Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

I drew her close and kissed her—gently, for angels are but cloud and music and divine light, thus bruise easily. Her lips were as sweet and rich as heaven’s cream. Her silken gown flowed as water on my skin. And underneath that fabric…As my left hand fingered her bronze corona of soft hair, my right released her wrist and smoothed the gauzy robe from her shoulder. Great gods of earth and sky, what gift of mortal substance have you granted your holy messenger? My mouth followed my hand’s guidance, as it unmasked the tender hollow below her shoulder and the firm swell of her breast…skin so like silk…

“Brother, what magic do you wield? Ah, Holy Mother…your hands are unbound. I’ve never felt such. We ought not…”

I kissed her lips to quiet her. Suffused in exquisite radiance, she yielded to my embrace, only a sighing breath as my hands slipped away her layered raiment, until she lay entwined with me, her skin cool against my fever, no sexless divinity, but full and ripe and enduringly female.

Hands cupping her firm backside, I drew her sweet center against my swollen need and buried a groan in her neck. Gods, I had been ready for an eternity. I tumbled her over, released her to the pillows, and straddled her. She lay beneath me in the brilliance of winter sunlight, arms flung over her head. Her eyes were closed, long lashes delicate on her cheek, lips full and slightly parted, golden skin flushed. Ready, too. I inhaled deeply.

As if a finger had snatched a blindfold from my eyes, her scent snapped me awake. Fennel soap. Thyme and leeks. Woman. Elene.

I hesitated, quivering with the difficulty of restraint, trying not to let thought or fear intrude where they had no place. Naught had changed but my perceptions. I touched two fingers to her lips and drew them down the fine line of her jaw and her neck, across her breast, and down to her belly. She shivered deliciously.

I smoothed my palm across her belly…and a certainty intruded on my overcharged senses, one of those spine-rippling moments of prescience I’d experienced throughout my life. I must not lie with her. Some heated core within her insisted I had no right.

Shaking with pent desire, I snatched my hand away.

“Lady…” I drew a wavering breath and shifted to the side, making sure not to touch her again. Then I spread the fallen red silk over her, gathered the tangled bedclothes into my lap, and turned my face away as if I had not looked on her abandon. Assuredly this was not her first time to lie with a man. Was it my own past sin that burned my conscience and stayed my hand? Fire-god Deunor, what had I done?

“Forgive me, lady.” My voice sounded coarse and strange, scarcely audible. “My madness has drawn you in. Or some magic of the sunlight. Unable to control—By the Goddess Mother, I would not take you unconsenting. By magic. Even mad, I can’t believe I would.”

She stiffened and drew away, the catch in her throat no longer healthy lust, but shock. My body’s demands were not so speedily dismissed. Great gods… I clawed the bright-woven blanket and clamped it in my lap. Perhaps I’d best keep babbling.

“Your kindness seems to have brought me back to life,” I said, as hurried fumbling took her clear of the bed. “My head so muddled…a lunatic…I thought you an—”

Tell her I’d believed her an angel, and she’d be sure I was mad and have me bound again. I could scarce argue with such a judgment. I had no idea of year or season, of where we were or what had brought us here. Only now were life and memory settling into some explanation of this eternity of pain and nightmare. Nivat. The doulon. Disease.

“You’ve cared for me all these wretched days…Iero’s hand of mercy…and I so disgusting in my perversions. I’d no idea that I had…I don’t know what to say.”

She didn’t run away. Scarce controlling my urge to wrestle her back into my arms, I could not but shove the wadded bedclothes tighter into my treacherous parts and shut my foolish mouth. A warrior woman of Evanore. She likely had a knife to hand—though where hidden in that gown I dared not imagine. What business had she in red silk instead of her habergeon? Yet truly, mail as sturdy as her father’s might not have resisted my urgency this day. Her father…Now there was a remembrance made my shaft begin to shrink.

The silence stretched long enough, I ventured a glimpse to make certain she was no stray illusion after all. She stood at the wide window, where the unexpected brilliance of sunlight split by mullioned panes had set off my befuddled misbehavior. Red gown in disarray, bronze hair tousled, she folded her arms and pressed one hand against her lips as her shoulders shook.

Just as I, shamed and regretful, returned my attention to the rumpled sheets, muzzled laughter burst that fine barrier and brightened the room even as the sunlight. “Dear Brother Valen,” she said, when her first spasms had eased, “when you wake, you wake. Though I must appreciate, and approve, your gracious conscience, I don’t know if I will ever, ever, forgive you for stepping back. I’ve imagined this occasion since I first took you walking out of Gillarine. Were I living in my grandmother’s day, I might have carted you off to my fastness that very night! Somehow you cause a woman to lose her mind and forgo all other…yearnings. Indeed your fingers carry magic.”

Unable to keep my gaze from her, I gaped, uncomprehending.

She shook her head in mimed rue. “What’s more, honesty requires me to confess that this is the first time I have visited you this tenday of your stay at Renna. Other tasks have occupied my time. It is Renna’s physician, Saverian, you must thank for your care. Though I’ll warn you: Play your finger tricks on her, and she’ll have you a eunuch before you can sneeze.”

The astringent angel. How could I ever have believed that sexless messenger of the heavenly sphere to be Elene, who was abundant earth itself? I felt ridiculous…and marvelous…and then, of a sudden, weak as a plucked chicken, as the sunlight faded into flat gray.

Elene produced a comb from her pocket and began to tame her hair. Chilled and chastened under my rumpled sheets and blankets, I curled up around my regrets and considered the mysterious certainty that had halted so fine a pursuit. I was no diviner. The only thing I’d ever predicted with accuracy was whether a sick or wounded man was like to live or die.

Life or death… I closed my eyes and recalled that core of heat beneath Elene’s silken skin…that core of life…My eyes popped open again. “Oh, good lady!”

My face as hot as the color of her garments, I motioned her near. What I had discerned might be more dangerous than any magical indiscretion. She approached my bedside, brows raised in amused speculation, her face at a level with mine. Not even the spider on the windowsill could have heard my whisper. “Mistress Elene, do you know you are with child?”

Clearly not. For a second time the sun vanished behind burgeoning clouds, and I existed once more entirely within the bounds of disastrous winter.

“You’re wrong! No god would be so cruel…so foul…the Mother would not permit it!” She spun in place, her arms flailing in helpless frenzy, until her bloodless fists gripped a warming iron and she smashed it onto the bed not a tenquat from my head. “Damnable, accursed madman! How could you know?”

I didn’t take the warming iron so much for a personal assault, as for a measure of shocked desperation. Her earlier confessions affirmed the child was not mine, begotten in some lunatic frenzy I could not remember. I kept a wary eye out for a second strike. “I’ve always had this instinct—”

I began to say it was a scrap of talent inherited from my mother, the diviner. But returning memory swept through me as a spring wind through an open door, swirling away dead beliefs like dried leaves. My hands trembled, no longer from frustrated lust, but from evidence revisited and truth laid bare. Josefina de Cartamandua-Celestine, drunken diviner, wife of Claudio, was not my mother.