“Thank you, Caolwn.” The words almost choked Ronica. Sincere as the woman's words might be, could she ever guess how they turned her bowels to ice inside her? Perhaps she did, for the lambent stare from within the hood blinked twice before Caolwn turned to the door. She took up the heavy wooden box of gold that awaited her by the threshold. Ronica unlatched the door for her. She knew better than to offer lantern or candle. The Rain Wild folk had no need of light on a summer's night.
Ronica stood in her open doorway and watched Caolwn walk off into the darkness. A Rain Wild man shambled out from the shadows to join her. He took the wooden casket of gold and tucked it effortlessly under his arm. They both lifted a hand in farewell to her. She waved in return. She knew that on the beach there would be a small boat awaiting them, and farther out in the harbor a ship that bore but a single light. She wished them well, and hoped they would have a good journey. And she prayed fervently to Sa that she would never stand thus and watch one of her own walk off into darkness with them.
IN THE DARKNESS, KEFFRIA TRIED ONCE AGAIN. “KYLE?”
“Um?” His voice was warm and deep, sweet with satiation.
She fitted her body closely to his. Her flesh was warm where they touched, chilled to delicious goosebumps where the summer breeze from the open window flowed over them. He smelled good, of sex and maleness, and the solid reality of his muscle and strength were a bulwark against all night fears. Why, she demanded silently of Sa, why couldn't it all be this simple and good? He had come home this evening to say farewell to her, they had dined well and enjoyed wine together and then come together in both passion and love here. Tomorrow he would sail and be gone for however long it took him to make a trade circuit. Why did she have to spoil it with yet another discussion of Malta? Because, she told herself firmly, it had to be settled. She had to make him agree with her before he left. She would not go behind his back while he was gone. To do so would chip away the trust that had always bonded them.
So she took a deep breath and spoke the words they were both tired of hearing. “About Malta . . .” she began.
He groaned. “No. Please, Keffria, no. In but a few hours I will have to rise and go. Let us have these last few hours together in peace.”
“We haven't that luxury. Malta knows we are at odds about this. She will use that as a lever on me the whole time you are gone. Whatever she wants that I forbid, she will reply, “But Papa said I am a woman now . . . ' It will be torture for me.”
With a long-suffering sigh, he rolled away from her. The bed was suddenly a cooler place than it had been, uncomfortably cool. “So. I should take back my promise to her simply so you won't be squabbling with her? Keffria. What will she think of me? Is this really so great a difficulty as you are making it out to be? Let her go to the one gathering in a pretty dress. That's all it is.”
“No.” It took all her courage to contradict him directly. But he didn't know what he was talking about, she told herself frantically. He didn't understand, and she'd left it too late to explain it all to him tonight. She had to make him give in to her, just this once. “It's far more than dancing with a man, in a pretty dress. She's having dance lessons from Rache. I want to tell her that she must be content with that for now, that she must spend at least a year preparing to be seen as a woman in Bingtown society before she can go out as one. And I want to tell her that you and I are united in this. That you thought it over and changed your mind about letting her go.”
“But I didn't,” Kyle pointed out stubbornly. He was on his back now, staring up at the ceiling. He had lifted his hands and laced the fingers behind his head. Were he standing up, she thought, he'd have his arms crossed on his chest. “I think you are making much of a small thing. And . . . I don't say this to hurt you, but because I see it more and more in you . . . I think you simply do not wish to give up any control of Malta, that you wish to keep her a little girl at your side. I sense it almost as a jealousy in you, dear. That she vies for my attention, as well as the attentions of young men. I've seen it before; no mother wishes to be eclipsed by her daughter. A grown daughter must always be a reminder to a woman that she is not young anymore. But I think it is unworthy of you, Keffria. Let your daughter grow up and be both an ornament and a credit to you. You cannot keep her in short skirts and plaited hair forever.”
