Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

When he had recovered enough to speak he repeated indistinctly, his face muffled against my belly, “I hate you.”

“Do you so?” I said sadly.

“You deal with me as coldly as if I were a bird, a fish—”

I laughed.

“Tear out the hook and throw the creature back. You will bait it again when it is older and more worth your while. Its torn face will have healed by then. It is only a fish.”

I bent over him, and said softly at his ear, “Little fish, do you know what bait I used on you tonight?”

He was quiet a moment, men said slowly, “I thought it must be foxglove and water hemlock.”

“I have only taught you a fraction of my own knowledge,” I said, and gripped his hair to pull his head up a little. “I will not be crossed by you, Medraut. You cannot best me at this game.

“Now touch me,” I ordered icily, and let go of his hair. He sank his face against my thigh, staring bleakly across the floor at nothing. His right hand still clutched at the skirt of my gown; but with his left he sorted through the linen folds until his long fingers found the inside of my thigh, and then I had to snatch at his hair again to brace myself at the untold pleasure his hands lit in me.

He winced as I pulled at his hair, and gasped aloud: “Do you think Jocasta used her son so?”

“Medraut,” I murmured, “Do not call me Jocasta, or I will let you borrow my brooches and you can put your own eyes out with them, and end this yourself, as her son did. Touch me!”

It was the last for a long time. The following day he dealt himself injuries more complete, more ugly, more evil, than any hurt I had ever done him.

They told me he was dead. And, God, I knew him so intimately by then that all I need do was glance once at his eyes to know he lived, but in the instant when three hysterical househands came reporting his death to me, I believed it. That instant in itself was his revenge, the dart he had aimed at me. That instant, and the time it took me to come to his side—seconds of unheard of nightmare for me, which he paid for, of his own volition, for the next three months.

He looked as close to death as any living thing could seem. His face was set in an agonized snarl, his teeth bared and his jaw clenched, and the rest of his utterly ruined body was set so tightly that he was still gripping his hunting knife in his right hand—they had not been able to pry it from his iron clutch. The other hand was crushed, the fingers so dreadfully mutilated that they only rested on, but could not grip, the broken shoulder he was trying to protect. But his gaze blazed purely triumphant when I knelt at his side in shock and grief. Nothing of pain in the dark blue eyes, nothing of fear. There was only victory.

He caught me wordless. I knelt by him and found myself mirroring his grimace. Never had I been so betrayed, never had I been so deeply wounded, never had I been so angry. I knelt with my hands hovering over this broken thing that had been my work of art, not knowing where to begin, what to touch, how to mend it.

Speechless, I asked him in a gesture of my hands: What, why?

His eyes blazed defiance into mine. His lips curled back, barely, and he croaked at me: “I do not need your brooches.”

Then I, awash with grief and hatred, gathered my skirts and turned from him, so that I could find a place alone and mourn his ruined body in dignity.

They had gone stag hunting, on foot, with spears. They told me this later; it wearies me to tell it over again. He had been first, and had set upon the stag with his hunting knife alone. There was no reason for it. He had acted in pure fearless and witless pride, to challenge himself, to prove it could be done. He had been trampled in wrestling it to the ground, and torn by its hoofs nearly as soundly as he himself had stabbed at the wild beast; and when he finally finished with it and cut its throat, his legs were caught beneath the dead and crushing weight of its massive body. His own body had become such a wreck that we could not tell where all the damage had come from, or how it could possibly have happened.

I worked over his crushed hand for so long that my eyes began to burn, and my head to ache. I must have sat there for half a day trying to piece his fingers back together. Others came and went around me, waiting on me, bringing me clean linen and thread and new salves, and the occasional cup of wine; and Medraut drifted in and out of ken, sometimes aware of me, sometimes not. The fourth time my physician Huarwar advised me to rest and let him spell my watch a while, I sent them all from my sight, and sat finally alone with my broken son and my worthless, bootless skill. Medraut, deep in his self-induced fever, said clearly, “Godmother, you lied to the high king’s messenger.”

Twenty years ago, nearly twenty years ago I had punished him for saying that.

“Child,” I said, as I had said then, “You will not cross me—” And I snapped apart the fractured bone I had just set.