They splashed around for a while in the warm, cinnamon-scented water. She challenged him to a race, and they streaked side by side from one end of the pool to the other, ending in what they could only call a tie. Then she hauled herself up out of the pool, found some towels to spread out on the tiled margin, and beckoned to him to join her.
“What if someone comes?” he asked.
She made no attempt to conceal the mischievous mirth she felt. “Nobody will. I locked the door.”
She could not have made it more plain, lying there naked on this pile of soft towels in this warm, humid room that they had entirely to themselves, that she had brought him here to give herself to him. If he disdained her now, it would be the clearest possible message that he had no interest in being her lover—that he found her physically unattractive, or that he was not a man who responded to women, or else that his own hyperdeveloped moral sensibility would not permit him to enjoy the pleasures of the body in any free and easy way.
None of those things were true. Dinitak lay down alongside her, and easily and capably gathered her into his arms and put his lips to hers and sent one of his hands roving over her firm little breasts and downward then to the juncture of her thighs, and Keltryn knew that it was going to happen to her at last, that she was about to cross the great boundary that separated girls from women, that Dinitak would initiate her this evening into the mysteries that she had never dared to experience before.
She wondered if it would hurt. She wondered if she would do things the right way.
But it turned out that there was no need to think about right ways and wrong ways. Dinitak obviously knew what he was doing, and she followed his lead easily and after a time she was able just to let her own instincts take charge. As for pain, there was only a moment of it, nothing like what she had feared, though it was a bit startling for an instant and she did let a little gasp escape her lips. After that there were no problems. What had happened felt strange, yes. But very fine. Fantastic. Unforgettable. It seemed to her that she had stepped just now through a doorway which had admitted her to some altogether unfamiliar new world where everything glowed with bright auras of delight.
That one little gasp led to difficulties afterward, though. When it was over, Keltryn lay back in a dazed haze of pleasure and astonishment, and only gradually did she realize that Dinitak was staring at her with a stunned look on his face that could almost have been one of horror.
“Is something wrong?” she whispered, close to tears. “Was I displeasing to you?”
“Oh, no, no, no! You were wonderful!” he said. “More than wonderful. But why didn’t you tell me it was your first time?” His forehead was knotted with anguish.
So that was it! His damned morals again!
“It never would have occurred to me. If you were wondering about it, I suppose you always could have asked.”
“One doesn’t ask about things like that,” he said sternly. It was as if she had done something dreadfully improper, she thought. How had this become her fault? “Anyway,” he went on, “I had no reason to suspect it. Not when you inveigled me down to this pool like this, and flung your clothes aside so shamelessly—and—” He struggled for words, did not seem to be able to find the right ones, and finally blurted, “You should have said something, Keltryn! You should have told me!”
This was bewildering. She began to feel anger rising. “Why? What possible difference could knowing it have made?”
“Because I feel so guilty for what’s happened, now. Unknowingly or not, I’ve done something that I can’t forgive myself for. To take a young woman’s virginity, Keltryn—it’s a kind of theft, in a way—”
This was getting farther and farther from anything that made sense to her. “You didn’t take anything. I gave.”
“Even so—one simply doesn’t do such things.”
“One doesn’t? You mean, you don’t. You sound positively prehistoric, Dinitak. Do you think the Castle is some sacred sanctuary of purity? I’ve spent months in the midst of a pack of silly boys who were absolutely slavering to do the very thing with me that you and I just did, and I said no to them all, and the first time I decide to say yes I get blamed for not having informed you in advance that I—that—”
Tears were surging up again, but this time they were tears of rage, not of fear. The idiot! How could he dare feel guilty in such a wonderful moment? What right did he have to expect her to give him details of her past sexual history?
But she knew that she had to put her anger aside and do something to repair this, and fast, or their friendship would never survive it.
In the gentlest tone she could find Keltryn said, “I don’t want you to think you did anything wrong, Dinitak. So far as I’m concerned what you did was one hundred percent right. Yes, I was a virgin—and I can’t tell you how tired I was of continuing to be one, and I think I would have gone right out of my mind if I had gone on being one an hour longer.”
But that only made things worse. Now he was the angry one. “I see. You wanted to get rid of that tiresome innocence of yours, and therefore you found a convenient implement to help you dispose of it. Well, I’m glad to have been of use.”
“Implement? No! No! What an awful thing to say. You don’t understand anything, do you?”
“Don’t I?”
“Please. You’re spoiling everything. All this pious outrage of yours. This blustering righteous indignation. I know that you can’t help it, that you take all these issues of morality tremendously seriously. But look at the mess you’re making between us! It’s all so terribly stupid and unnecessary.”
He started to reply, but she put her hand over his mouth.
“Don’t you realize I love you, Dinitak? That that’s the reason why you’re here with me tonight, and not Polliex, or Toraman Kanna, or some other boy from Septach Melayn’s fencing class? All these weeks we were together, and you never once made a move, and I sat there praying desperately that you would, but you were either too shy or too pure or too something else to do it, and so, finally—finally—tonight, the two of us at the swimming pool, I thought—I’ll put him in a position where he can’t resist me, and see what happens—”
At last he understood.
