Kushiel's Avatar (Phedre's Trilogy #3)

Joscelin stood in the road, breathing hard, blood sliding in crimson runnels toward the point of his lowered sword. "You're all right?" he asked without looking at me.

"I'm fine." I didn't wholly trust my voice.

He nodded, wiping his blade carefully on the roughspun tunic adorning the nearest corpse, and then, without warning, knelt in the dust. With his head bowed, he laid his sword down and crossed his forearms, murmuring a Cassiline prayer. The packhorses and I waited silently, while his gelding leaned in to whuffle his hair in curiosity. Joscelin's eyes, when he rose, were filled with anguish.

"It gets easier, you know." In one fluid motion, he sheathed his sword at his back and went to pluck his thrown dagger from the throat of the bandit leader, face averted from me. "Too easy."

"I'm sorry." There was nothing else I could say.

"I know." Cleaning and sheathing his dagger, he went about the business of splicing our severed lead-lines. "Give me a hand, you've a better touch with knots."

I worked without comment. When we had finished, we remounted and rode onward toward Pavento, where we sought lodgings for the night and reported the incident to the Principe's guard. No further hostilities troubled us that day or the next. If the local banditry had any network of information, I daresay word went out along the northern route that the pair of harmless-looking D'Angeline travellers were best left undisturbed.

On the next day, we reached La Serenissima.

Twilight hovered smoky and blue on the waters of the canals and soft roseate hues washed the buildings around the Campo Grande, here and there picked out with a brazen note of gilt where the sun's dying rays still pierced. Laughter carried over water, and voices raised in song. The painted bissoni and gondoli were out, young men of the Hundred Worthy Families courting and wooing in the ways of Serenissiman nobility.

It could have been my world. I even entertained the thought— once, briefly, for a heartbeat's space of time. Severio Stregazza, who is the Doge's grandson, proposed marriage to me in this city. His family would never have permitted it, of course. Still, he did not know it at the time.

I looked at Joscelin's profile, silhouetted against the deep blue of falling night.

I never doubted that I chose aright.

It made it all the harder to ask him what I had to ask, that night in the dining-hall of our elegant inn, the same we'd stayed in before. I'd no more inclination than I'd had the first time to burden any of my acquaintances in La Serenissima with this visit. The rooms were fine and the service well-trained; the food was outstanding for Caerdicci fare.

"Joscelin."

Amid the clamor of voices and rattling cutlery, he caught the hes itation in my tone. "What is it?"

I beckoned for the neatly-attired servant to bring more of the sweet muscat wine the inn served with its dessert course. He bowed, smiling with pleasure, and refilled my glass. I took a sip, and another, delaying. "I want to go alone tomorrow."

Joscelin sat unmoving, then blinked, once. Something hard surfaced in his expression. "To see Melisande. Why?"

"Because." I turned the delicate wineglass, watching the candlelight refracted in the fluted rim. It was exquisitely made. Serenissiman work, no doubt, blown on the Isla Vitrari. "What I have to tell her... it is about her son. And it is a matter between her and Kushiel. No one else."

"Oh, Phèdre." It was the sorrow in his voice that jerked my gaze back to his. "Do you have such a care for her pride? Even still?"

"It's not only that. Not pride." I shook my head. "Joscelin . . . you saw the children, the children we saved. And they were the lucky ones. I have to tell her that."

"It is Kushiel's justice," he said softly. "You said so yourself."

"Yes." I drained my glass and set it back. "Did you think it just, when we found those children in Amílcar?"

He didn't answer immediately. "It is not for me to judge."

"Nor I. But I think ... I think there is no one in the world who despises Melisande Shahrizai with the same purity of emotion as you." My voice was shaking, a little. "And I think that when she learns that Kushiel has chosen to punish her by exacting payment for her sins from her son ... I think that even Melisande deserves to hear it alone."

Joscelin's voice was harsh. "Do you think she would offer you the same compassion?"

To impart suffering without compassion . . .

"It doesn't matter." I swallowed, hard. "Joscelin, I am not easy in my heart with this. I have served Kushiel all my life, and never ques tioned his will. I question it now. I do not see that the end justifies the means. And I am made to endure pain, to revel in it, not to inflict it. To deliver this news with you glowering over my shoulder ... I don't think I can do it."

"I wouldn't glower," he said automatically, then sighed, pressing the heels of his hands against his eye-sockets. "All right. All right, all right. Do as you must, and I will wait in the Temple proper." Dropping his hands, he looked at me with slightly bloodshot eyes. "Will it suf fice?"

