Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [69]
No, to everyone but my people, She was a bear, only a bear.
Eventually, he gave up on that line of questioning, turning instead toward magic. “When did you begin to practice witchcraft?”
I shrugged, already weary of explaining myself. “My mother taught me to summon the twilight when I was some five years of age.”
Pyotr Rostov’s pen hovered over the page. “Summon the twilight?”
“Aye.”
His eyes took on a gleam. “What is it? How is it done?”
I told him, but he didn’t like that truth, either. It was too simple, too elemental. He did not want a gentle magic that came as naturally as breathing. He wanted charms, incantations, dire rites filled with chanting and blood sacrifices. It did not satisfy him when I said it was a small gift, meant to protect and conceal us. That in Alba I had only ever used it to hide, to catch fish with my bare hands, and to coax plants to grow.
“Is that a sin?” I asked.
The Patriarch set down his pen and pinched the bridge of his nose as though to alleviate the pressure of an aching head. “Plants.”
“Aye, plants.”
He sighed. “I do not believe it is addressed in the scripture. But this gift, how did you describe it? Taking a half-step into the spirit world?” I nodded. “In Terre d’Ange, you found other purposes for it.”
I looked away. “It is more as though they found me. Is that what you wish to speak of next, my lord?”
“No.” He took up the pen with grim determination. “Let us proceed in the proper order. I believe we have come to Cillian mac Tiernan, and the sins of the flesh.”
So we had.
On the point of having ensorceled Cillian, I resisted stubbornly. It was a false accusation, and one that still pained me, inextricably linked as it was to the sorrow of his death. At length, the Patriarch relented, although only on that single point.
“But you did fornicate with him out of wedlock?” he persisted.
“Yes,” I murmured.
His pen hovered. “How many times?”
I shook my head slowly. How many times? I hadn’t counted. Cillian had come to me whenever he could. In the spring and summer, we had lain together in the Alban meadows, flowers and plumy grasses springing around us. I’d come to know his body as well as my own, reveling the feel of him between my thighs, his strong, young phallus plowing my depths. Afterward, I had counted the freckles on his fair skin, his long, muscled limbs tangled with mine. Once, I had coaxed a dragonfly with translucent wings to land on my fingertip, and he had marveled at it, asking if it was magic. Only the ordinary, everyday kind, I had told him.
Was that sin?
In hindsight, it seemed a profoundly innocent time.
The Patriarch dipped his pen, tapped it impatiently against the inkwell. “How many times?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Many.”
“And then he died.”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes, tears leaking from beneath my lids. Since the news of Jehanne’s death, my grief was still very, very close to the surface. “Cillian died in a cattle-raid.”
“Because of you?”
“No.” I rubbed my face. “Yes. I don’t know. It was foolish and unnecessary. He shouldn’t have gone. Cillian was a scholar, not a warrior. But he felt he had somewhat to prove.”
“To you?”
“To me, to his father, to the Dalriada. I don’t know. I don’t know.” The tears wouldn’t stop coming. “If I had loved him better, if I had agreed to wed him, mayhap he would not have gone.”
I bowed my head against my knees, and wept.
There was a rustling sound as the Patriarch gathered his accounting, and then the scraping sound of chair legs as he stood. “Now you begin to see, Moirin,” he said in a gentle tone. “Had you engaged in the holy sacrament of marriage, matters would have fallen out differently. Your sorrow stems from failing to obey God’s will.” He laid one hand on my shaking shoulder. “It is a good beginning. Tomorrow, we will continue.”
He left me alone, locking the door behind him. After my tears had run their course, I rose and splashed cool water from the ewer on my face.
It didn’t feel