Perhaps he took her furious and affronted silence for something else, for he turned slightly toward her as he said, “We should be grateful she is so unlike Wintrow. Look at him. He not only looks and sounds like a boy, but longs to continue being one. Just the other day, aboard the ship, I came upon him working shirtless in the sun. His back was red as a lobster and he was sulking as furiously as a five-year-old. Some of the men, as a bit of a jest, had taken his shirts and pegged them up at the top of the rigging. And he feared to go up to get them back. I called him to my chamber and tried to explain to him, privately, that if he did not go up after them, the rest of the crew would think him a coward. He claimed it was not fear that kept him from going after his shirt but dignity. Standing there like a righteous little prig of a preacher! And he tried to make some moral point of it, that it was neither courage nor cowardice, but that he would not risk himself for their amusement. I told him there was very little risk to it, did he but heed what he'd been taught, and again he came back at me with some cant about no man should put another man even to a small risk simply for his own amusement. Finally, I lost patience with him and called Torg and told him to see the boy up the mast and back to get his shirt. I fear he lost a great deal of the crew's respect over that . . .”
“Why do you allow your crew to play boys' pranks when they ought to be about their work?” Keffria demanded. Her heart bled for Wintrow even as she fervently wished her son had simply gone after his own shirt. If he'd but risen to their challenge, they would have seen him as one of their own. Now they would see him as an outsider to torment. She knew it instinctively, and wondered that he had not.
“You've fair ruined the lad by sending him off to the priests.” Kyle sounded almost satisfied as he said this, and she suddenly realized how completely he had changed the topic.
“We were discussing not Wintrow but Malta.” A new tack suddenly occurred to her. “As you have insisted that only you know the correct way to raise our son in the ways of men, perhaps you should concede that only a woman can know the best way to guide Malta into womanhood.”
Even in the darkness, she could see the surprise that crossed his face at the tartness of her tone. It was, she suddenly knew, the wrong way to approach him if she wanted to win him to her side. But the words had been said and she was suddenly too angry to take them back. Too angry to try to cajole and coax him to her way of thinking.
“If you were a different type of woman, I might concede the right of that,” he said coldly. “But I recall you as you were when you were a girl. And your own mother kept you tethered to her skirts much as you seek to restrain Malta. Consider how long it took me to awaken you to a woman's feelings. Not all men have that patience. I would not see Malta grow up as backward and shy as you were.”
The cruelty of his words took her breath away. Their slow courtship, her deliciously gradual hope and then certainty of Kyle's interest in her were some of her sweetest memories. He had snatched that away in a moment, turned her months of shy anticipation into some exercise of bored patience on his part, made his awakening of her feelings an educational service he had performed for her. She turned her head and stared at this sudden stranger in her bed. She wanted to deny that he had ever spoken such words, wanted to pretend that they did not truly reflect his feelings but had been said out of some kind of spite. Coldness welled up from within her now. Spite words or true, did not it come to the same thing? He was not the man she had always believed him to be. All these years, she had been married to a fantasy, not a real person. She had imagined a husband to herself, a tender, loving, laughing man who only stayed away so many months because he must, and she had put Kyle's face on her creation. Easy enough to ignore or excuse a few flaws or even a dozen when he made one of his brief stops at home. She had always been able to pretend he was tired, that the voyage had been both long and hard, that they were simply getting re-adjusted to one another. Despite all the things he had said and done in the weeks since her father's death, she had continued to treat him and react to him as if he were the man she had created in her mind. The truth was that he had never been the romantic figure her fancies had made him. He was just a man, like any other man. No. He was stupider than most.
He was stupid enough to think she had to obey him. Even when she knew better, even when he was not around to oppose her. Realizing this was like opening her eyes to the sun's rising. How had it never occurred to her before?
Perhaps Kyle sensed that he had pushed her a bit too far. He rolled towards her, reached out across the glacial sheets to touch her shoulder. “Come here,” he bade her in a comforting voice. “Don't be sulky. Not on my last night at home. Trust me. If all goes as it should on this voyage, I'll be able to stay home for a while next time we dock. I'll be here, to take all this off your shoulders. Malta, Selden, the ship, the holdings . . . I'll put all in order and run them as they should always have been run. You have always been shy and backward . . . I should not say that to you as if it were a thing you could change in yourself. I just want to let you know that I know how hard you have tried to manage things in spite of that. If anyone is at fault, it is I, to have let these concerns have been your task all these years.”
