Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [85]
“I am not yours.”
“I speak in hope and anticipation, as a suitor may.” His smile bunched his fat face tighter.
“Or with the trickery of a rat.”
“Rats,” he observed, sighing, “are low, shy, straightforward creatures. Very limited. For trickery, one wants a man. Or a woman. Trickery, treachery . . . truth, triumph . . . traps for bears . . .”
She twitched at this possible reference to Foix. “You want something. The gods’ tongues can grow quite honeyed, when they want something. When I wanted something—when I prayed on my face, arms outflung, in tears and abject terror—for years—where were You then? Where were the gods the night Teidez died?”
“The Son of Autumn dispatched many men in answer to your prayers, sweet Ista. They turned aside upon their roads, and did not arrive. For He could not bend their wills, nor their steps. And so they scattered to the winds as leaves do.”
His lips curved up, in a smile more deathly serious than any scowl Ista had ever seen. “Now another prays, in despair as dark as yours. One as dear to me as Teidez was to my Brother of Autumn. And I have sent—you. Will you turn aside? As Teidez’s deliverance did? At the last, with so few steps left to travel?”
Silence fell between them.
Ista’s throat was clogged with rage. And more complicated things, a boiling mixture even she could not separate and name. A stew of anguish, she supposed. She snarled through her teeth, “Lord Bastard, you bastard.”
He merely grinned, maddeningly. “When the man arises who can make you laugh, solemn Ista, angry Ista, iron Ista, then will your heart be healed. You have not prayed for this: it’s a guerdon even the gods cannot give you. We are limited to such simples as redemption from your sins.”
“The last time I tried to follow the gods’ holy addled inadequate instructions, I was betrayed into murder,” she raged. “But for You, I wouldn’t need redemption. I don’t want to be part of You. If I thought I could pray for oblivion, I would; to be smudged, blotted out, erased, like the sundered ghosts, who die to death indeed, and so escape the world’s woe. What can the gods give me?”
His brows twitched up in an expression of remarkably disingenuous goodwill. “Why, work, sweet Ista!”
He stepped closer; beneath his feet, the boards creaked and groaned, dangerously. She almost retreated just for the fearful vision of the pair of them crashing through the floor into the chamber beneath. He held his hands lightly above, but not quite touching, her shoulders. She noticed, with extreme annoyance, that she was nude. He leaned forward over his belly, its equator bumping hers, and murmured, “My mark is on your brow.”
His lips brushed her forehead. The spot burned like a brand.
He has given me back the gift of second sight. Direct, unguided perception of the world of spirit, His realm. She remembered how the print of the Mother’s lips had seared her skin, just like this, in that long-ago waking vision that had led to such disastrous consequences. You may press Your gift on me, but I need not open it. I refuse it, and defy You!
His eyes glinted with a brighter spark. He let his fat hands drift down over her bare back, and hugged her in tighter to his girth, and bent again, and kissed her on the mouth with an utterly smug lascivious relish. Her body flushed with an embarrassing arousal, which only infuriated her more.
The dark infinities abruptly vanished from those eyes, so close to hers that they crossed. A merely human gaze grew wide, then appalled. Learned dy Cabon choked, recovered his tongue, and leapt backward like a startled steer.
“Royina!” he yelped. “Forgive me! I, I, I . . .” His gaze darted around the chamber, flicked to her, grew wider still, and sought the ceiling, the floor, or the far walls. “I don’t quite know where I am . . .”
He was not, now, her dream, she was quite certain of it. She was his. And he would remember it vividly when he awoke, too. Wherever he was.
“Your god,” snapped