She laughed. “Sadly-perhaps sadly for us both-I am a nun, and not your lady love.”
He nodded. He fetched a stool-there were several. “I can build a fire to get you dry,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’ll get wet again going out,” she said. “Nor would it be useful for me to strip for you.”
“This place is very special,” he said. He ignored her last comment. “Can you feel it, oh puissant Sister?”
She reached out into the aethereal.
She put her hand to her mouth.
“It is closed off. The earth on one side and the rush of flowing water on the other.” He nodded. “I imagine something very powerful could make it in, or out, but this cave is virtually sealed in the aethereal.” He sat on a stool and leaned back. “So here we can talk. About anything. No one is listening-not Harmodius, not Thorn, and not even Ash.”
The name reverberated.
“Ash?” she asked.
“After Lissen Carak, I went and made an ally-I think-of a potent and ancient Power that men call the Wyrm of Ercch.” He glanced at her and she nodded.
“I have learned a great deal talking to him. Mostly, I have learned that he opposes another Power, who he calls Ash, and who-” Gabriel smiled like a boy. “I know I sound like a fool, but who seems to be the Power moving the pieces on the chessboard-at Lissen Carak, and in Harndon. And perhaps elsewhere.”
This was not the conversation for which she had prepared for the last hour while walking and riding and climbing. She took a deep breath.
“What do you guard, under the vaults and dungeons of Lissen Carak?” he asked her.
“That is not my secret,” she said.
He nodded. “But you admit there is a secret there,” he said. “What have you done that I cannot be killed?” he asked. “Even for you, this is a potent witchery.”
She sat back on her stool. Leaned her head into the stone of the back wall, slanting upwards into the white blur of the water that made the front wall.
“Don’t you think we’d be better with blatant seduction?” she asked.
He laughed. His laugh-the open honesty of it-made her laugh.
“Amicia, is your love of God so great, the feeling so wonderful, that you have no room in you for earthly love?” he asked.
She made a face. “What would you have me say? But yes.” She shook her head. “I think there was a time-not so long ago-when I’d have fallen into your arms.” She flushed. “But something has changed in me. There is a point, in prayer-in the ascent to God-when you must guard yourself carefully against sin. And then, I’m sorry, a point where sin seems a little foolish. When it no longer tempts. Where earthly love is but a pale companion.”
“Ouch,” he said. He wore a brave smile, but she saw she’d cut him too deeply.
“Oh, my dear-I only want everyone to be happy,” she said.
He nodded. “What would you say if I said that’s how I feel for you?”
She made the face again. “I’d say that you are twenty-three or -four and you’ll feel differently in a year or two.” She held up a hand. “I’d say that your preoccupation with war makes it impossible for you to love me-or God-very deeply.”
He nodded. “Yes. I’d tell a squire with a new girl the same.” He crossed his booted legs. “So-to hell with love. What did you do?”
She looked at him. So close. So much himself. So many things about him she hated. And loved. Not always as easy to let it go as she claimed, even now, when she could feel the-the simple reality of God’s creation as firmly as she could feel the rock under her hip.
“I used…” She paused. She had a great deal to lose. And at another level, there were parts of this she had carefully avoided admitting, even to herself. “The Abbess was dead. The fortress almost fell. I had all that power Thorn released. I was failing-oh, Gabriel, how I was failing. The potentia was too much for me. The King-and the Queen-required healing.”
She closed her eyes. “And then God put a hand on me and steadied me. And the potentia turned steadily to ops. And I cast and cast.” She stared at the falls, but in her eyes were the results of a hundred healings, of men and women broken by battle and remade.
“I healed everything I touched,” she said. She still wondered at the thought.
Gabriel nodded but said nothing.
She turned to him. “Whoever-steadied me. Spoke to me.” She took a deep breath. “Then and later-but not since, which troubles Miriam. And me.” She pursed her lips a moment and frowned. “Then-the night I was going to… I might have-” She paused.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I don’t want to explain. I made a decision. Just as you do. The kind of decision that you make in battle-irrevocable, and binding. It is made. I have never hidden what I feel for you.” She looked him in the eye. “But I will not act on it.” She nodded crisply. “Ever.”
“But-” he began.
She got up. “Don’t ask. You love me? Don’t ask. If you sent Michael to his death to save your company-would you?”
He pursed his lips. Had he known, for a moment his expression was the twin of what hers had been. “You’re not an easy friend. Yes, I can see myself doing it.”
She nodded. “Let’s say it worked. Michael dead, the company saved. How often would you care to revisit that decision?”
He rose, too. “I think-I think I understand.” He shook his head. “Oh, Amicia.”
Impulsively, she put a hand behind his head and kissed him-quickly, on the lips, the way she might kiss Katherine or Father Arnaud. “I will teach your children,” she said. “I just won’t bear them.”
He stood for a moment, as if stunned. Then he knelt at her feet, and kissed one of her hands.
From his knees, he smiled. “Am I really unkillable?” he asked.
She grinned. Breath flowed out of her, and her shoulders relaxed.
“Don’t press your luck,” she said.
After that, they spoke for almost an hour-easily, talking. Mostly, he told her what he had learned in Liviapolis, and from the Wyrm. She was reticent about the secrets of Lissen Carak, but she grunted at some of his theories.
“What did Father Arnaud think of your Wyrm?” she asked, when it was clearly time for them to go.
“The Wyrm restored his powers to heal,” Gabriel said.
Instead of responding, she went and put a hand into the waterfall. She drank-the water chilled her hand almost instantly.
“Before we go back to the world,” she said. “Tell me why you are coming to peace with God.”
“Is this confession?” he asked. “Bless me, Mother, for it is roughly ten years since my last confession. Shall I start with the murders or the lechery?”
“Blasphemy comes so easily to you,” she said.
“My mother has always seen herself as God’s peer.” He shrugged.
“I like your mother,” Amicia said. “I think you need to stop hiding from her, and behind her. We all have mothers.” She took his hands. “God?”
He nodded. “Oh, I think I have allowed myself to fall into the same trap that every highly-strung boy and girl since Adam and Eve has fallen into. That I was specially cursed by God.”
“Rotten theology,” she said.
“Mmm.” His non-committal grunt was almost lost in the water sounds. “I’m not yet entirely convinced. And then, instead of miraculous conversion, my dear Sister, you will find me merely a tiresome agnostic. Asking all the usual questions-why so there so much suffering? Why is the world run by a handful of malicious super-entities with special powers? Where is the proof of God’s love?” He looked down at her hands. “I confess that when you hold my hands, I have a frisson of belief in God’s love.”
“Is there a better line of patter in all the spheres?” she said, eyes wide. “Love me, and I’ll come to God?”
They laughed together. It was a good laugh.
“You will find another,” she said.
“Never,” he said.
“Yes, love. Now be easy.” She reached out to touch him, and felt a frisson of power-merely an echo of power. But she knew the taste, and she smiled, because Ghause had put a love-spell on her, and it made her laugh. “Like to like,” she murmured.