Kushiel's Mercy

racked my memory. “Delphine, is it not?”
    “Aye, my lord.” She bobbed a curtsy. “I’m . . . We were all very sorry to hear of Lady Dorelei’s death. She was kind.”
    “Thank you,” I repeated. “Yes, she was.”
    The chambermaid hesitated, sympathy and avid curiosity warring on her pert features. “Is it true that you, that you and . . . ?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Oh!” Her eyes widened. “Well, then . . . well.”
    “Indeed,” I agreed gravely.
    Politics and gossip, the lifeblood of the D’Angeline Court. I dismissed Delphine from the bathing-chamber, sinking into the warm water and enjoying a few minutes of luxurious privacy before I heard a familiar voice arguing at the door to the antechamber. I listened, smiling.
    “He’s right,” I called out at length. “You may admit him.”
    “Name of Elua!” My cousin Mavros Shahrizai strode into the bathing-chamber and glared at me, hands on his hips. His midnight-black hair was loose and rippling, his blue eyes vivid with emotion. We bore an unmistakable family resemblance. “Do you never think to send word? We worry, you know.”
    I stood in the tub, dripping. “Hello, Mavros.”
    “Idiot.” He gripped my bare shoulders and gave me the kiss of greeting, then held me away from him, gazing with a critical eye at the pink furrows of flesh that ran at a raking angle from my right shoulder to my left hip. “Gods, it’s worse than I reckoned. You didn’t tell me that bastard nearly gutted you.”
    I shrugged. “I lived.”
    His fingers flexed, digging into my shoulders. “Idiot. He’s dead now, right? You brought his head home in a bag?”
    “And buried it in Clunderry,” I said. “Oh, yes.”
    Mavros let go of me, fetching a stool and dragging it nearer the tub. “Finish your bath and tell me about it.”
    For as long a journey as it had been, there wasn’t much to tell. It had been a slow, plodding hunt. I’d been shipwrecked on the Eastern Sea and lost weeks stranded on an isolated island while we salvaged and repaired our damaged ship. I’d been mistaken for an ally of raiding Tartars in a Vralian village and thrown in gaol. I’d managed to escape, and followed Berlik to the place where he’d sought refuge, spending countless days attempting to find him in the trackless wilderness.
    In the end, he found me.
    “So he wanted to die?” Mavros asked when I finished.
    “Yes,” I said. “To make atonement.”
    “Huh.” He thought about it while I dried myself and slipped into a dressing-robe. “Do you reckon it worked?”
    “I don’t know.” I knotted the robe’s sash. “What he did . . . as awful as it was, I came to understand it. He thought it was the only way to spare his people.”
    “From the future your son would bring,” Mavros said slowly.
    “Yes.” I shivered, remembering the vision. A young man, his features a mixture of mine and Dorelei’s, but bitter and cruel. Armies raging over Alba, blood-sodden fields.
    Women and children dragged from their homes, houses put to the torch. Men hunted like animals. The standing stones and the sacred groves, destroyed. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mavros. I’ll not defy Blessed Elua’s precept again and I want nothing more to do with strange magics. All I want is to be left in peace for a time.”
    “Good luck.” His tone was wry.
    “I know,” I said. “Sidonie.”
    “Is it worth it?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
    I turned the gold ring on my finger. Despite everything, the love I felt for her was undiminished. The soaring exaltation, the inexplicable rightness of the fit. The shared laughter and talk, the common, ordinary happiness. And somewhere beneath it, a sense that this was important and needful. I couldn’t explain it. I only knew it was true.
    “Yes,” I said simply.
    “Well, you know House Shahrizai stands behind you,” Mavros said. “Although things being what they are, our support might not be terribly helpful.”
    “So I noticed.” I gestured, pointing my thumb downward.
    “Mmm.” His face was introspective. “You and Sidonie . . . it raised old fears, opened old wounds.”
    “You do know I’ve no aspiration toward the throne?” I asked.
    “Oh, I do.” Mavros glanced up at me. “But I’m not the one you need to convince. There are a few thousand of those, starting with her majesty the Queen.” As though summoned by his words, there was a knock at the outer door—one of Ysandre’s guards, come to fetch me to audience.