Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [192]
I tried riding astride, but even when the Bastard behaved himself and paced sedately, I could feel the swaying motion of sitting upright in the saddle tugging at my healing wounds. One never thinks, until one is badly injured, about the myriad intricate ways in which the parts of one's body are connected.
It was frustrating, how slowly I healed. Girard had provided a store of salve and clean bandages. I couldn't even tend myself, but had to be helped, like an infant. It was a piece of luck that one of Urist's men, Cailan, was a wise-woman's son. He was a quiet, shy fellow with a gentle touch, although the others assured me he was a demon in battle. Every night, he unwound my bandages to wash my wounds and apply salve.
The first time he saw them, he gave a low whistle. "You're lucky to be alive, my lord.”
"So I'm told," I said.
They were healing, if not fast enough to suit me. The redness was fading, and there was no more yellow matter, only thick scabs. But Berlik's claws had cut deep. It was infuriating, how weak it made me. A week into our journey, I began practicing the Cassiline forms, slowly and carefully. Tentative as I was, the first time I made it through telling all the hours, I was panting and my legs trembled with helpless exhaustion. Still, I kept trying.
Slowly, slowly, it grew easier.
We avoided cities and villages in favor of making camp in the open. Urist and his men preferred it, and it suited me fine. I still felt raw and exposed, my grief too intimate to share with anyone who didn't understand it. On the road, we got a lot of odd looks from fellow travellers wondering why a member of House Trevalion was travelling with an escort of Cruithne, but no one bothered us. At least that was one good thing about the carriage. I could remain anonymous.
None of us spoke much on the journey.
They were good men, the men Urist had recruited. Most were veterans who had fought alongside him in the battle of Bryn Gorrydum; it was the younger ones who had elected to stay with Kinadius and search for Berlik. These were taciturn fellows, filled with quiet purpose, and their presence was a comfort.
I thought a great deal, jouncing in my carriage, about the vision Morwen had showed me in the stone circle. I thought about my son, Dorelei's and my son, and wondered what had befallen him to turn him so thoroughly against Alba. Her death? My death? I'd left, and I'd never come back. Having come so close, so heartbreakingly close, to being a father, I couldn't imagine I would ever abandon a child of my own blood so thoroughly.
Mayhap I'd died.
Mayhap Barquiel L'Envers finally got his wish.
And yet, it was his D'Angeline heritage our son had embraced. I'd never reckoned on that. Somehow, I'd been so sure he would be Alban, through and through. But he'd left Alba, gone to Terre d'Ange for many years. Mayhap I'd sent for him before I died. I wondered what had happened. Had he fallen in love and been thwarted? Had some D'Angeline peer deemed Melisande Shahrizai's half-breed grandson an unfit match? Had politics intervened? Had he seen his return to Alba to serve as Talorcan's heir as exile? Had it made him twisted and bitter?
Mayhap that was why my father's spirit had looked so very, very sad when he appeared to me at the Feast of the Dead. He was a man who'd grown bitter in exile. Mayhap he'd seen that the same fate would befall my son.
In the end, I would never know.
My unborn son was dead.
Dorelei was dead.
As we travelled across Terre d'Ange, those dreadful truths settled slowly into my bones. Gone. They were simply …gone. And nothing in the world I could do would bring them back. All I could do was offer them the solace of vengeance.
Without becoming a monster myself.
It was important, that. I wondered if it was one of the reasons Dorelei had extracted Urist's promise. If she had seen the potential in me. She had known me well enough to know I would dedicate myself to vengeance if anything happened to her. I wondered