Naamah's Curse

I looked away, willing him to believe it.



“Yes.” He nodded to himself in satisfaction. “I think it is so, child. You tried and failed. Is it not so?”



“Must you humiliate me as well?” I muttered.



“It is for the good of your soul,” he said sternly. “You must confess it.”



It seemed I could lie to the Patriarch after all—so long as it was a lie he already wished to believe.



I let my shoulders slump. “Yes, my lord,” I lied in a defeated whisper. “In the small hours of the night, when she was lonely and frightened, I sought to entice the Emperor’s daughter. I failed.”



“Good, very good.” His pen skated over the page. “The Ch’in are a heathen folk, but they have a great respect for custom and propriety,” he said in an absent tone. “Take heed from the lesson of the Emperor’s daughter, Moirin. The temptations of the flesh can be resisted. All it takes is discipline.”



I bowed my head. “Yes, my lord.”



TWENTY-SEVEN



W hen Aleksei came to read to me the following morning, he was moving stiffly, as though he were in pain.



I eyed him. “Are you hurt?”



Predictably, he flushed. “No….. no!” He shrank away from me as I ignored his protestations, stooping beside the stiff-backed chair and unlacing the ties of his linen shirt, peeling back the lapels. “Moirin, please don’t.”



“Let me see.”



“No!”



I did, though. I caught a glimpse of the garment he wore beneath the outer layer of his clothing, a crude goat’s-hair vest.



My nostrils flared. “Stone and sea!” I gagged. “Aleksei, this thing is crawling with lice. How is that not unclean?”



“It helps me ignore the distraction of temptation.” He pulled away from me, lacing his shirt. “Even the lowest of the low is part of God’s creation, and may serve his purpose. Do you not see the beauty in it?”



“No.” Yesterday’s anger lingered in me. I paced my cell, taking precise, mincing steps. “No, Aleksei. I do not. I am sick unto death of hearing about your God and his everlasting fascination with things he has decided are abominations. Apparently, that includes everything in my life I have ever done that brought me joy.”



“False joy,” he whispered.



I rounded on him. “How in the name of all the gods would you know? Filled with abject terror as you are?”



He shuddered away from me.



That, and the sight of that crude, stinking vest seething with lice, broke something inside me.



I sank to my heels, covering my face with my hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” I forced myself to breathe slowly, fighting a losing battle with tears.



Aleksei hovered anxiously in front of me, undone by my tears. “Don’t cry! Moirin, please.” Greatly daring, he knelt and held out his hands. “Come, pray with me. It will help, I promise.”



His glorious blue eyes were filled with genuine pity and compassion. Unlike his uncle, I’d never seen anything less in him. I took one of his hands in mine, rubbing at my tears with the other.



His breathing quickened, and his long fingers stirred in mine. I stroked them gently. “Sweet boy, do you know what I see when I look at you?” I whispered. He shook his head, tawny locks shining in the sunlight that slanted through my narrow window. “I see a bird raised in captivity, taught that his wings were a curse and flight a sin. A beautiful bird taught from birth to love his cage and fear the open sky.”



Aleksei’s lips parted. “You must not say such things!”



“It’s true.” I lifted my free hand, chains dangling. “Your uncle has clipped my wings. But he will not be content until he has broken every bone in them.”



“It’s not true!” He wrenched himself away from me, fumbling back toward the chair for his book. “I will read to you. Only….. be still, and listen. I keep telling you, you must open your heart and listen, Moirin!”



“I have listened,” I said wearily. “And yes, there are moments of glory and wonder in your tales. Yes, your Yeshua sounds like a decent fellow for a god, filled with love and kindness toward mankind. But there are also great, long boring bits about the genealogy of the Habiru, which holds little interest for me, and there are tales that make no sense at all, and other parts that are simply harsh and cruel.”



He looked aghast. “Only because you do not understand them yet!”



“Do you think so?” I shook my head. “No, I think I am beginning to understand. These scriptures, they were written by mortal men. And mayhap some of them were moved by divine grace, but others were petty, jealous fellows moved by the ordinary concerns of everyday life, like being cuckolded by a straying wife.”



