Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [97]
Foolish beyond hope to send a middle-aged former madwoman running down the roads of Chalion to fetch up here, and for what? Failed saint, failed sorceress, failed royina, wife, mother, daughter, failed . . . well, lover was not a role she’d ever attempted. Less even than failure, in her hierarchy of woe. At first, upon discovering Lord Arhys’s relation to dy Lutez, she’d guessed this for a tribunal on the gods’ parts, for her old, cold murder and sin confessed to dy Cabon back in Casilchas. Feared that she was slated to be dragged though all that stale guilt yet again: Fetch a bucket of water for the drowning woman!
But now . . . it seemed her self-involved expectations were mockingly thwarted. Not herself, but another, was the center of the god’s attentions. Her lips puffed on a bitter laugh. And she was merely being . . . what? Tempted to meddle?
Tempted, certainly. The Bastard had plainly primed her with that salacious kiss of His. His questing tongue had sent a most cryptic message, but that part of it she had received clearly, body and mind.
What point, to wake that sleeping appetite here, now? What point ever? No dishes had been served up in tiny, backwater Valenda worth salivating over, even if the curse had not paralyzed her as much below the waist as above it. She was hardly to be faulted for failing her feminine duty to fall in love there. She tried to imagine dy Ferrej, or any other gentleman of the Provincara’s entourage, as an object of desire, and snorted. Just as well. Anyway, a modest lady always kept her eyes downcast. She had been taught that rule by age eleven.
Work, the Bastard had said.
Not dalliance.
But what work? Healing? Enticing thought. But if so it was not, it appeared, to be effected with a simple kiss. Perhaps she’d just missed something on her first try, something obvious. Or subtle. Or profound. Or obscene? Though she had little heart for a second attempt. She briefly wished the god had been more explicit, then took back the wish as ill phrased.
But as disastrous as the situation already was, could even she make it worse? Perhaps she was here on the same principle as young physicians set to practice their experiments and new potions on the hopeless cases. So that no blame attached to their—usually inevitable—failures. The dying, they do have at Porifors. A little practice piece, this tightly contained domestic tragedy. Two brothers, a barren wife, one castle . . . perhaps it was not beyond her scope. Not like the future of a royacy, or the fate of the world. Not like the first time the gods had conscripted her into their service.
But why send me in answer to a prayer, when you know perfectly well I can’t do a thing without You?
It wasn’t too hard to follow the logic of that one to its inevitable conclusion, either.
Unless I open to You, You cannot lift a leaf. Unless You pour into me, I cannot do . . . what?
Whether a sally port was a passage or a barrier depended not on the materials of which it was made, but on its position. The free will of the door, as it were. All doors opened in both directions. She could not open the gate of herself a crack and peek out, and expect to still hold the fortress.
But I cannot see . . .
She cursed the gods methodically, in five couplets, in ferocious parody of an old childhood bedtime prayer, rolled over, and wrapped her pillow over her head. This isn’t defiance. This is shuffling.
IF ANY GOD DABBLED IN HER DREAMS, ISTA DID NOT REMEMBER IT when her eyes opened in the night. But regardless of the phantasms that troubled the mind, the body still had to piss. She sighed, poked her feet out of bed, and went to open the heavy wooden shutter to let in a little