a corner, watched him and smiled.
If Gunter had not noticed before, he noticed it that night. He remarked on it to me as we lay in bed, afterward. It had surprised me, that he liked to talk after pleasure, when he'd not drunk heavily before it.
"He is pleasing to the women, your D'Angeline," he mused. "What do they see, so, in a beardless boy?"
So that was why he thought Joscelin a boy still. "We do not grow hair like the Skaldi," I said to him. "Some of the old lines, where the blood of Elua and his Companions runs strong, grow none on the face. Joscelin is a man grown. Perhaps women are less easily misled than men in this," I added, smiling.
But Gunter was in no mood to be teased. "Does Hedwig find him pleasing?" he asked me, yellow brows scowling in thought.
"She finds him pleasing to behold," I said honestly, "but she does not make eyes at him, as does Ailsa, my lord."
"Ailsa is a trial," he muttered. "Tell me, is the D'Angeline trained as you are? Kilberhaar's men did not say so."
I nearly laughed, but smothered it, as he was minded to take it wrong. "No, my lord," I said instead. "He is sworn to lie with no woman. It is part of his oath."
At that, his brows shot up. "Truly?"
"Yes, my lord. It is true that he is a lord's son, but he is a priest, first; a kind of priest, as you know it. That is the nature of his oath."
"So he is not trained to please women, as you are to please men," Gunter said thoughtfully.
"No, my lord. Joscelin is trained to be a warrior and companion, as I was trained to please in bed," I said, adding, "Men and women both."
"Women!" His voice rumbled with surprise. "Where is the sense in that?"
"If my lord has to ask," I said, somewhat offended, "there is no merit in answering."
I thought perhaps I had annoyed him then, and he would turn over and speak no more that evening, but Gunter was considering something. He lay gazing at the ceiling, running one finger beneath the cord of Melisande's diamond. "I please you," he said eventually. "But you say it is the gift of your patron-god."
"A gift, or betimes a curse," I muttered.
"All the gifts of the gods are like that," he said dismissively, pinning me with his shrewd look. "But I thought maybe you only said it that I would let you see the D'Angeline boy, eh?"
It was hard, sometimes, to remember that he was a clever man, for all his Skaldi ways. I shook my head. "What I said was true, my lord." It wasn't, of course, exactly true; I'd no idea if Kushiel's Dart could be unstricken. But of a surety, it was true that I was its victim.
"So you say that I would not be pleasing to a D'Angeline woman who lacked your curse of a gift?"
"I am the only one with this gift," I murmured. "Does my lord wish me to answer him truly?"
"Yes," he said bluntly.
I remembered what Cecilie had said about Childric d'Essoms. "My lord makes love as if he is hunting boar," I said; it was not as much of an insult to a Skaldi as it would be to a D'Angeline. "It is a heroic act, but not necessarily pleasing to women."
Gunter thought about this, absently smoothing his mustaches. "You could teach me," he said cannily. "If you are trained as you say."
I nearly laughed at that, too, albeit bitterly. I would be dead now, were I not pleasing to Melisande Shahrizai, whose skills I would match against any adept of the Night Court. "Yes, my lord," I said. "If it is your wish."
"It would be a mighty thing to know." He still had that canny look on his face, though in this, he wasn't nearly as shrewd as he thought. I knew well enough that Hedwig had refused him three times. If he meant to give me to Waldemar Selig at the Allthing, surely he would ask her a fourth. After his time with me, I did not