Numbed, she let him draw her near to him, let him settle against her to sleep. What had been his warmth was suddenly a burdensome weight against her. The promises he had just made to reassure her instead echoed in her mind like a threat.
RONICA VESTRIT OPENED HER EYES TO THE SHADOWY BEDROOM.
Her window was open, the gauzy drapes moving softly with the night wind.
I sleep like an old woman now,
she thought to herself.
In fits and starts. It isn't sleeping and it isn't waking and it isn't rest.
She let her eyes close again. Maybe it was from all those months spent by Ephron's bedside, when she didn't dare sleep too deeply, when if he stirred at all she was instantly alert. Maybe, as the empty lonely months passed, she'd be able to unlearn it and sleep deep and sound again. Somehow she doubted it.
“Mother.”
A whisper light as a wraith's sigh. “Yes, dear. Mother's here.” Ronica replied to it as quietly. She did not open her eyes. She knew these voices, had known them for years. Her little sons still sometimes came, to call to her in the darkness. Painful as such fancies were, she would not open her eyes and disperse them. One held on to what comforts one had, even if they had sharp edges.
“Mother, I've come to ask your help.”
Ronica opened her eyes slowly. “Althea?” she whispered to the darkness. Was there a figure just outside the window, behind the blowing curtains. Or was this just another of her night fancies?
A hand reached to pull the curtain out of the way. Althea leaned in on the sill.
“Oh, thank Sa you're safe!”
Ronica rolled hastily from her bed, but as she stood up, Althea retreated from the window. “If you call Kyle, I'll never come back again,” she warned her mother in a low, rough voice.
Ronica came to the window. “I wasn't even thinking of calling Kyle,” she said softly. “Come back. We have to talk. Everything's gone wrong. Nothing's turned out the way it was supposed to.”
“That's hardly news,” Althea muttered darkly. She ventured closer to the window. Ronica met her gaze, and for an instant she looked down into naked hurt. Then Althea looked away from her. “Mother . . . maybe I'm a fool to ask this. But I have to, I have to know before I begin. Do you recall what Kyle said, when . . . the last time we were all together?” Her daughter's voice was strangely urgent.
Ronica sighed heavily. “Kyle said a great many things. Most of which I wish I could forget, but they seem graven in my memory. Which one are you talking about?”
“He swore by Sa that if even one reputable captain would vouch for my competency, he'd give my ship back to me. Do you remember that he said that?”
“I do,” Ronica admitted. “But I doubt that he meant it. It's just his way, to throw such things about when he is angry.”
“But you do remember him saying it?” Althea pressed.
“Yes. Yes, I remember he said that. Althea, we have much more important things to discuss than this. Please. Come in. Come back home, we need to . . .”
“No. Nothing is more important than what I just asked you. Mother, I've never known you to lie. Not when it was important. The time will come when I'll be counting on you to tell the truth.” Incredibly, her daughter was walking away, speaking over her shoulder as she went. For one frightening instant, she looked so like her father as a young man. She wore the striped shirt and black trousers of a sailor on shore. She even walked as he had, that roll to her gait, and the long dark queue of hair down her back.
“Wait!” Ronica called to her. She sat down on the windowsill and swung her legs over it. “Althea, wait!” she cried out, and jumped down into the garden. She landed badly, her bare feet protesting the rocky walk under her window. She nearly fell, but managed to catch herself. She hastened across a sward of green to the thick laurel hedge that bounded it. But when she reached it, Althea was already gone. Ronica set her hands to that dense, leafy barrier and tried to push through it. It yielded, but only a little and scratchily. The leaves were wet with dew.
She stepped back from it and looked around the night garden. All was silence and stillness. Her daughter was gone again. If she had ever really been here at all.
SESSUREA WAS THE ONE THE TANGLE CHOSE TO CONFRONT
Maulkin. It both angered and wounded Shreever that they had so obviously been conferring amongst themselves. If one had a doubt, why had not that one come to speak of it to Maulkin himself, rather than sharing the poisonous idea with the others? Now they were all crazed with it, as if they had partaken tainted meat. The foolishness was most strong in Sessurea, for as he whipped himself into position to challenge Maulkin, his orange mane was already erect and toxic.