XXI: Swear
Feyd seethed in the silence. He could not look at me longer than a second before he had to look away, too furious to even yell.
I ate my mango. The sweetness refused to lift my spirits.
In truth, it was rather dull.
Feyd's revenge. His touch stole the satisfaction of its flavor.
Our tense meal was interrupted by Adnan, Feyd's personal attendant. The longest surviving one, now, I'd guess.
He kept his head level with the floor as he addressed the na-Baron. "The captain sends word that Fremen have been detected out in the desert. It is a location near the coordinates that you believed them to be hiding, lord na-Baron."
Feyd shook his head. "Tell Captain Rurik to ready the men for the expedition. He will lead them to the coordinates."
"The captain says it is believed to be a seitch, na-Baron. It is under a large cut of rock out in the worm lands," Adnan relayed. "He believes Muad'dib to be there."
Mention of Feyd's single rival on Arrakis did heighten his spine in his seat. The refusal to leave me lessened as the words sank further through him.
If he wished to win on Arrakis at all, he had to stop Muad'dib. The attacks were slowing spice harvesting. Only a select few were sent out, heavily armored and with many men. Those alone were risky. So much invested in a single venture. Their production was slim.
He, too, arrived to that very conclusion. the instructions sent to the captain were similar, but Feyd did announce that he needed a thopter of his own.
I breathed a sigh of relief. He would be gone out on a mission so I could get some distance from this whole mess he created.
The space would give me time to calm. I could gather my thoughts on things without his intrusion baiting me into anger or lust. The truth of holding a child within my belly - on purpose - could still sink deeper.
Perhaps it was not total hatred I held for him.
"Finish up," he said. "We have a long day ahead of us."
"Us?"
He clicked his tongue. "Does my lady believe me so dim that I would leave her alone?"
I tossed my napkin onto the table. "Fine."
Vishti entered the room when I clicked for them. They began to pull things from the wardrobe in preparation for the mission into the desert.
The burning commitment to never letting me out of his sight remained. Feyd stood there and watched me be prepared. His own attendant entered with Feyd's clothing and helped him ready for the thopter while I was being tended to, right in the same room.
His eyes watched as Vishti laced the back of my dress. She pulled me so suddenly that I yelped in surprise.
"Not too tight," Feyd blurted.
The only shape to the dress was the embroidered bustier. It ended just in the middle of my ribcage.
I glared. "My dress was two sizes smaller than this last night. If I still managed to be…" my mouth struggled with the word. Aloud. It made it all so real. "I can handle it."
Vishti finished cinching the dress closed. The knots were not wretched tight. The front of the dress hung off my skin, not close to it.
My arms laced against my chest as I waited for Feyd to be ready. For once, I was done first.
Vishti, though, had dressed me so simply that the only addition to my person besides my dress was the necklace around my neck with Feyd's ring on it. That remained there always.
My fingers ran along the smooth surface of the ring. I had no business wearing it. Feyd no longer held a spot for me respect since he did not respect me.
I reached behind my neck for the clasp when a low growl left Feyd's lips.
"Don't do that."
My hands snapped to my sides. The burning of my rage did not simmer in my gaze.
"Please," he said.
The mixture of anger and sorrow held my chest in frightening control. Where I awaited the return of numbness, none descended. My body withheld its comfort. Instead leaving me to burn and frozen in the wastelands of emotion that surmounted my depths.
Feyd and I rode in our own thopter, as per usual. The captain scowled in my direction, and openly glared behind Feyd's back, as per usual. The cockpit was another usual space to me now.
He awaited launch until the five-point harness was secured at my chest.
The ride over open sandy desert with nothing but rock and dune to observe gave way to my innermost thoughts. The turmoil of my position.
Tears threatened my eyes, more than once. I had to fight with every last ounce of strength within me to keep them contained.
The winds were strong this day. The thopter was tossed around a bit. The heavy metal jumped and jolted against the pushing strength of the dune's gusts.
Sand, too, flicked up from the ground. It made the desert a haze of golden tan. The last hours of Arrakis daylight were a tragic mix of golden sun, a painted sky and the dry suffocating heat.
One stream of air was especially savage. It tossed the thropter high and then a free fall down.
The harness caught my body from falling out. The metal buckle dug through the soft fabric of my dress against the center bone of my chest. It knocked the breath out of my chest.
Feyd held an arm out. It too kept me contained inside the seat as we rode the waves of wind.
