Free Retribution by Ann Herendeen Page A

Eclipsia City.”
    “Is Dominic going with you?” I can’t ,
I thought. I can’t stay here, alone, without Dominic, and on bad
terms with everybody .
    “No, of course not, that’s the point,” Niall
said. My look of surprise seemed to annoy him beyond containment.
“I’m out of here before he kills me. Or I kill him.”
    I could only stare.
    “I owe him a death,” Niall said in formal
speech, the same prophetic words Jana had used to her bandit
captors.
    “Please, Niall,” I said, holding out my hand
in an attempt at communion, “don’t joke like that.”
    Niall sat back, rejecting the proffered
touch. “How could I joke about something like this? Dominic has—”
His voice cracked in a way I remembered, an unpleasant memory. “He
has broken faith with me.”
    It was the tremor in Niall’s voice that
breached the wall of my imposed forgetfulness. I recalled it all
clearly now: Dominic’s frightening duality that began after the
battle, the “dream” I had had at Lady Ladakh’s, Niall’s bruised
body and the shattered look in his eyes I had seen the next
morning. However imaginary my encounter with Reynaldo, between
Dominic and Niall there had been real violence, with very real
consequences.
    He raped you! The thought was in my
mind before I could suppress it. In my idealized notions up to now,
broken faith could not occur between true lovers.
    Niall was on his feet, his hand reaching for
his sword in a reflex. The blade was halfway out of the scabbard
before he rammed it back with a bark of angry laughter. “Lady
Amalie,” he said. “You really must be careful with that kind of
language.”
    The physical injuries were easier for Niall
to accept than the word. In this world of ‘Graven honor, to admit
to being a victim means assuming a heavy burden: suicide for a
woman, vengeance for a man.
    “Please, Niall,” I said. “Sit down and listen
to me.” I told Niall what nobody had ever heard, what nobody knew
except Dominic and me, the story of my first night alone with
Dominic, our natural communion of love warped by a powerful
telepathic weapon into mindless sexual abandon. Afterward I had
felt violated—not by Dominic, but by an evil force that had wanted
to humiliate and destroy me. Dominic had almost killed himself the
next morning, out of remorse. Only later had he come to accept that
the weapon fed off our worst qualities and made use of them.
    “You see,” I said, wrapping up my personal
history, “I did not blame Dominic for acting under the influence of
something beyond his control—our control.”
    “Yes,” Niall said. “Dominic told me this when
we met.”
    I shut my eyes against the betrayal, but
Niall was not looking at me. “You’re lucky, in a way, as a woman,”
he said. “When you were dishonored, Dominic could make it right
simply by marrying you.”
    I forced myself to speak without shouting.
“Niall, excuse me, but you did not understand what I was trying to
tell you. I wasn’t ‘dishonored.’ Dominic and I were both
manipulated by a telepathic weapon. I was making an analogy between
what happened to me then and what’s happened to you now.”
    Niall shook his head. “I do understand.
You’re saying that you were not forced, that you lay with Dominic
by your own choice. That’s not so shameful as you seem to think.
With a ‘Graven lord, attractive as Dominic is, I imagine few women
would even bother to put on a show of resistance. But at the time
Dominic felt he was at fault. He still does. And in a way he’s
right. A man of honor does not take advantage of a lady, even if
she’s willing.”
    He took my speechlessness for confusion.
“Surely you, of all women, know that love between men is
different.”
    “Oh yes?” I said.
    Niall leaned over to rub his fingers lightly
against my left arm, feeling for the deep scar of the marriage
brand beneath the fabric of my nightgown. “You must stay with him
no matter what, because he’s your lord husband. Between