III
Gallan awoke a little after whiterise, and promptly forced out of his mind the remnants of last night’s disquieting encounter. Then he lit the hearth, placed the kettle in the midst of the glowing coals, and while waiting for the sweet lily petals to brew, wishing to chase the staleness of sleep from his mouth, he took a bite off an overripe fig – and spat it out at once, doubling over and retching, retching emptily.
He had never tasted ashes, but they couldn’t be more bitter than this.
Meanwhile, Raddia was writhing in the web of a dark folly – as dreams were known in Lurien; for even with a glowstone by your pillow, at some point your eyes closed and plunged you into darkness, which, being the opposite of pureness, was filled with foul thoughts and feelings that crept in and took hold of the defenceless, sleeping mind.
But this was an especially unsettling folly, for in it Raddia found herself, naked and small as a newborn chick, curled up inside a dark pouch next to an equally bare and tiny Gallan. What was more, the pouch was filled with a liquid like thickened ether milk, which their minuscule selves somehow breathed in and out without drowning.
And then something changed, and Raddia’s discomfort at the confinement of the pouch and her terror of touching Gallan’s naked body were replaced by a feeling of safety and bliss unlike anything she had ever experienced; because the pouch was in fact the belly of a woman, (though not Navva’s; Raddia couldn’t say how she knew this, but she did) who spoke to them soothingly, her voice – a real, audible voice – resonating in their every bone, the beating of her heart filling theirs with warm blood.
You cannot ever mate, the woman’s voice said, because you are already as one.