Her mouth was puffy with the injections she used to keep it from falling back into its former thinness-but back then, though thin, that mouth had been ready for bawdy laughter, and that was part of what had attracted him to her. Now it looked as if it pained her to speak. Her eyes had had the lids lifted and brows tattooed above them.
Thick eyelashes had been implanted to augment her own. But none of this disguised the dull, stony glare of her eyes. Beneath black veils trimmed in a tasteless manner in black spangles, her hair was stiff with gilt metallic dye.
“Yasmin, you are dead by law if not in fact, and even if you remain my wife, it is only in name, and that will not be for much longer, now that I know it is a problem. Had I realized that you still lived, I would not have divorced you before, for the sake of our son, but now that he is gone “
“Murdered,” Yasmin whispered, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Foully murdered and yet I understand that you, his father, did nothing to avenge him! Have in fact, it is said, with unseemly haste replaced him with that asteroid-hopping nephew of yours as your heir.”
“Tapha had it coming. He was our son, it is true, but it is also true that he was a vicious and ignorant pig.” “He didn’t get that from my side of the family.” Hafiz waved his hand in dismissal. “No matter. There is no longer any your’ side of the family. Your side of the family, apparently through your own contrivance, is extinct. And you have not been a member of my family in many years. It grieves me to tell you, oh dear departed mother of our late unlamented son, that I would have disinherited Tapha even if he lived. The boy managed, despite his legitimate birth during our marriage, to be a bastard of the worst kind.”
“You have no sense of family! It is a good thing that I have returned, as your khaSine, to instruct my junior wife.”
Hafiz looked as if he were about to explode, and said in a slow, dangerous voice, “You will not speak to her, you will not so much as lay eyes upon her. You are not k.ha()lne. You are no longer even my wife.”
He took a deep breath and began chanting the expeditious ancient Hadathian method of ridding oneself of unwanted marital attachments, “I divorce you, I divorce you, I-”
Before he could say it the third and decisive time, she interrupted in a shrill, high whine that would not allow him to ignore it.
“You think you can cast me out, just like that, kill my son, marry another, and dismiss me as if I were someone of no consequence?”
“I am certainly about to,” Hafiz told her.
“There’s no need to get so unpleasant. As you recall, it was I who left you. I was only testing you,” she said with a poisonously sweet smile. She pulled a beautifully jeweled box from her robes and offered it to him. “I confess, I was afraid you might react this way, that the shock of my resurrection would prove too much for you and that the years we have spent apart would have put too great a strain on your affection. Still, although I do not care for the way you’ve treated me, I am a broad-minded woman. And to show there are no hard feelings, I have brought you a wedding present. One I know will be of great interest to you.”
“I have no wish for your gifts-but, ahhh-is that a rare Terran early nineteenth century inlaid vermilion and jade snuffbox similar to the one from the court of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte?” He must at least inspect such a treasure. His fingers itched to do so, as they did with any fine and rare collectible object. Perhaps he was only imagining the sneer that crossed Yasmin’s red swollen mouth?
“The very one. The emperor himself gorged his very nostrils from this same box, oh avaricious husband. And now it holds a new rarity, a treasure of particular meaning for you. Go ahead, take it.”