“I have to talk to you,” he told her.
She glanced at him hesitantly, almost reluctantly. Then she took a last bite of pancake, swallowed some orange juice, and excused herself to her friends. She followed him out to the privacy of the completely empty courtyard where they had last talked. Since then, they had looked at each other, and they had refused to look at each other, but they had hardly spoken at all.
They sat down on one of the benches and Iray stared at her clenched hands.
“I’m sorry,” began Teray, “but I have to ask you ….Is there any way … through you, that Coransee will hear what I say?”
“No,” she said softly. “I’m linked with him, but only so he can be sure that you and I… that we don’t make love.”
“The link is just an alarm, then?”
She nodded. “And I won’t tell him anything you don’t want him to know.”
She was offering him the same loyalty that she had always offered, but somehow, something was wrong. Was it only her link with Coransee that had started her twisting her hands, that made her willing to look at him only in quick glances?
“Will you open to me?” he asked.
“You don’t trust me,” she said. There was neither surprise nor anger in her voice.
“I trust you … trust who you were. I want to trust you now.”
“You can. I won’t open to you, but I won’t betray you either.”
“Has he hurt you? Has he done something you don’t want me to …?”
“No, Teray. Why should he hurt me?”
“Then what’s happened?”
“I took your advice.”
There it was. All his fears wrapped in four words. He could not pretend to misunderstand her any longer.
“I started out playing a role,” she said. “A hard role. Then …” She faced him, finally, wearily. “Then it got easier. Now it’s not a role anymore.”
Teray said nothing, could think of nothing to say.
“He’s not what I thought,” she said. “I thought his power had made him cruel and brutal, but instead …”
“Iray!” He could not sit still and listen to another woman inventing good qualities for Coransee. Especially not Iray.
She looked at him solemnly, her shielded mind not quite hiding the fact that she did not want to be there with him. She had stilled her twisting hands, but her very stillness bespoke tension, withdrawal.
“Iray … what if there was a way out? For us, I mean. What if you didn’t have to stay with him?”
“Is there?”
“Yes!” He had to trust her. How could he expect her to believe him if he did not tell her what there was to believe? He had failed her once. Twice. She had reason to be hesitant. He outlined his plan quickly, giving her the assurance that Michael had passed on to him through Amber without mentioning Amber herself. Now was not the time to cloud things further.
Iray took a deep breath and shook her head. “Clayarks,” she said. “All the way to Forsyth. Hundreds of kilometers of Clayarks.”
“Not that bad,” he said. “We could make it. We could
“No.”
He was silent for a long moment. He could look at her and see that she meant it. Instead, he looked at the ground, at a wall of the House. “All right. I can’t really blame you. I almost didn’t ask you because I didn’t think I had the right to risk your life as well as my own. And I don’t have that right, of course. But I said I wouldn’t desert you. I had to ask you if you wanted to take the risk.”
“I’d take it. If I wanted to be with you the way I did once, I’d go.”
He said nothing, only stared at her.
“You couldn’t accept his controls,” she said. “Even though your own freedom wasn’t all that was involved, you couldn’t accept them.”
“Would you have wanted me controlledlike Joachim?”
“No! No, I understand what.you did. That’s why I never blamed you, never tried to make you change your mind. I knew you’d rather be dead than controlled. You did what you had to do. Then you told me what I had to do. And you were right both times. Well, now I’ve done what I had to do. And it was good, and I’m home. I’m going to stay here.”
There was nothing he could say to her that would not twist back and indict him, too. Even his anger was more at his own helplessness, and at Coransee, than at her. He had thought of her with Coransee, even thought of her corning to prefer Coransee. But he had never really believed she would. In spite of all Coransee’s power and apparent attractiveness to women, he had never let himself believe it.
She touched his arm and he savored her touch for a moment, then moved his arm away. She was still shielding him out and her touch brought her no closer to him. He could have taken more pleasure in Suliana’s touchthe touch of a mute.
Or Amber’s.
“Teray,” she said softly, “I have to tell you” She broke off suddenly as he looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That can’t mean much to you now, but I am sorry.”
He stood up and started toward the common-room door.
“Wait!” She caught his arm again, this time in a grip that he would have had to hurt her to loosen. He stood still, looking down at her, waiting for her to let him go.
“Leave soon, Teray, if you’re still going. Soon. I said I wouldn’t betray you, and I won’tnot deliberately. But accidentally … Well, I’m with him a lot now, and sometimes he hears things I don’t mean for him to hear.”
After a moment he nodded and she let him go. But he stayed where he was, watching her, not wanting her to see the pain in his eyes but not able to turn away again. He raised his hand to her face.
She drew back from him sharply, then turned away and hurried past him into the House.
Teray stood still for several seconds longer. Finally he shook his head. He reached out to one of his kitchen mutes. The man whose foot he had healed. Silently, with careful gentleness, Teray gave the man orders. Then he reached a stable mutea mute who was not one of his charges, but who, of course, was obliged to obey any Patternist. He gave orders to the stable mute, then went back up to his room.
Amber was dressed and having breakfast. Teray realized that he had eaten nothing, and at the same time realized that he had no appetite.
“When you get through with that, go get your things together,” he told her. “We’re leaving today. I don’t want to spend another day in this place.”
She looked surprised, but nodded slowly. “All right.”
“And take as little as possible. Put some more clothes on over those or something. We can’t go out of here looking like we’re running away.”
“I know.”
“I’m having a supply of food packed for us and horses readied. And … there’ll only be two of us.”
She said nothing to that. She went on eating.
They traveled southwest toward the coast and toward the nearest borders of the sector. Teray had decided to take the coast trail south, if he could. The inland route was easier, less likely to be washed out or blocked, but it was also the most-often-traveled route. It was where Patternist caravans passed and where Clayarks lay in wait for them. The inland route was a little shorter, too, because it did not follow the eccentricities of the coast. But it did go straight through the middle of twenty-one Patternist sectors. The little-traveled coast route went through three.
There were some Clayarks along the coast route. But then there were Clayarks everywhere, breeding like rabbits, warring among themselves, and attacking Patternists. Teray hoped to find them only in small family groups along the coast.
Michael, he recalled, had traveled part of his way north along the coast route. Teray had asked a pair of his outsiders about their trip, prying as casually as he could. With his large party, Michael had had little trouble, but he had sensed at least one large tribe. He had gone into a Patternist sector to escape it. And that was something Teray could not do. He had a better chance against the Clayarks than he would have against a group of his own people who decided to earn Coransee’s gratitude by capturing him. Until he reached Rayal’s House, the only Patternist he could trust was Amber.