Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [70]
Now…
Somehow, the confession the Patriarch had dragged from me had soiled every aspect of my relationship with Cillian. Was our lovemaking a sin? I didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it.
And yet the mere act of confessing it made it seem so. My memories had been violated—and it was only the beginning.
With beliefs so deeply ingrained, seducing Aleksei was going to be very, very difficult indeed.
Still, I meant to try.
TWENTY-FIVE
I n Terre d’Ange, seduction is reckoned an art and a sport alike, and yet I’d never had cause to practice it, not really.
When I arrived in the City of Elua, I fell straightaway into Raphael de Mereliot’s schemes—quite literally, from the moment his carriage struck me down unwittingly in the street and he found the signet ring around my neck identifying me as a descendant of House Courcel.
And from the moment Raphael made me a pawn in his complicated game with Jehanne, I became a target, a prize to be claimed.
I’d known it when I let Jehanne seduce me.
I’d known it when Prince Thierry courted me, and I bedded him in a moment of loneliness.
I’d been prey, not a hunter, albeit rather willing prey. Now that would have to change, and I would have to play a very subtle game with my oh so skittish prey.
Well and so, I knew how to hunt. Unlike D’Angelines, I had never practiced it as a sport. It was a means of survival.
So was this. And as Batu had said, survival was the best reason of all.
Any overt move on my part would send Aleksei fleeing, of that I was sure. I could sense it in the nervous tension in his body when he was alone in my cell with me, in the way his voice broke and faltered as he read to me, in the way he avoided my gaze. But a good hunter observes his prey, and a very good hunter makes the prey come to him. For now, I was content to wait and observe Aleksei.
I sat demurely on my stool and listened to him read, keeping my expression open and earnest. I learned to look away when he faltered, for those were the times when he allowed himself to steal glances at me.
In Terre d’Ange, one of the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court is dedicated to modesty—Alyssum House, whose motto is With eyes averted. When first I heard of it, I hadn’t understood the allure. Jehanne had explained to me that there were two kinds of patrons drawn to modesty. The first kind simply reveled in the delicious sense of wickedness involved in coaxing a modest adept to a state of wanton abandonment.
The second, more sensitive kind was moved by the tender sense of protectiveness modesty aroused in them.
Young Aleksei was surely the latter.
So I played at being modest, feeling him relax a measure in my presence. When he finished his reading for the day, I thanked him for it.
“You’re welcome.” He gave me a shy smile. “Did you enjoy it?”
It had been a long, repetitive tale about the plight of the Habiru folk in the land of Menekhet in which their prophet Moishe dueled with the Pharaoh’s magicians. I felt very sorry for the Habiru, enslaved in a foreign land and forced to labor, but I also felt sorry for the ordinary folk of Menekhet, forced to endure rivers of blood, plagues of flies and frogs, boils, hailstorms and locusts, darkness that lasted three days, and the death of their firstborn children, all because the ridiculously stubborn Pharaoh wouldn’t grant the Habiru their freedom. It seemed to me that God was cruel to punish a whole nation of common folk for the whim of one stubborn man.
And I couldn’t understand for the life of me why it was acceptable for this fellow Moishe to call down darkness across the entire land, while it was a sin for me to summon the gentle twilight. But I had a sense it would be better not to ask.
“It was very interesting,” I said politely.