Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

WHEN MEDRAUT STEPPED OFF the merchants’ ship I had not seen him since Artos, his father the high king, had taken him from me at ten. I knew him now by his hair and eyes; but he was an exotic in this wintry archipelago of islets where my brother the high king has banished me. His dress was foreign, his face and hands burnt to copper in the African sun and on the sea, and his hair was so sun-bleached that it was as blindingly and unnaturally fair as it had been in his babyhood. He had been a slender and shapeless child; now, at five-and-twenty, he was taller than my husband. It seemed to me that he must have trained his body to match his will, until they had become alike in their iron surety.

He kissed me formally when he greeted me, and held my hands in his own.

“My child.” I welcomed him. “You have changed a great deal since I sent you off.”

“Godmother,” he answered warmly, “but you are exactly the same, and all as beautiful as I remember.”

Since I had seen him I had borne two more children, five in all, not counting those not carried to term. My husband, King Lot of the Orcades, flung words like hag and crone in my face when he wanted to hurt me. Yet I had never known Medraut to say a doing he did not believe to be true.

He sat by me as we feasted him on his first night back in the home of his childhood. He shared a plate with me. His left hand rested quiet and still upon his thigh, while he broke his bread and handled his meat only with the right. He did it deftly, and without making a show of it; I only noticed because I was fascinated by the curious beauty of his long, dark hands. My own hands had grown thin and wiry over the years of birthing and cutting and healing and killing; they were now lean and taut as a man’s. Medraut’s hands were like replicas of my own, but larger, stronger.

“Have you hurt your hand?” I asked, and touched his left very lightly. “You do not use it.”

“It is only habit. It is very rude to eat with your left hand in Aksum.”

I clasped his fine fingers beneath mine. He tolerated this patiently, but did not return the endearment. His first ten years had taught him to beware my attention.

“How long were you ambassador there?” I asked.

His look turned suspect a moment. It was exactly the expression he had worn at seven, apprehensive that he was about to endure another humiliating catechism: Why do I have you beaten in place of my husband’s sons, Medraut? Why do I place the fault at your feet when you did no wrong? Why is it meet that the high king’s bastard should wait on King Lot’s children?

Now I laughed at his look, very gently. He joined me, laughing at himself, suddenly at ease; or attempting to be. His hand lay still beneath mine.

“I was in Aksum a little longer than three years,” he said. “Which of these young men are my cousins?”

He called them cousins, not brothers or half-brothers, for it is a secret that I am his mother. He had been taken from me when he was born and then, after an occult series of maskings to hide the truth of his birth, given back to me a little later to “foster” for his father the high king. It would have been profanity to allow the people to know that the high king’s only child was born of incest. Medraut had never heard the truth from me.

“I think I can guess Gareth and Agravain,” Medraut continued, “but I don’t recognize Gwalchmei at all. Agravain’s hair is so like yours.”

“And Gareth’s like yours,” I said.

He shot me a swift, startled frown. So: He knew what I meant. How could he not, with my eyes and my hands and my cool, collected glance? But Artos must have told him.

“Gwalchmei has more of his father’s look than mine,” I added calmly, as though nothing had passed between us in that moment of subtle testing and recognition. “There he is, at the opposite end of the other long table. And Gaheris is on his right. Gaheris is devoted to him.”

“Artos wants to offer them all places in his court,” Medraut said.

Perhaps he meant it only as a polite and honorable invitation. It was sheerly threatening. Well, I thought, so he declares his loyalty.

“And you,” I said gently. “Have you a place there?”

“Always,” he said warmly, reverent and unguarded.

I felt the same surge of jealousy and hatred that I had known when he was a child. It made me want to strike him, as it always had. What a spirit he had had then, how he had endured my dominion over him in silent stoicism, how he had clung pridefully, quietly, to the knowledge of who his father was, and to the hope that Artos would rescue him from the northern hell that was his childhood. And here he was back within my grasp, his loyalty confirmed, himself no longer a child.

“Neither Gaheris nor Gareth was born when I left,” said Medraut lightly. “I have been away longer than it seems.”

I had striven so to create him, this living weapon against my brother. I remembered the seduction and the labor, the intrigue and the exile, and felt myself haggard with age and strain. I thought I had lost him.