“Now you throw my mother’s sin in my face?” For the first time, he sounded angry. “I have spent my life trying to atone for it!”



I winced. “No. I’m sorry, I forgot.”



“I suppose your D’Angelines would not reckon it a sin,” Aleksei said bitterly. “I suppose it’s just fine for a woman to betray her husband, to give a man a bastard son and expect him to call it his own.”



“No, it’s not.” That brought him up short. “For all her infidelities, my lady Jehanne knew full well that was the one betrayal the King would not tolerate. But unlike your mother, I suspect, she loved her husband.”



“That’s a cruel blow,” he said in a low voice.



“Yes,” I agreed. “It is. And yet if your mother had been allowed to wed for love instead of prestige, would she have strayed?”



“D’Angelines do.”



“Many, aye. Within their culture, it is permitted. Blessed Elua allows what God and Yeshua forbid.” I shrugged. “And it is possible to love more than one person.”



Aleksei swallowed hard, the words evoking a yearning in him that he could not hide. “Have you?”



I held his gaze. “Yes.”



Gods, I could almost taste the ache of desire in him! And not only for sex, no. He was Naamah’s child, as surely as I was. His poor, caged spirit longed to love freely. To share Naamah’s gift within him, to delight in pleasures ranging from the sheer carnal bliss of pleasure to all of love’s myriad tendernesses. Oh, he hungered for it so.



He turned away, his shoulders hunched. “I will read to you.”



I sighed. “As you will.”



Later that day, the Patriarch returned with his hateful desk and his hateful quill to resume the hateful process of hearing my confession.



“So, Moirin,” he said when he had everything in readiness, pen poised above his account of my sins. “Let us speak of this young Tatar prince.”



I almost laughed, picturing Bao’s insolent grin at hearing himself described thusly. “Bao?”



“Bao, yes.” Pyotr Rostov frowned. “I must confess, I am confused. Is he Ch’in or Tatar?”



“Both,” I said. “His mother was a Ch’in woman, ravaged by a raiding Tatar warlord. Although to be fair,” I added, “Bao’s father sought to avenge the loss of his own wife, taken by the Ch’in. It is a complicated matter.”



He stared at me. “And this Bao, who is the Great Khan’s son-in-law, is also the companion of the physician Lo Feng?”



I nodded. “Yes.”



“You travelled from Terre d’Ange to Ch’in in his company?”



“Yes, my lord.” Although I had dreaded this moment, too, now that it had arrived, it was not as awful as I had feared. It was different from the others. My diadh-anam shone within me, a reminder that there was a powerful magic about the bond between Bao and me that not even Pyotr Rostov could sully. And, too, the thought of Bao’s cocky grin made me smile inwardly. I could guess what he would say if he knew, could almost hear the cheerful cynicism in his voice. Tell the stunted old pervert whatever he wants to hear, Moirin, and I will bash his head in when I have the chance. “Do you want to hear about the fornication and unclean acts?” I asked politely. “It was a very long journey.”



“Ah….. yes, of course.” The Patriarch glanced at his notes. “For the moment, let us take it as a given fact.”



“All right.” Bao, I thought, would be obscurely disappointed. He was proud of his prowess in bed—and rightfully so. As usual, he made good on his boasts.



Rostov gave me a sharp look. “Brother Ilya gathered extraordinary reports from the Tatar gathering. It seems that you claimed that this young man, this Bao, died and was restored to life.”



“Yes,” I agreed. “So he was.”



“By you.”



“No, not exactly.” My moment of private mirth faded. This was another trap I hadn’t seen coming, one I didn’t begin to understand. Gods, it seemed there was an unintended sin lying in wait around every corner of my life! Once again, my palms were sweating. “It was Master Lo Feng’s doing. He was grieving. He gave his life to restore Bao’s, and required my magic and half my diadh-anam to do it, although I did not know what he was asking at the time.” I shook my head. “And if you are asking me to tell you how it was done, I cannot.”



