Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey [3]
All of these pale beside your birth.
I began to know it as you grew within me; a life, separate yet contained. Our veins sharing the same blood; my food, your nourishment. And then the wrenching separation of birth, the two divided and rejoined. When they put you in my arms, I felt a conflagration in my heart; a love fiercer and hotter than any I had known.
You will remember none of this, I know. But in the first months of your life, I suffered no attendant to bathe you, no nursemaid to suckle you. These things, I did myself. Like any fatuous mother, I counted your fingers and toes, marveling at their miniature perfection, the nails like tiny moons. Your flesh, a part of mine, now separate. The veins beneath your skin where my blood flowed, the impossible tenderness of it all. In the privacy of my chambers, I held you close to my breast and said all the foolish things mothers say.
I remember the first time you laughed, and how it made my heart leap. And yes, I dreamed great dreams for you—dreams you will call treason. But above all I knew I would never, ever suffer anyone to harm you. I, who had never acted out of spite (although you may not believe it), would gladly have killed with my own hands anyone who harbored an ill thought toward you.
When I sent you away …if you believe nothing else, I pray you will believe this. I believed you would be safe in the Sanctuary of Elua. Safe from my enemies, and safe from the intentions of the Queen. Safe and hidden, the secret jewel of my heart. If I had known what would happen, if there was any way I could undo what was done to you, I would do it. I would humble myself and beg, I would pay any price. But there is none, none the gods will accept.
Instead, I am afforded a reminder harsher than any rod, that cuts deeper than any blade: Kushiel's justice is cruel.
You will wonder if I loved you. The answer is yes; a thousand times, yes.
One may be wounded in battle without feeling it. After we retreated from the first onslaught in Lucca, I was surprised to find a gash on my thigh, a gouge on my arm. And I was surprised now to find tears leaking from my closed lids. I'd known the letters had bruised and battered my heart. I hadn't known my mother's words had touched something deep and aching within me, something I had buried since I was ten years old and I learned who I was. Now it was cracked asunder.
It hurt.
It hurt because I had believed myself unloved, a political expedient; a cog in my mother's vast ambitions. It hurt with a deep, bittersweet ache. For the laughing infant in his mother's arms, for all that she had understood too late. I had spent so many years despising her, knowing only the proud, calculating monstrosity of her genius. It was hard to feel otherwise.
Alone in the darkness of my bedchamber, I pressed the heels of my hands against my closed eyes and sighed. I couldn't love her. Not now; likely not ever. But I could begin to forgive her, at least a little bit, for the things that had befallen me.
In time, I slept without knowing it, sinking into the depths of exhaustion. At first I dreamed I was reading my mother's letters still, and then the dream changed. For the first time in many months, I dreamed of Daršanga. I dreamed of the Mahrkagir's smile and the sound of a rusty blade being scraped over a whetting stone, and I cried aloud and woke.
A figure at the window startled. "Your highness?”
I sat up and squinted at her. There was light spilling into my bedchamber. It had been the sound of the drapes being drawn, nothing more. "Clory?”
Phèdre's handmaiden bobbed a quick curtsy. "Forgive me, your highness!”
"It's just me, Clory." I ran my hands through my disheveled