Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [34]
Yes. It was not, after all, as though she had not made full confession before, to another god-gripped man. Perhaps these things grew easier with practice.
“You are mistaken. Understand, Learned. I have walked down that road already, to its bitterest end. Once, I was a saint.”
It was his turn to recoil, in astonishment. He gulped. “You were a vessel of the gods?” His face bunched up with consternation. “That explains . . . something. No, it doesn’t.” He grasped his hair, briefly, but let it go unravaged. “Royina, I do not understand. How came you to be god-touched? When was this miracle?”
“Long, long ago.” She sighed. “Formerly, this story was a state secret. A state crime. I suppose it is no longer. Whether it will in time become rumor or legend or dead and buried, I know not. In any case, it is not to be shared, not even with your superiors. Or, if you seem to have cause to do so, take your instruction first from the Chancellor dy Cazaril. He knows all the truth of it.”
“They say he is very wise,” said dy Cabon, wide-eyed now.
“For once, they say right.” She paused, marshaling her thoughts, her memories, her words. “How old were you when Roya Ias’s great courtier, Lord Arvol dy Lutez, was executed for treason?”
Dy Lutez. Ias’s boyhood companion, brother in arms, greatest servant throughout his darkly troubled thirty-five-year reign. Powerful, intelligent, brave, rich, handsome, courteous . . . there seemed no end to the gifts that the gods—and the roya—had piled upon the glorious Lord dy Lutez. Ista had been eighteen when she’d married Ias. Ias and his right arm dy Lutez had reached their fifties. Dy Lutez had arranged the marriage, the aging roya’s second, for already there were worries about Ias’s sole surviving son and heir, Orico.
“Why, I was a young child.” He hesitated, cleared his throat. “Though I heard it talked about, later in my life. The rumor was . . .” He stopped abruptly.
“The rumor you heard was that dy Lutez had seduced me and died for it at my royal husband’s hands, yes?” she supplied coolly.
“Um, yes, lady. Was it—it wasn’t—”
“No. It was not true.”
He breathed covert relief.
Her lips twisted. “It was not me he loved in that way, but Ias. Dy Lutez should have been a lay dedicat of your order, I think, instead of holy general of the Son’s.”
In addition to bastards, the occasional artist, and other jetsam of the world, the Bastard’s Order was the refuge of those to whom it was not given to conform to the fruitful relations between men and women overseen by the great Four, but to seek their own sex. At this distance in time, space, and sin it was almost amusing to watch dy Cabon’s face as he unraveled her polite description.
“That must have been . . . rather difficult for you, as a young bride.”
“Then, yes,” she admitted. “Now . . .” She held out her hand and opened it, as if letting sand pass through her fingers. “It is beside the point. Far more difficult was my discovery that since the calamitous death of Ias’s father, Roya Fonsa, a great and strange curse had been laid upon the royal house of Chalion. And that I had brought my children into it, unknowing. Not told, not warned.”
Dy Cabon’s lips made an O.
“I had prophetic dreams. Nightmares. For a time, I thought I was going mad.” For a time, Ias and dy Lutez had left her in that terror, alone, uncomforted. It had seemed then, and still seemed now, a greater betrayal than any trivial sweaty graspings under the sheets could ever be. “I prayed and prayed to the gods. And my prayers were answered, dy Cabon. I spoke to the Mother face-to-face, as close as I am to you now.” She shivered still in memory of that overwhelming incandescence.
“A great blessing,” he breathed in awe.
She shook her head. “A great woe. Upon the instruction of the gods, as given to me, we—dy Lutez, and Ias, and I—planned a perilous ritual to break the curse, to