I shake my sleeve free of her grip and pull away, but before she can turn, before she can say a word, I grab her hair and kiss her roughly on the other side of her neck. Twisting her, I lift her onto the table and find her lips.
In the tales, every time true lovers come together, it is with such fervency and effortless skill that the heavens and the earth are shaken and nothing can ever be the same. Such is a lie, of course, but it’s another expression of the central flaw of the glass that drama holds up to reality: everything depicted in that glass matters.
In reality, lovemaking rarely changes things. Most isn’t even that memorable. In most lives, the heavens and the earth are shaken rarely by lovemaking, or perhaps never.
But sometimes they are.
Even with the ancestral gift of the Guile memory, the next minutes disappear in the turbulence of feelings unmoored from thought and pulled into the deep waters of passion.
“Sorry,” I mutter, some time later.
I had absolutely intended to tear her Ilytian lace undergarments to show her my unbridled desire for her. The roughness following that had . . . not been the result of a rational internal dialectic.
“You can make it up to me—”
“I can, huh?”
“—but there’s nothing to forgive.”
“What?” And then it hits me. “You hexed me?”
“You can’t hold it against me after I confess it, right?”
“Felia!” I don’t know whether to be mad or a little proud of her. She used to be such a stickler for the Chromeria’s rules.
“I wanted you to be rougher,” she says matter-of-factly.
“You could’ve asked.”
“I wanted you to apologize afterward. And to have to make it up to me. Speaking of which, you still need to.”
“Make it up to you?”
“As in, right now. Carry me to our bed. I’m not sure I can walk.”
* * *
“There were a couple of words that have changed meaning in our own language since those earlier translations, but it was all solid scholarship. And then I saw this.” She points to a single point on the lambskin, right where the redaction begins.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A flaw in the leather? A stray quill mark? A stain of any kind from the intervening centuries.” She shrugs. “A good translator or copyist wouldn’t speculate, but only communicate what she knows. But when I look at the whole scroll, and see what’s missing and how, it seems to me that whoever redacted this was in a hurry here. There are numerous places where he or she was sloppy. These three dots here at the end of the line, if I guess where the lines of text fell, could be all that remains of the three horns of a ‘shin.’ This could be the foot of a ‘khaf sofit.’ It could as easily be ‘resh’ or ‘nun sofit’ or ‘tsadi sofit’ or ‘zayin’ or ‘dalet,’ but when I compare his earlier handwriting, his ‘shin’s were tall and elegant, and his ‘khaf sofit’s extended a little lower than the others.”
She’s getting into the minutiae. But she sees my impatience.
“If I’m right,” she says, “then this dot”—she lays a piece of parchment over the area and draws a delicate curve—“is part of an aspirate, a breath mark, as in the way ‘Or’holam’ was once written. It’s the right time period. Breath marks in punctuation only started falling out of scholarly usage some eighty years later, with Polyphrastes’ Dictions.”
“But this mark obviously isn’t for ‘Orholam.’ You’ve discovered something else,” I say.
“ ‘Discovered’ is too strong. I’ve ‘speculated.’ ”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll show you instead.” She lines up the parchment edge over the original scroll so that one edge just touches the breath mark and, farther down the absent line of text, the three dots of the missing ‘khaf sofit’ protrude. “You understand, what I’m doing here is by no means ‘translation.’ It’s a guess, not scholarship.”
I say nothing, and she picks up a quill, shaved precisely as the ancient Parians shaved theirs to give the proper calligraphic quality to edges and curves. Her lettering is not only beautiful, it is also such a match for the Scriptivist’s handwriting that it would make a forger proud. The spacing and size of the letters is exact. She starts from the breath mark and moves left, unhurried. “There is nothing internally or in the other writings of the Scriptivist to support this,” she says as she draws the ‘khaf sofit,’ its three horns coming above the edge of her parchment to touch the three dots on the scroll. She finishes the phrase and steps back.
“ ‘On a broken stone, the black fires of hell, on earth once more shall unleash the two hundred falling glories of heaven.’ Literally, ‘the falling stars.’ But when it’s ‘two hundred,’ it’s never literal. The ‘two hundred falling stars,’ or ‘fallen stars’—it’s a euphemism sometimes shortened to ‘the two hundred.”
“The celestials,” I say. “The elohim, the old gods.”
“Those who rebelled against Orholam and were cast from His court.”
“Or marched out in defiance of the tyrant, if the heretics have it true,” I say.
“The Braxians?” Felia asks. “The Cracked Landers believe anything that justifies their thirst for power.” She grows quiet. “Like all of us do, perhaps.”
“You mean you and I?” I ask.
For a moment, her eyes are an open door to the soul bleeding within.
I forget, sometimes, that her greater sensitivity means that she suffers more than I even can.
“I don’t want this,” I say. “Do you? Are you perverting this translation so that we can do this to our boys? That’s not the Felia I know you to be.” Before tears can gather once more in her eyes, I say, “So don’t lump us in with those desert assassins.”
She is defeated. “My lord husband, look at Gavin’s last letter to you.” She hands me a parchment, not Gavin’s letter, which was in code, but the decryption of it.
“How did you get this?” I ask.
“Read.”
She’s made a mark next to a paragraph: ‘Father, I have him on the run now. Dazen doubtless hopes to retreat to the mountains around Kelfing, but we’ve a plan to entrap his army at a bend in the river near a town called Rekton.’
I look at the map Felia has spread on the table. She sweeps a hand over Tyrea, and the little dot that is Rekton on the Umber River. In orange luxin, names appear—old names, though. “At the height of the Tyrean Empire,” she says, “there was a city here, its name lost to time. It was a holy city, consecrated to Anat Sub-red, before Karris Atiriel or her followers demolished it. There’s a great dome of rock there. Anat’s Dome, or Anat’s Furnace, the Lady of the Desert’s milk-swollen breast or her pregnant belly, they say. Upon it, the ancient Tyreans sacrificed their sons and fed their blood to the sands, begging the goddess to make their desert bloom.” Her voice grows distant. “How blithely I condemned them as monsters, Andross. What mother worthy of the name could murder her sons and believe that, of such enormity, good would come? I couldn’t imagine . . . How could we let this happen?”