“Have I not done my best to please thee, thy way?” she asked. “To have sex with thee when I be not in heat?” For she, being a unicorn mare, normally sought such interaction only when the breeding cycle demanded, and then with such intensity as to wear out any man. Her shape might be completely human, for this, but her underlying nature remained equine. The unicorns owed more to animal lineage than to human.
“Indeed you have!” he agreed. “But I want more.”
She frowned. “Mayhap another filly? Be thou eager to start a herd?”
He laughed. “No, of course not! You are all I want, and all I love! But—”
“Thou dost want me in other shape? I thought—”
“No, Fleta!” he exclaimed. “I want to marry you!”
She considered. “As the humans marry? Mating restricted one to the other, for all o’ their lives?”
“Yes.”
“But this be not the animal way, Mach. We have no need o’ such a covenant.”
“I think I do. I think of you as human.”
“I be not human,” she said firmly. “That be why thy folk—Bane’s folk—oppose our association o’ this manner. And my dam, Neysa—ne’er will she accept our union.”
He sighed. “I know it. And I think we cannot have a valid marriage without the approval of your kind or mine. So we are forced to cooperate with the Adverse Adepts, whose policies I think I should oppose.”
“I tried to free thee from this choice,” she reminded him.
“By suiciding!” he exclaimed. “You almost freed me from the need to exist!”
“Aye, I know that now,” she said contritely.
“So here we are in paradise, with no future.”
“Mayhap we could have a future, o’ a kind, if—”
He glanced sharply at her. “You know a way to persuade our relatives?”
“Mayhap. If we could but breed.”
“Breed? You mean, have offspring? That’s impossible.”
“Be it so?” she asked wistfully. “Not for aught would I dismay thee, Mach, but how nice it would be to have a foal o’ our own. Then might the relatives have to accept our union.”
“But human stock and animal stock—you may assume human form, but as you said, that doesn’t make you human. The genes know! They deal with the reality.”
“Yet must it have happened before. Surely the harpies derive from bird and human, and the vampires from bats and human, and the facility with which we unicorns learn the human semblance and speech suggests we share ancestry.”
“And the werewolves,” he agreed, intrigued. “If it happened before, perhaps it is possible again.”
“I really want thy foal,” she said.
“There must be magic that can make it feasible,” he said, the idea growing on him. “Perhaps Bane would be able to—”
“Not Bane!” she protested. “I want thine!”
“Uh, yes, of course. But I am no Adept. I’m a fledgling at magic. I don’t know whether—”
“Thou didst make the floating boat,” she pointed out. “Thou didst null the spell the Red Adept put on me. That be no minor magic.”
“In extremes, I may have done some good magic,” he admitted. “But I was lucky. For offspring I would need competence as well as luck.”
“Then make thyself a full Adept, as Bane is growing to be,” she urged. “Enchant thyself and me, that we may be fertile together. Success in that would make up for all else we lack.”
“You’re right!” he said with sudden conviction. “I must become Adept in my own right!” But almost immediately his doubt returned. “If only I knew how!”
“My Rovot Adept,” she said fondly. “Canst thou not practice?”
“Surely I can. But there are problems. No spell works more than once, so I cannot perfect any particular technique of magic without eliminating it for future use. That makes practice chancy; if I found the perfect spell, it might be too late to use it.”
“Yet if thou didst seek advice—”
“From the Adverse Adepts? I think I would not be comfortable doing that; it would give them too intimate a hold on me. I mean to do their bidding in communications between the frames, but I prefer to keep my personal life out of it.” Yet he was conscious as he spoke of the manner his personal life was responsible for their association with those Adepts; he was probably deluding himself about his ability to separate that aspect.
“Aye,” she agreed faintly. “Methinks that be best. Yet if thou couldst obtain the advice o’ a friendly Adept—”
“Who opposes our union?” he asked sharply.
“I be not sure that all oppose it.”
“Whom are you thinking of?”
“Red.”
“The troll? He’s not even human!”
“Neither be I,” she reminded him.
“Um, you may be right. He did help you try to suicide.” Mach had mixed feelings about that, too, though he knew the Red Adept had no ill will in the matter.
“He urged me not, but acceded to my will. If thou shouldst beseech him likewise—”
“It’s worth a try, certainly. But would it be safe to go there? Once we leave the protection of the Translucent Demesnes, we might have trouble returning. Our own side might prevent us.”
“I think not so, Mach. It be thy covenant they desire—thy agreement to communicate with thine other self. Thou wouldst no more do it for one side as for the other, an the agreements be wrong.”
He nodded. “Let’s think about it for a few days, then go if we find no reason not to.”
“Aye.” She kissed him, enjoying this human foible. Unicorns normally used lips mainly for gathering in food. The notion that human folk found the seeming eating of each other pleasurable made her bubble with mirth. Sometimes she burst out laughing in mid-kiss. But she kissed remarkably well, and he enjoyed holding a laughing girlform.
Before they decided, they had a visitor. It was a wolf, a female, trotting through the water to the island and passing through the barrier. Mach viewed her with caution, but Fleta was delighted.
“Furramenin!” Fleta exclaimed.
Then the wolf became a buxom young woman, and Mach recognized her also. The werebitch had guided him from the Pack to the Flock, where the lovely vampiress Suchevane had taken over. The truth was that all Fleta’s animal friends were lovely, in human form and in personality; had he encountered any of them as early and intimately as he had Fleta, he might have come to love them as he did her. He accepted this objectively, but not emotionally; Fleta was his only love.
“I come with evil tidings,” the bitch said. This appellation was no affront, any more than “woman” was for a human female. Indeed, the term “woman” might be used as an insult to a bitch. “The Adept let me pass, under truce.”
They settled under a spreading nut tree. “Some mischief to my Herd?” Fleta inquired worriedly. She was tolerated by the Herd, but no longer welcome; still, she cared for the others, and they cared for her.
The bitch smiled briefly. “Nay, not that! It relates to thy golem man.”
Fleta glanced at Mach. “The rovot be not true to me?” she asked with fleeting mischief.
“He be from Proton-frame. The Adept Stile says it makes an—an imbalance, that grows worse the more time passes, till the frames—” She seemed unable to handle the concept involved.
“Till the frames destroy themselves?” Mach asked, experiencing an ugly chill.
“Aye,” Furramenin whispered. “Be that possible?”
“I very much fear it is,” Mach said. “In the days of our parents, many folk crossed the curtain between frames, and Protonite was mined and not Phazite, generating an imbalance. They finally had to transfer enough Phazite to restore the balance, and separate the frames permanently so that this could not happen again. That depleted the power of magic here, and reduced the wealth of Proton there, but had to be done. Too great an imbalance does have destructive potential. But I would not have thought that the mere exchange of two selves would constitute such a threat.”