“I know. But it doesn’t work the other way around. He didn’t give me permission to marry you. That worries me. It feels like a trap, one my road leads straight to, or through. So I go back, my darling.”
He gathered her tightly, his eyes full of tears. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ve fought it. I’ve run from it. I’ve worried over it, thinking up every excuse I can come up with. None of it’s any good. I promised. I’ll keep my promise. And then, when I’ve kept it, if I’m able, I’ll marry you.”
He tugged her back into the bed and they came together again in a spirit that was part desperation, part ecstacy, part renunciation, part something deeper and older and more profound than either of them could have identified if they had tried.
And even in the heat of it, he wondered why she would not marry him, and if it was for the reason she had given him, or for some other reason she had not told him at all. In the night he dreamed of her in the caverns, at the mercy of that old man, and on the sea, at the mercy of whatever it was who had come up out of the depths, and he awoke from that dream as he had awakened from others, shouting in terror, waking her also into fear. It required some time to settle them both.
“Only a nightmare,” he said to her and himself, clammy skinned and sweating. “Only a nightmare.”
19: Mission to Mahahm
Aufors and Genevieve returned to Havenor, neither hurrying nor delaying, but with deliberate inevitability. Despite the intensity of the passion that had overmastered them in Weirmills, Genevieve allowed them only that one night, insisting that their love must be held in abeyance. Not now, she said. Not yet. “Not yet” became words bitter on Aufors’s tongue, particularly on the twenty-fifth day of their travel when he caught Genevieve in tears.
“What is it?” he asked, reminding himself to be as gentle as possible. Shouting at her would not help, so he had proven to himself early in the journey, and lately she had seemed tired and listless.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I think.”
He staggered, forgetting himself to shout, “Oh, by the deepsea, Genevieve. We must be married. We must!”
“Shh,” she said. “No, Aufors. Not yet.”
He heard himself pleading, “If not now, it may be never!”
“That will be as it will be. And I don’t want you to tell Father when we get to Havenor!”
“It’ll become apparent, soon enough.”
“Maybe not. I have a kind of idea. Don’t ask me. Just let me … deal with it.”
“At least I’ll be there to care for you.”
“You mustn’t. I can’t take that. This trip is hard enough, being so close to you without . . .” She drew a sobbing breath. “You said Father had a new equerry. You must live somewhere else, do something else.”
“Genevieve, for the love of heaven, your father expects us to be married.”
“Well, I’m not saying no. I’m just saying not now.”
“Why?”
“You’ve asked me before. I can’t explain it. I have some other thing to do, something I was born for. I can’t deal with my own life until I’ve dealt with that!”
“But you don’t know what it is!”
“No. Not yet.”
Not yet. The bitter words. He was beginning to lose faith in not yet. He was beginning to seek reasons that lay outside the reasons she gave. Though he would have denied it, a tiny seed of doubt had germinated and sent down a hairlike root to find sustenance in his guilt over not being with her on that journey, in his fury at her father, in all the mystification and double talk that went on around him. Perhaps something had happened to her that should not have happened.
They had come through Barfezi by way of a boat upon the Potcher-water, through County Vanserdel, where Lorn, Duke Barfezi had his seat, where they had hired horses and gone north to the ferry across the Reusel. This brought them into Langmarsh, where they rode upward along the same road where Aufors had begun his journey. Though it would not have hurt Genevieve to travel faster, Aufors was in the grip of an obsession, and he insisted upon a slow, untiring pace as they climbed to the pass above High Haven. Two more days brought them to Havenor, where they went first, at Aufors’s suggestion, to the home of the Duchess Alicia. She was, so the servants said, still in Merdune, with her granddaughter, grieving the loss of her daughter. They did not expect her return to Havenor at any proximate time.