Visibility began to diminish. By the second, we were drenched in more sand. The taste of it came through the filtered air. I felt its grit atop my tongue as I breathed harder and harder.
Sounds of the machine changed. The thick chugging as the engines swallowed air and sand together.
The other thopters on Feyd's command rained down their similar situations. The pressure of the wind mixed with the sand was degrading their wings, the joints, the glass.
My pulse stayed rapid. It throbbed inside my ears with the rising turbulence.
"Return to Carthag," Feyd instructed to the men. "Fall back. The storm is too strong."
The rushing sand against the windows fell harder as the thopter circled. We were pushed rather suddenly in another current of air. My hands gripped the harness until my knuckles ached. It kept me as steady as possible. The cab bounced us around. Feyd had secured his waist strap to remain seated at the controls.
This was the life Feyd had.
He barely recognized the dangers anymore. The true threat on his life was so familiar that it was did not frighten him to be caught in a sand storm in deadly hot lands full of sandworms. Without water or emergency supply.
I pictured myself with a baby in my arms that moment. It had no place being trapped in that danger.
But this was what its father would endure. Every day.
There was no peace. No hope for a stop to the fight for life.
My heart would never be whole as the mother of Feyd's children. It would be wretched at the seams. He, always lost in the fight of survival and them, needing me to remain strong to care for them. I'd have to choose who to let burn, on their own.
I could not face that choice. It would tear me apart.
A mother's love of her children was stronger than any force and yet, I found it difficult to imagine not choosing Feyd.
We burned together.
Hot tears streamed down my face. It was by some deserts blessing that it soundlessly did so that I could wipe away the evidence before he noticed me again.
My long sleeves were smeared with my tears and snot when we returned to Carthag. It had long grown dark. The cover of night hid my tear-stained face as we disembarked the thopters.
The sadness refused to leave my breath. It rattled with each step back inside the castle. Setting deeper and heavier.
"Are you well?" Feyd asked.
It had been a few hours since we had spoken a single word to one another. The entire flight was silent. Our lives were tossed to the fates of the desert, and yet we'd not uttered a single word.
I shook my head. "No."
"A meal should await us in your chambers."
"I'm not hungry."
If I ate, I'd vomit.
Feyd led the way to my chambers. I did not question why he'd brought me to them while he preferred his own. My chambers were probably searched in our absence. No way to hurt myself, unlike his own chambers filled with weapons.
A meal steamed in the sitting room. The fresh spices hit my nose in a tantalizing scent. My stomach answered with a grumble.
I clutched it and ignored the sound. My feet carried me to my bedroom. If for a single moment alone to stow away the building grief.
The edge of the bed frame held me as I breathed deep.
Stop, stop, stop!
Stop assaulting me, sorrow. There was no home for you here.
I tilted my head back to puddle tears in my eyes and not on my cheeks.
"Is carrying my child so distasteful to you?"
His voice carried from the edge of the room. I needn't look to know he lurked just outside the space, not yet breaching my safety.
My head lowered. "Yes."
Tears dripped down to the floor. I sniffed back the growing sobs. "Can you leave please?" I begged in a harrowing voice.
Sadness was not an emotion I wanted shared with him. He already knew I was no longer a stoic woman as I had been, when he first chose me, but this was something different. This was pain. Mental pain. My pain.
He'd caused it and I did not want him to take sick joy in it.
It would only break me farther than I could repair.
His boots stomped into the room. "No. I'm not leaving you." Two palms gripped my shoulders. He knelt in front of me. "You will be forever secured in my house, Mintha. Protected and cared for. The mother of an heir is a great honor. My line will carry on through you. I've ensured there will be no bastards. No question to your honor. This is a gift."
His tone pleaded so severely. It brought the very raw edge to his voice to have it so close to the surface.
There was haunted beauty in the way he beheld me. The swell and ripple of his lips as they struggled to express what all swirled in his mind.
"There is no one in the Imperium I want as the mother of my child." He lowered his hand from my shoulder to the soft swell of my belly. The large hand covered my belly button and most of my lower abdomen as if he cradled the occupied womb deep inside. "Except you."
Tears again rushed to my face. The hope twisted within his eyes was far too genuine to be there.
"I think," he pondered gently, "she'll be like you."
She?
My eyes fluttered down to his open palm. The hold it kept there on me, on our unborn child.
I swallowed, knowing what I was going to do but still hated doing.
It was the only way he'd understand.
"What if it's a boy?"
"It isn't," he said. "We will have a daughter."
