Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [65]
“Yes, I know,” I said bitterly.
“Do you not see that it is a sign from God that they found you so swiftly, so near to this place?” he asked with the inexorable logic of his faith. “You were already on a path toward salvation, Moirin. You just didn’t know it.”
My palms were sweating, and I rubbed them against the prickly woolen fabric of my dress. “Are you so certain you know your God’s will? Mayhap I was sent here for some other purpose.”
“No.” The Patriarch shook his head. “You were not. I am not immune to doubt, but in this, I am certain. There have been other signs that the days of conflict that will accompany Yeshua’s return are nigh. I have sensed it ever since the King of Terre d’Ange had the temerity to raise a whore, an unrepentant whore, to the royal throne.”
I flushed.
He ruffled his notes. “Yes, you knew her intimately, did you not? Take heed from her fate, Moirin mac Fainche, lest God strike you down, too.”
A jolt of unexpected horror ran through me, and I found myself staring at him. “What fate?” I raised my voice. “What fate?”
“You didn’t know.” It was a statement, not a question. The Patriarch of Riva met my gaze without flinching. He didn’t smile, not exactly, but his lips curled and his face took on a satisfied expression I would come to think of as his creamy look, the one that meant he was reveling in the pain he was about to inflict upon me for my own good.
It came and went in the flicker of an eye, but it was there, and already I dreaded the words that would follow it.
He spoke them. “The D’Angeline whore-queen Jehanne de la Courcel died in childbirth over a year ago.”
It hit me like a fist to the belly. I wasn’t aware of toppling from the stool, wasn’t aware of falling. Only that there was cold stone pressed against my cheek, and I couldn’t breathe. I lay curled around my misery and shoved my manacled hands against my stomach, gasping for air, my body punishing itself.
Jehanne! Ah, gods.
All this time.
No.
I wanted to weep, and couldn’t. The grief was too vast, too unanticipated. Not Jehanne, my unlikely rescuer, my mercurial Queen. I dragged a ragged gulp of air into my lungs, expelling it with a low keening sound.
I wanted to believe it was a lie.
I knew it wasn’t.
Chair legs scraped. “You are upset,” Pyotr Rostov said with regret from somewhere above me. “Forgive me, I should have realized it had been a very long time since you had news from your homeland, Moirin. I will leave you to your grief, and we will resume on the morrow.”
He left.
TWENTY-THREE
The days that followed were a blur.
I refused to eat, refused to talk, turning my face to the wall of my cell. There was no thought or strategy behind it, only the profound, endless ache of grief.
Jehanne. My lady Jehanne.
All this time… ah, gods! She had been frightened, so frightened. Frightened of impending motherhood, frightened of childbirth. And I had left her anyway, obeying the call of my bedamned destiny.
If I had stayed, I could have saved her. Raphael de Mereliot and I could have saved her.
It was a thought that haunted me, circling back upon me no matter how hard I sought to avoid it. We had done it before, Raphael and I. Together, with my magic channeling his gift for healing, we had saved a young mother bleeding excessively during the act of giving birth.
I wondered if he had been there at the end.
I suspected he had.
King Daniel would have sent for him. It was true, even without my aid Raphael was a skilled physician. In their own ways, they had both loved her, and Jehanne had loved them, too.
And me.
I tortured myself with imagining it. Jehanne, weakening, her exquisite face drained of blood. Raphael, rubbing his healer’s hands together to generate warmth, laying them on her, trying in vain to staunch the bleeding. King Daniel