“I love you, Keltryn. That’s the only reason I was waiting. What I thought was that the time for that part of things hasn’t come yet. I didn’t want to cheapen our friendship by behaving like all those others. And I’m very sorry now that I miscalculated everything so badly.”
Keltryn grinned. “Don’t be. All that’s over and done with. And now—”
“Now—”
He reached for her. She eluded his grasp, rolled past him to the side of the pool, threw herself in with a resounding splash. He came splashing after her. She swam down the middle of the pool with all the speed at her command, a pink streak cutting a line through the pink water, and Dinitak came barreling after her. At the far end she pulled herself up to the tiles again, laughing, and held out her arms to him.
That was the beginning. It was all much less complicated for them after that. Keltryn began to comprehend that that odd puritanical side of him had its own set of boundaries, that the harsh code of values by which he lived was not something that could be delineated in simple tones of black and white. Dinitak was no ascetic. Far from it; passion and lust were certainly no strangers to his makeup. But things had to happen in accordance with his unique sense of what was proper, and Keltryn realized that she would not always be able to anticipate what that was.
In the weeks that followed, they spent night after night in each other’s arms, until it actually began to seem desirable to have some time off to get some sleep. Dinitak’s trip to Muldemar provided that. Provided rather too much of it, Keltryn thought, by the second day of his absence. She could not get enough of him—nor, it seemed, he of her.
She continued her twice-weekly fencing sessions with Audhari of Stoienzar. After Septach Melayn’s departure for the Labyrinth the fencing class had d
issolved, but she and Audhari went on meeting, even so. Fulkari, for a while, had been convinced that a romance was budding there; but Fulkari had been wrong about that. Keltryn had never regarded big, good-natured Audhari as anything but a friend.
He guessed right away that something had changed in her life. Perhaps it was the dark semicircles under her eyes, or perhaps a certain slowing of her reflexes that had set in, now that she was getting so little sleep. Or, Keltryn thought, maybe there’s some kind of emanation given off by girls who have begun going to bed with men, a visible aura of unchastity, that every man is easily able to detect.
And finally he mentioned it. “There’s something different about you these days,” Audhari observed, as they went at each other with their foils.
“Is there? And what would that be, then?”
He laughed. “I couldn’t really say.”
They dropped the subject there. He appeared to regret having brought it up, and she certainly was not eager to pursue the conversation.
She wondered, though, about his ambiguous words. Why couldn’t he say? Was it because he genuinely didn’t know what it was that had changed about her? Or did he feel uncomfortable about talking to her about it? Though he made no further references to it, it seemed to her, though, that a more personal tone had begun to steal into his remarks to her: a flirtatious one, even. He noted that she seemed not to be getting as much sleep as she needed. He observed that there was a new sexiness in the way she walked. He had never said things like that to her before.
She asked Fulkari about it. Fulkari replied that men often changed their way of speaking to a woman once they decided that she had become more available than she had been before.
“But I’m not available!” she said, indignant. “Not to him, anyway.”
“Even so. Your whole manner’s different, now. He may be picking that up.”
Keltryn didn’t much like the idea that all the men of the Castle might be able to figure out at a glance that she was sleeping with somebody. She was still too new to the world of mature men and women to feel entirely at home in it; she wanted to clutch her affair with Dinitak close to herself, sharing the knowledge of her transition into adulthood with no one except, perhaps, her sister. The idea that Audhari, or just about anyone else, could look at her and know right away that she had been Doing It with someone, and therefore she might somehow be interested in doing it with him as well, was offensive and disturbing to her.
Possibly, Keltryn thought, she was misunderstanding things. She hoped that she was. The last thing she wanted, now, was for her kind, earnest friend Audhari to begin making romantic overtures to her.
At a suggestion from her serving-maid, though, she went down one Starday into the lower reaches of the Castle, the market area, and bought from a purveyor of wizard-goods a tiny amulet of fine knitted wire known as a focalo, that had the property of warding off the unwanted attentions of men. She pinned it to the collar of her fencing jacket the next time she met with Audhari.
He noticed it at once, and laughed. “What’s that thing for, Keltryn?”
She flushed a flaming scarlet. “It’s just something I’ve started wearing, that’s all.”
“Has somebody been bothering you? That’s why girls usually wear focalos, isn’t it? To send a keep-away message.”
“Well—”
“Come on. It can’t be me you’re worried about, Keltryn!”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, feeling unutterably embarrassed now, but realizing that she had no choice but to tell him, “I’ve been starting to think that things have been getting a little peculiar between us lately. Or so it seems to me. Your telling me that I walk in a sexier way now, and things like that. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but—oh, Audhari, I don’t know what I’m trying to say—”
He was more amused than annoyed. “I don’t think I do either, actually. But one thing I’m sure of: you don’t need that focalo around me. I could tell right from the start that you weren’t interested in me.”
“As a friend, I am. And as a fencing partner.”
“Yes. But not anything beyond that. That was very easy to tell.—Anyway, you’ve got a lover now, don’t you? So why would you want to get involved with me?”