My throat clenched. "What if it is a boy?" I allowed a hardness in my voice. "Would you push him down the path you've taken, na-Baron?"
The change in me was enough to rile his suspicions. His eyes narrowed.
I doubled down. The burning anger I'd built inside myself filled my eyes with their boil. It met his dark gaze. My hands gripped the bed frame harder.
"Will you proudly present your son to the Baron for molding just as he did you?"
Feyd stood very suddenly. Awash in fear and confusion his face twisted.
I only imagined what he saw me as now: a ghost of his scars, taken life, to haunt him on the failures he survived.
My feet now stood in front of him, a small weak thing compared to his monstrous being. A meek human of flesh and bone and blood to devour, a terror to his calm.
If he could see… if only he could feel the sickness I felt at the very thought of a child's future under the Baron's control.
"Will you allow your own son to be taken into your uncle's chambers? Will you allow him to defile their beautiful innocent body as he does yours, Feyd?"
We never discussed what happened between Feyd and his uncle. I never gave a hint of it. It was a piece of delusion I gave that allowed him. If we did not speak of it, he could pretend it did not exist.
But I knew.
He shook his head slow, crafted a measured response. "I said I would kill him."
"When the time was right." I yelled. "Years could pass before the time is right. And you've chosen now to give me a child. Now, when that monster still breathes and could take away our son just as he took you. Do things to him -." I stopped myself before my voice broke in an angry sickened sob.
My wrist pressed against my mouth to keep it from spilling out. "All I can remember about my life is being powerless. Powerless to stop anything that happened. And I cannot imagine a worst fate than knowing what awaited our child in that man's castle, powerless to stop it."
Feyd stepped forward now. His mouth set in a thin line. He grabbed ahold of my chin. It was lifted with a savage grip up to his own view.
Splinters of pain ascended the sides of my face.
"Never," he bayed.
I tried to shake loose of his hold, but the grip was too strong. "You don't know that."
"I will swear it."
"There is only one thing I will ask you to swear," I said.
"Say it," he bellowed.
"Kill me."
His loud panting breath ceased all at once.
"If he still draws breath when I deliver a son, you will kill me and child both." I scanned his expression now for a tell of resistance. "It is the only way."
Feyd clenched my chin harder; instead of fury, it was sadness that he wore.
"You knew." His voice was grave. A distance, perhaps, pain that never tread there before. "How long?"
Hot vomit bottled at the back of my throat.
"Always, Feyd."
"All this time." He swallowed. His voice was barely a whisper. "I thought if you knew the truth, I'd lose you." Images played within his eyes. They moved back and forth swiftly, before they returned down to my haunted face. "And you've known."
It was a thought said aloud. Maybe, a question. Why did I love him if I knew?
He did not give me a moment to answer.
"I am not like him," he told me now. "I would never do what he's done."
Watercolors filtered at the edges of my vision. Tears, small sad ones, dripped from the corners of my eyes. "I know."
"I've pictured it, you know. What a normal family would be like. Someday, what might be possible, if I lived long enough." He chuckled sardonic. "I did not think I would see it." A ripple ran down his throat. "You have showed me what it would be, and I want more. I want more of you and I. Us mixed together. A legacy built, strong, away from any that could harm us."
His grip released my chin.
My nose inhaled deep, sniffing back the snot and sobs built within me.
The heat of our bodies generated a stifling temperature inordinate to the moment. It was not hot. We were not thrilled and lustful.
This was painful, vulnerable. My chest ached with grief and sorrow, maybe some shame.
The emotion within his voice was too genuine. So real. Feyd did not do this.
"I didn't know what it was. They never told me." I found myself murmuring. "The kitchen girls, they told me the maids and servants used it to keep 'free'. They knew you…visited me, so it was a gift they shared." I swallowed. "I hoped that's what it did. Every time after you visited, I used it. Only here, you spent more and more time with me. I'd forget."
That must be why I never fell pregnant before here.
"You should have told me," he said. "Tell me everything."
He spoke behind a turned back. A wall to what plagued him.
"Do you tell me everything?"
He faced me now.
"There are secrets I've entrusted you that would not be utterances outside this room," he countered.
"It's not the same," I snipped. "You did not tell me your intentions for me to be your breeder."
He snarled at the word. "Not a breeder. You are not a breeder. You are my lady! The one person I do not fantasize about their death. You are my only. Mine."
"If you are mine then, truly, swear to me that you will slay our child before he takes it from us. I will never know peace. Not without your word that I will never suffer as I imagine your mother did."
He frowned. The hate of the idea clearly etched through his face.