“I am asking nothing.” The Patriarch’s expression had gone stony. “I am telling you it cannot have been done.”



“But it was,” I said, bewildered.



“No.” He raised one finger. “Only Yeshua ben Yosef rose from the dead, and lived. No other. You are mistaken.”



“I do not claim to explain it, my lord,” I said. “But I assure you, Bao was dead. I felt for a pulse myself. There was none.”



His face was implacable. “You are mistaken.”



“For over an hour!” I shook my head again. “No. I tried to suck the poison from his flesh, tried to breathe life into his lungs. Bao died, and lived. Believe me, my lord, he was none too happy about it.”



“You are mistaken.”



Why it mattered to him so deeply, I could not begin to guess; I could only see that it did. He demanded truth from me, but only when it agreed with his beliefs, and I did not understand the intricacies of his faith. All I knew was that I would not win this argument; I would never win this argument or any argument with the Patriarch of Riva.



Never, ever, ever.



There are ways and ways of betraying memory, of betraying the truth. I hadn’t expected this one. In my mind’s eye, I saw the amusement fade from Bao’s face. The fierce determination and stubborn pride lingered. Bao would not care what lie I told, what truth I betrayed, so long as I lived.



Tell the stunted old pervert what he wants to hear.



I took a deep breath. “Mayhap….. mayhap I was mistaken. Mayhap I let my fear master me. And Bao was never dead, only stunned.”



The Patriarch smiled his creamy smile, his eyelids drooping with satisfaction. “Yes. Yes, indeed. Good girl.”



TWENTY-EIGHT



I had begun to think the hellish cycle of confession would never end, but the next day, the Patriarch surprised me.



He came in the morning, instead of the afternoon as he was usually wont to do. I wondered if it meant Aleksei would not be reading to me anymore, but I was reluctant to ask, wary of showing too much interest in the lad. I hoped I hadn’t driven him into a full-blown retreat the other day.



I had to own, it galled me that I’d had so little success seducing a young man at the apex of his transition to adulthood, a young man so desperately starved for love. I’d lain awake for hours berating myself for it, convinced that a skilled adept like Jehanne would have had Aleksei eating out of the palm of her hand in a matter of minutes.



Then I would remember the lice, and think again.



I’d known it wouldn’t be an easy task, but I was still struggling to grasp the scope of the damage done to him. It wasn’t just the deeply ingrained strictures of his faith. Aleksei had been raised his entire life to believe he was the product of his mother’s sinful downfall, tainted with a foul curse. He was determined to redeem them both through this trial—and, I sensed, to redeem me, too.



I was no mere mortal temptation, oh, no. As Valentina had said, God had decreed my person a battleground.



Stone and sea, it surely felt that way.



For two hours, I endured another assault as the Patriarch questioned me, exhuming another batch of sins and false beliefs.



First, it was the dragon.



Pyotr Rostov was convinced it was a demon that had possessed the princess. I could not entirely blame him, since everyone in Ch’in had believed it, too, including Snow Tiger herself. She had only believed otherwise when I had summoned the twilight and shown her the dragon’s reflection in the mirror.



I could still see the wonder on her face.



The rest of Ch’in had come to believe after we succeeded in freeing the dragon, when he came arrowing through the skies over White Jade Mountain, silver coils shimmering, calling down rain and lightning.



Pyotr Rostov refused to believe, refused to accept the dragon’s nature as a celestial being of elemental magic. No, nothing would do but that it was a fallen spirit bent on wreaking havoc and harm in the world.



“You said yourself that the fallen ones took strange and fantastic forms, Moirin,” he pointed out to me. “That they liked speaking to you, that at least one wielded power over the elements. Can you not see that this is exactly the same?”



“But it’s not, my lord.” I turned the jade bangle on my wrist, agitated. “The dragon is a creature of his place. He wanted nothing more than to drowse on the peaks of White Jade Mountain, gazing at his reflection and guarding his pearl.”