“You can tell that too?”
“It’s written all over your face, Keltryn. A ten-year-old could see it. Well, good for you, is what I say! He’s a very lucky fellow, whoever he is.” Audhari slipped his fencing mask into place. “But we really ought to get down to work now, I think. On your guard, Keltryn! One! Two! Three!”
Dekkeret said, “I don’t mean to intrude on your personal life, Dinitak. But Fulkari tells me that you’ve been seeing a great deal of her sister in recent weeks.”
“This is true. Keltryn and I have been spending a great deal of time together lately. A very great deal of time.”
“She’s a lovely girl, Keltryn is.”
“Yes. Yes. I confess that I find her extremely fascinating.”
They were dining together at Dekkeret’s invitation, just the two of them, in the Coronal’s private chambers. Dekkeret’s steward had laid a magnificent meal before them, bowls of spiced fish, and the sweet pastel-hued fungi of Kajith Kabulon, and roast leg of bilantoon cooked in thokka-berries from far-off Narabal, accompanied by a rich, earthy wine of the Sandaraina region. Dekkeret ate robustly; Dinitak, restless and edgy, scarcely seemed hungry at all. He did little more than pick at his food and did not taste his wine at all.
Dekkeret studied him closely. From time to time over the years, he knew, Dinitak had struck up some casual relationship with this woman or that one, but they had never come to anything. He had the feeling that Dinitak did not want them to, that he was a man who had little need of ongoing feminine companionship. But from what Fulkari had told him, something quite different appeared to be going on now.
“As a matter of fact,” said Dinitak, “I expect to be seeing her this very evening, after I leave you. So if you have business to discuss with me, Dekkeret—”
“I do. But I promise not to keep you here very late. I wouldn’t want business matters to get in the way of true love.”
“Such sarcasm isn’t worthy of you, my lord.”
“Was I being sarcastic? I thought I was speaking the simple truth. But let’s get on to our business, at any rate. Which involves Keltryn, in fact.”
Dinitak responded with a puzzled frown. “It does? In what way?”
Dekkeret said, “The plan now, as I understand it, is for us to depart for the western provinces on Threeday next. Since we’ll be away for a few months or even more, maybe a good deal more, what I asked you here tonight to discuss was whether you’d like to invite Keltryn to accompany us on the trip.”
Dinitak looked astounded. He rose halfway out of his seat and his face turned a blazing crimson beneath his dark Suvraelinu tan. “I can’t do that, Dekkeret!”
“I don’t think I understand you. What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I mean it’s completely out of the question. The idea’s outrageous!”
“Outrageous?” Dekkeret repeated, narrowing his eyes to a mystified squint. After more than twenty years of their friendship, he still was unable to tell when he was likely to strike some odd vein of moral fastidiousness in Dinitak. “Why is that? What am I failing to see here? According to Fulkari, you and Keltryn are absolutely mesmerized by each other. But when I offer you a way of avoiding a long and undoubtedly painful separation from her, you flare up at me as though I’ve suggested something hideously obscene.”
Dinitak seemed to grow calmer, but he was still visibly upset. “Consider what you’re saying, Dekkeret. How can I possibly bring Keltryn along with me on this trip? It would say to everyone that I look upon her as nothing more than a concubine.”
Dekkeret had never seen him as obtuse as this. He wanted to reach across the table and shake him. “As a companion, Dinitak. Not a concubine. I’m going to be bringing Fulkari with me, you know. Do you think
I regard her as a concubine too?”
“Everyone understands that you will marry Fulkari after the mourning period for Teotas is over. For all intents and purposes she is already your consort. But Keltryn and I—nothing is established between us. I’m twice her age, Dekkeret. I’m not even sure that it’s proper for us to have been doing what we’re doing now. There’s no way I could countenance taking an extended trip across the continent in the company of a young single girl.”
Dekkeret shook his head. “You astound me, Dinitak.”
“Do I? Well, then, I astound you. So be it. She can’t come with us. I won’t allow it.”
This was not in any way what Dekkeret had expected. Indeed at the outset of the meal he had been wondering whether Dinitak, in some hesitant, awkward way, would eventually bring the conversation around to a request for permission to have Keltryn join them on the journey. Having her come with them made perfectly good sense to him. The girl was very young, yes, but by all accounts she was levelheaded beyond her years and growing up fast. Besides, she and Fulkari were not only sisters but the closest of friends, and it would be useful to have Keltryn keeping Fulkari company while he and Dinitak were occupied in the real tasks of the mission. And one would assume that Dinitak would relish the prospect of having her close at hand while they traveled. But he could not have been more wrong about that.
Beyond all doubt Dinitak was serious about this concubine business, crazy as it sounded. Dekkeret knew better than to try to argue with him in the area of moral niceties. Where matters of that sort were concerned, Dinitak inhabited a world of his own.
Dekkeret sighed.
“As you wish,” he said. “The girl stays home.”
The job of breaking the news to Keltryn became Fulkari’s responsibility. She and Dekkeret agreed that if they left the matter to Dinitak, his clumsy explanations would infuriate Keltryn to the point where the relationship could not survive.