I did not care if he hated it. I needed his word.
Feyd relented; his head gave a short nod.
"Good." I sighed. My hands brushed the hair away from the sides of my face. Logical thought trickled through my thick fear. Slowly. "Then you do not have to worry about me harming myself. I will not do a thing to sabotage your heir."
"Our child," he corrected.
I shrugged. That was the point he'd nitpick?
"It is to be an heir, is it not?"
"I did not choose you to carry my heir. I chose you." He drew in a small breath. A finger brushed the strands of my hair from behind my shoulder. "As the mother of a child. My daughter will be ours first, yours, before she is anything."
Feyd agreed to let the topic alone for now. I was exhausted. My thoughts were too heavy when I considered the future now that it had changed. Talking about it only panicked me more.
We let the day pass without mention of it.
That night, as Feyd snuggled his chest against my back, did a word more speak about our new journey together. Or rather, an aspect he had not considered.
His mouth leaned over to my ear, his voice a gruff utterance in the still of the night.
"Do you remember your mother?" He asked.
The thought of mother only triggered a darkness in my mind as if a memory was wiped clean from that very spot I searched. A woman I was supposed to know, missing.
I hated the question I had for her: how could I not remember my own mother?
How could I be a mother when I had no knowledge of my own? What hope did I have to do it right?
I shook my head. "No," my voice croaked.
He pushed himself closer to me. Arms curled around my body. A palm rested just above my bellybutton.
"Do you?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "I do."
"What about her do you remember best?"
Maybe if I tried, I could remember my mother's too. We could cheat my mind into unlocking its secrets.
He thought for a moment. "Her smell." He cleared his throat and shifted. "I liked knowing she was there, and she smelled nice."
For the first time in so long, my lips pulled to a small smile. "That sounds nice."
"There are times where I smell you, here, and she comes to mind. Not that you smell the same. I don't know what smell hers was. Just that it was warm. I liked being warm since we lived in a fuckin igloo."
"What's an igloo?"
He snorted. "It's a house made of ice. And we didn't really live in one. It felt like it. Everything was cold. All the time."
"I don't like being cold," I revealed.
"That's all Lankiveil is. Cold, ice, snow."
"Lankiveil. Is that, near the Baron's castle?"
"It is a planet ruled by my mother's family. Geidi Prime is where my uncle is from. There is some distance between them."
My hands ran along his arms. "I did not realize you were not native to the black sun planet."
"My father was," Feyd said. "I was born on Lankiveil, but I've spent most of my days on Geidi Prime. It is the place I hail from."
Where would our child hail from? If it survived.
Would the Arrakis desert be all they knew? The heat, the sand, the Fremen. These dangers being the very commonplace routine we'd all be accustomed to. Of course, there was more to Arrakis than that. There were the beautiful dances and cheerful music and traditions and stories. The culture of being without and not resenting the absence. Smiles.
If my child were to live, I'd want them to know joy. A smile, not a calculated manipulation, but a genuine expression of one's inner happiness.
"Do you think they abandoned you there before the invasion?"
My eyes snapped open. "I had not considered it."
"They are not people that need be missed then. Either they left you there or kept you on an unsafe planet. Neither deserve your sorrow."
A frown down pulled my mouth. "Do you think the same of your mother? That she does not deserve to be missed because she did not protect you."
Feyd fell silent.
Another life was given to my tongue. "You see why I'd rather be slain with our child in birth than live to see the day that I am villainized for not doing more."
His body remained tense against me. The breath of his lips was expelled in unusual rhythm, as if he started and stopped words before they took to sound.
He finally cleared his throat. "It is better this way, Mintha. Always. Better this way."
The first sight that next morning was his sleeping face against a pillow laid in a position that mirrored mine.
It only took my change of breath to alert him. He suddenly sucked in a large breath before his eyelids flicked open. Large dark eyes scanned the room around us. It went to the chamber doors, as if they'd made a sound to disturb him. He moved onto his side, intent to fall back asleep, when one last sweep of his eyes caught against mine. His body paused.
"Sweetness," he said in soft surprise. "Are you well?"
What possessed me, I had no knowledge of its origin or what it was trying to do.
My fingertips brushed along his cheekbones, sliding down his taut cheeks and cupped the side of his face.
"I am well when you are near."
That was true, in its plainest form. He was my comfort, my safety, and even though I still burned with despair at his actions, Feyd remained the only one I belonged to.
A small smile trickled onto his lips. "Near is where you will always find me."