"Yes," I whispered. "Thank you."

"Don't." He shook his head. "I think your compassion is wasted on Melisande."

Thence the need for an anguissette to balance the scales.

"I know," I said miserably. "And mayhap you are right. But I can only act according to the dictates of my nature, not hers."

"Love as thou wilt," said Joscelin, and sighed again.

In the morning we went to the Temple of Asherat-of-the-Sea.

Poets and philosophers alike have written of the sense of strangeness that one encounters from time to time of a moment lived before; a place, a person, a chance word, that triggers something in one's memory that says, yes, I remember, that is how it was, that is exactly how it was. So I have read, but I have never encountered such a thing save that there was reason for it. I felt it that day. I had been here before, in this city built on water, beneath the great golden domes of the Temple. Full many a time had I met the blank stare of the great effigy of Asherat, towering vast and stony above the altar, carved waves surging at her feet.

I brought honeycakes, the first time. The second, I usurped her voice.

It was a bargain we had struck, the goddess and I.

And I had come with Ysandre, who had the right to order me because she was my Queen; and I had come, last of all, with Joscelin, as I came now, amid the priestesses of the Elect, with their whispering blue robes and the veils of silver net that hid their faces, glass beads shimmering like wire-strung tears, bare feet moving soundlessly over the floor.

"I will wait," Joscelin said to me, making a formal Cassiline bow, his hands clenched into fists beneath the steel mesh gauntlets of his vambraces. Amid the murmurous presence of the priestesses, the fierce soft pride of the Temple eunuchs with their ceremonial spears, he seemed an alien thing, hard-edged and masculine.

"I will return," I promised. He thought me a fool; I know he thought me a fool for my compassion. Was I? I didn't know. I followed the Elect priestess down the winding corridors, wondering. What do you owe Melisande, that you must deliver this news yourself? So Ysandre had asked me, and rightfully so. She was my liege and my sovereign, Ysandre de la Courcel; she had believed, when any other would have doubted. She had raised me up and given me every honor, given me the Companion's Star to wear at my breast, called me her near-cousin. When I thought of courage, when I thought of loyalty, it wore Ysandre's face as I had seen it on our return from La Serenissima, when she had parted the troops of Percy de Somerville's army and ridden without faltering to the very walls of the City of Elua.

And when I thought of love, it wore Joscelin's face.

Phèdre!

But there was Melisande's voice in my memory too, unstrung with shock, her beautiful eyes wide with fear after I had cracked open my skull against my cell in La Dolorosa. I had seen it, as I slumped to the floor.

A kiss, one kiss. It took all that I had to resist it.

She had only touched me once, since. And that with the point of a dagger. Joscelin's dagger. I'd have let her kill me, if she could. She couldn't.

It was the same, all the same. The gilt-hinged door, the priestess of the Elect giving the double knock and announcing my name in the soft, slurring Caerdicci dialect they use in that city. It was the same room, filled with slanting sunlight and the soft splashing of an unseen fountain. The sound of the door closing, leaving us alone, was the same. Even the fragrance was the same; a little deeper, in summer, of water and sun-warmed marble and flowering shrubs, and the scent, the faint, musky spice I would have known anywhere, could have picked blindfolded out of a crowd, the unique fragrance of Melisande, who stood waiting.

And the wave, the wave of emotion was the same, hatred and love and desire, cracking my heart to bits and grinding the fragments. Only this time, I saw the fear in her eyes. And this time, I knelt.

TWENTY-EIGHT

"tell me."Melisande's eyes closed, lids dusky with blue veins, shuttered against the pain. I have done such a thing myself. I have seen it in others. I had never seen it in Melisande. I had been right to come alone. Her lashes curled like ebony wave-crests. I am D'Angeline. I cannot fail to notice such things.

"There was," I said, searching for words, "no conspiracy."

Her eyes opened. "What, then?"

I told her.

What I had expected, I cannot say. She bore it; she bore it well. I do not think anyone who knew her less than I—and who that may be, I do not know—would have seen her flinch, would have seen the awful comprehension that filled the deep-blue wells of her eyes. It struck her hard. Any mortal enemy she could have outwitted, outplotted. Not this. Not random chance, and the shadow of Kushiel's hand overhanging it.

"He is alive?" It was the first thing she said, the first she was able to say, forced between clenched teeth.

"I believe him to be so." The marble floor was hard beneath my knees, the discomfort of it lending me focus. "The Menekhetan saw his value. He paid in hard coin. By that token, I believe Imriel lives."