Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [140]
Arhys pulled on his close-trimmed beard. “The rumor I have heard bruited by the envious that they were, ah, more intimate than boon companions, I take to be political slander?”
“No,” she said simply. “They were lovers for years, as all Cardegoss knew but did not speak of outside the capital walls. My own mother told me, just before I wed, so I would not step into it unawares. I thought her callous, then. Now I think her wise. And worried. Looking back, I think it also was an offer to let me back out, though I missed that implication entirely at the time. Yet for all her candid warnings—which, I found later, Lord dy Lutez had insisted she give me—to prevent trouble for him, mostly, I suspect, though also for Ias—I did not understand what it meant. How could I—a romantic virgin, overwhelmed by what seemed a great victory on the field of love, to be chosen as bride by the roya himself? I nodded and agreed, anxious to seem sophisticated and sensible.”
“Oh,” he said, very quietly.
“So if ever you thought your mother untrue to her vows, to take Illvin’s father to her bed, be assured she was not the first dy Lutez to break them. I suspect her mother was less shrewd and honest than mine, preparing her for her high marriage. Or less informed.”
His brows climbed in reflection. “That accounts for . . . much, that I did not understand as a boy. I thought my father had cast her off, in anger and humiliation, and that was why he never came here. I never thought that she had cast him off.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure that Lord dy Lutez was thoroughly offended by her defection,” Ista said. “No matter how justified. His pride would keep him from returning, but his sense of justice, to give him credit, likely also kept him from pursuing any vengeance. Or perhaps it was shame. I can hope.” She added dryly, “In any case, he still had her property to add to his vast holdings, for compensation of his wounds.”
He eyed her. “You thought him greedy.”
“No man accumulates all that he did by chance. Yet I would not call it greed, exactly, for he scarcely knew all he held, and a greedy man numbers each coin.”
“What would you call it, then?”
Ista’s brows pinched in. “Consolation,” she tried at last. “His possessions were a magic mirror, to reflect him the size he wished to be.”
“That,” he said after a moment, “is a fearsome judgment, Royina.”
She bent her head in an acknowledging nod. “He was a very complex man.” She drew breath, began again. “Arvol and Ias did not betray me by concealing their love. They betrayed me by concealing the curse. I entered into marriage with Ias unaware of my danger, or the danger to my children-to-be. The visions started when I became pregnant with Iselle. The gods, trying to break in upon me. I thought I was going mad. And Ias and dy Lutez let me go on thinking that. For two years.”
He jerked a little at the sudden fierceness in her voice. “That seems . . . most unkind.”
“That was cowardice. And contempt for my wits and spine. They mired me in the consequences of their secret, then refused to trust me with its cause. I was a mere girl, you see, unfit to bear such a burden. Though not unfit to bear Ias’s children into that darkness. Except the gods did not seem to regard me as unfit. For it was me They came to. Not Ias. Not dy Lutez. Me.”
Her lips twisted. “I wonder—in retrospect—how put out Arvol was by that? He would have been the sole shining hero to save Ias, if he could. It was his accustomed role. And indeed, for a while it did appear that the gods had assigned it to him.
“At last—do even the gods grow impatient with our obtuseness?—the Mother of Summer Herself appeared to me, not in dream but in waking vision. I was prostrated—I had not yet learned to be suspicious of the gods. She told me that the curse might be broken and carried out of the world by a man who would lay down his life three times for the blighted House of Chalion. Being young, and frenzied with anxiety for