All of it, all of it comes back when I think of him: child and man. How once, when he was six, he had been made to kneel all night on one knee at the foot of my bed, naked and with his head bowed, because he had dared to contradict me. Again, twenty years later, his silver head between my legs, his hungry mouth and tongue in the secret places of my body, his long and gentle fingers. How he would look up at me men, with the eager, half-frightened expression I knew so well from his babyhood: Have I pleased you, Godmother, is it enough, will I not be punished this time? He would by day hunt fiercely, work in the fields, drive himself as hard as he had ever done; and then he would come to me for instruction. How much of yourself, of your soul, are you willing to barter for today’s scrap of arcane information?
“Kiss me and I’ll tell you.”
Sometimes I said it lightly. Sometimes he did it. More often the exchange was unspoken; what I give you today, you will pay me for tonight.
“This will cost you a great deal …” I could feel myself smiling as I spoke. And his eyes would narrow and his hands would clench, but every now and then he would smile too:
“A small price to pay.”
I forgot that I was in exile. I forgot that I was aging. I forgot I had a husband; I forgot my other sons. Even, for a time, I forgot that I was training Medraut to go back to his father with his loyalties shifted and slanted.
Out of respect for the man who had fostered him Medraut did not habitually sleep in my bed, but otherwise we made no attempt to hide our affair. No one knew the truth of Medraut’s birth, as I have said, and I doubt anyone would have dared raise question even if it had been known. The court was growing to fear Medraut even as they feared me, out of guesswork, out of self-interest, because we were so close. We ate together. We combed each other’s hair. We worked in consultation.
But still we battled. I could tell of so many battles, so many little ways in which we teetered between tenderness and spiteful torment of each other. Never had I dreamed of an apprentice or lover so diligent, so passionate and craving, and yet so difficult to manage. I threatened him, made love to him, and hurt him. I cozened him. I coddled him. What a way to learn to minister to the afflicted.
He came storming into my apartment at daybreak one morning. He still affected foreign dress in the first year he lived with us, and in the gray dawn light of my antechamber he seemed very alien and unappeasable. But he spoke calmly and directly. “Godmother, I want no more of your tuition if I must come by it in waiting upon poisoned children.”
I find it difficult to answer such directness. One feels so sly, one wants to laugh, one wants to lie. To acknowledge or deny the accusation is to accept that one has done some kind of evil.
I said, “Tell me this story.”
“If you have wondered where I was tonight,” he said, “I have spent the last half day ministering to my old nurse’s grandson, who has been vomiting himself inside out after sharing his evening bread with Gaheris and Gareth. He had not eaten anything else since before noon. Neither of your sons suffered—”
“How can you possibly know what Fercos had eaten between noon and supper?” I said, but I meant the question as a test, not a defense.
“I don’t,” said Medraut shortly. “But I know what poisoned him, and how it may be administered.”
“You will not know the symptoms if you do not see it happen,” I said.
“Then poison your own children,” he snapped.
“Medraut,” I said, and laid a hand on his shoulder, to make him sit down. “Do you mean that?”
He looked up into my face. His expression struck me to my very core: the frightened, stubborn look of rebellion that he had given me as a boy, so sure that he was right, so afraid of what I might do to him.
“No,” he said. “I would not see Gareth suffering as Fercos did last night.”
“Agravain, then,” I said softly.
“Not even he,” said Medraut immediately, peevish with suspicion.
“Then you have a choice,” I said, turning my back to him. I played with the face paints on the dressing table, watching my hands in the mirrors.
He said nothing, suspect, waiting.
“Quit me now,” I said, “or I will visit these tests on your own body.”
He was silent for so long that it grew lighter while I waited for his answer. I did not insult him by repeating or rephrasing the challenge. One chance: one answer only.
“I’ll stay another year. I’ll do it,” he said.
“Will you? Or will you come asking for solace and mercy as you do now?
“I’ll do it!”
“Prove me this.”
“Ah, my God,” he growled. “What must I do?”
I turned to look at him, my hands behind my back. His face was set in a familiar grimace of bleak, defiant determination.
“Give me your hand.”
For a moment he did not move. Then he nodded once, and held out his right.
“Your other hand,” I said mildly, which ought to have warned him.
His eyes never left mine. He held out his left hand, palm up. He was calm; the hand I held now was relaxed; but I saw the twitch in his jaw as he braced himself against the unknown blow.
The blade I used was so thin, so keen, that I do not think he at first felt anything. Then he lowered his eyes to stare at his wrist. A slow glance at me, then down again at the bloody slash that scored his inner forearm.
He lost precious seconds and a good deal of blood in registering how seriously I had hurt him. Then he snatched at the wrist with his other hand, choking off the pumping vein, raising his forearm above his head. It was expertly done, but it was not enough, and he lost another few precious seconds before he realized that. Now in utter calm, as if there were no hurry, he stood up and reached for the tongs in the brazier. No longer expert, but anyway efficient, he sealed the wound with a glowing coal, and laid the tongs down, and fainted at my feet.
I knelt trembling at his shoulder to examine his arm, but he had done the trick; he had saved himself. The first coherent thought that came to me after that was that he would never get the bloodstains out of his white linen shamma. And I was meanly glad of it, because the leopard skin that covered the floor was ruined also, and I hated and envied Medraut’s African dress as the badge of his freedom.
He lay profoundly insensible for perhaps twenty minutes, and awoke bewildered and pathetic. He lifted his arm languidly, and stared at the seared skin, and let the arm fall. “God, what a mess.”
I was kneeling at his head like a harpy.
“You will need to change your clothes,” I said.
“I think I will pass out if I try to sit up.”
“There will be no hunting for you for a few days,” I said softly. “Are you thirsty? You will need to drink.”
He hesitated. “Would you help me now?”
“For a fee.”
He lay flat on his back on the ruined leopard skin he had given me, his body drained of blood and his burnt arm blistering, and spoke with patient resignation: “Come. I’ll drink of you.” The languid hand reached up to touch my knee. “Here, you must ungirdle yourself, this time. I have not the strength to wrestle with your skirts.”
“If I say you must?” I murmured, but gathered my skirts aside.
“I’ll weep with frustration. You would not have me weep, would you?”
“Not if it distracts you.” And now my legs were free, and he turned his head toward me and parted his lips.
“Come nearer,” he whispered. I threw one leg across his chest, so that his pale head rested against the inner thigh of my other leg, and laying my hands on the top of his head I pressed his mouth against and into the soft, wet slot where he had started life—