Besides, with what had been done to him, could he even sire young?
He expected her to hit the fan at his insubordination. Instead she said, "How fearless of you to deny your station. You are so like your father."
Wrong. He and the Bloodletter had nothing in common. "Your Holiness—"
"You shall do this. And you shall submit of your own volition."
His reply shot out, hard and cold. "I'd need a good goddamned reason."
"You are my son."
V stopped breathing, his chest going concrete on him. Surely she meant that in the broader sense.
"Three hundred and three years ago you were born of my body." The Scribe Virgin's hood rose off her face of its own volition, revealing a ghostly, ethereal beauty. "Lift thy so-called cursed palm and know our truth."
Heart in his throat, V brought up his gloved hand, then ripped the leather off with messy tugs. In horror he stared at what was behind his tattooed skin: The glow in him was just like hers.
Jesus Christ… Why the hell hadn't he made the connection before?
"Your blindness," she said, "afforded your denial. You did not want to see it."
V stumbled away from her. When he hit the mattress, he let his ass go down and told himself now was not the time to lose his mind—
Oh, wait… he'd already lost it. Good deal, or he'd be totally freaking out right now.
"How… is this possible?" Sure, that was a question, but who the fuck cared at this point?
"Yes, I think I shall pardon your inquiry this one time." The Scribe Virgin floated around the room, moving without walking, her robes unaffected by the trip, as if they were carved from stone. In the silence she made him think of a chess piece: the queen, the one among the others on the board who was free to move in all directions.
When she finally spoke, her voice was deep. Commanding. "I wanted to know conception and birth physically, so I assumed a form sufficient to perform the sexual act and went to the Old Country in a fertile condition." She paused before the glass doors in front of the terrace. "I chose the male based on what I believed were the most desirable masculine attributes for the survival of the species: strength and cunning, power, aggression."#p#分页标题#e#
V pictured his father and tried to imagine the Scribe Virgin having sex with the male. Shit, that must have been a brutal experience.
"It was," she said. "I received exactly what I had gone out to find in full measure. There was no going back once the rutting started, and he was characteristic to his nature. At the end, though, he withheld himself from me. Somehow he knew what I was after and who I was."
Yeah, his father had excelled at finding and exploiting the motivations of others.
"It was perhaps foolish of me to think I could pass for something I was not with a male like him. Cunning, indeed." She looked across the room at V. "He told me he would give me his seed only if a male young would be placed with him. He had never successfully begotten the live birth of a son, and his warrior loins wanted that satisfaction.
"I, however, wanted my son for the Chosen. Your father may have understood tactics, but he was not the only one. I knew well his weakness too, and had it within me to guarantee the sex of the young. We agreed that he would have you three years after the birth for three centuries, and that he could tram you to fight on this side. Thereafter you would be for my purpose."
Her purpose? His father's purpose? Shit, didn't he get a vote?
The Scribe Virgin's voice got lower. "Having reached our accord, he forced me beneath him for hours, until the form I was in nearly died from it. He was possessed by the need to conceive, and I endured him because I was the same."
Endured was right. V, like the rest of the males in the warrior camp, had been forced to watch his father have sex. The Bloodletter hadn't distinguished between fighting and fucking and had made no allowances for females' size or weakness.
The Scribe Virgin began shifting around the room again. "I delivered you unto the camp on your third birthday."
V became dimly aware of a humming in his head, like a train was gathering speed. Thanks to his parents' little bargain, he'd been living his life in ruins, stuck dealing with the aftermath of his father's cruelty as well as the war camp's vicious lessons.
His voice dropped to a growl. "Do you know what he did to me? What they did to me there?"
"Yes."
Throwing all rules of etiquette into the shitter, he said, "Then why the fuck did you let me stay there."
"I had given my word."
V burst to his feet, his hand going to his privates. "Glad to know your honor stayed intact, even if I didn't. Yeah, that's a fair fucking exchange."