Picking his words judiciously, Dekkeret said, “A few odd things have been going on lately across the sea. What sort of things isn’t particularly important right now. But Prestimion wants me to head west and station myself somewhere along the coast, so that if it turns out to be necessary for me to go to Zimroel in the near future, I’ll already be well on the way there.”
“Zimroel!” She said it as though he were talking about a voyage to the Great Moon.
“To Zimroel, yes. Perhaps. None of this may ever come to pass, you realize. But the Pontifex feels that we need to look into it even so. Therefore he’s asked Dinitak and me to head out to Alaisor and—”
“Dinitak also?” Fulkari said, her eyebrows shooting upward.
“Dinitak will be traveling with us, yes. Doing special government research, using certain detecting equipment that—” No, he could hardly speak of that either. “Using certain special equipment,” he finished lamely. “He’ll be reporting to me on a daily basis. You do like Dinitak, don’t you? You won’t have any problem about his accompanying us.”
“Of course not.—And Keltryn?” she asked. “What about her?”
“I don’t understand,” Dekkeret said. “What in particular do you mean?”
“Is she going to be coming with us too?”
He felt lost. “I’m not following you, Fulkari. Are you saying that whenever we take a trip anywhere, you’ll want Keltryn to come along with us?”
“Hardly. But we’ll be gone several months at the very least, won’t we, Dekkeret?”
“At the very least, yes.”
“Don’t you think they’ll miss each other, having to be apart as long as that?”
This was utterly incomprehensible. “Dinitak and Keltryn, you mean? Miss each other? I don’t at all understand what you’re talking about. Do they even know each other, except in passing?”
“You mean you don’t know?” Fulkari said, and laughed. “He hasn’t said anything about it to you? And you honestly haven’t noticed? Dinitak and Keltryn? Really, Dekkeret! Really!”
3
Keltryn was in the little bedroom of her apartment at the Setiphon Arcade, laying out the cards for what she thought must be her three thousandth game of solitaire since the Pontifex had summoned Dinitak to Muldemar House for Teotas’s funeral.
Four of Comets. Six of Starbursts. Ten of Moons.
Why was it necessary for Dinitak to be at Teotas’s funeral? Dinitak had no official place in the government nor was he a member of the Castle Mount aristocracy. His only role at the Castle was as Dekkeret’s friend and occasional traveling companion. And, so far as Keltryn was aware, Teotas and Dinitak had been only nodding acquaintances, nothing more, until very recently. There wasn’t any reason for him to be at the funeral. No one had said anything at all about Dinitak’s going down to Muldemar House when the funeral arrangements were first being set up.
And then, right on the eve of the funeral itself, a courier in Pontifical uniform suddenly arriving to say that Prestimion requested the presence of Dinitak Barjazid immediately at Muldemar? Why? On such short notice, Keltryn thought, it was unlikely that Dinitak would have been able to get down there in time for the ceremony. So it must have had to do with something else. And why had the message summoning Dinitak come from the Pontifex, rather than from his own good friend Lord Dekkeret? Dekkeret was down there too, after all. The whole thing was very mysterious. And she wished that Dinitak would hurry back, now that the funeral was done with, she assumed, and Teotas safely deposited in his tomb.
Petulantly she dealt out the cards.
Pontifex of Nebulas. Damn! She had the Coronal of Nebulas on the table already. Couldn’t the Pontifex have turned up five minutes ago? Nine of Moons. Knave of Nebulas. She slipped the Knave below the Coronal of Nebulas. Three of Comets. Keltryn scowled. Even when the cards turned up in the right order she took no pleasure from it. She was sick of solitaire. She wanted Dinitak. Five of Moons. Queen of Star-bursts. Seven of—
A knock!
“Keltryn? Keltryn, are you in there!”
She swept the cards to the floor. “Dinitak! You’re back at last!” She ran toward the door, remembered at the last moment that she was wearing nothing but her loinclout, and hastily snatched up a robe. Dinitak was so terribly fastidious about such things, so very moral. Despite everything that had passed between them since they had become lovers, he would be shocked if she were to come to the door virtually naked. The robe had to be on her before it came off: that was how he was. Besides, Dekkeret might be with him. Or the Pontifex Prestimion, for all she knew.
She opened the door. There he was: alone. She caught his wrist and tugged him inside, and then she was in his arms, at last, at last, at last. She covered him with kisses. It felt to her as though he had been gone at least six months.
“Well!” she said, releasing him, finally. “Are you glad to see me?”
“You know I am.” His eyes gleamed fiercely, shining like beacons in his narrow, angular face. He moistened his lower lip with a quick movement of his tongue. Straitlaced and high-minded as he might sometimes be, he seemed quite thoroughly ready right now to pull the robe from her.
A roguish mood seized her. She decided to make him wait a little while. It would be a test of her own fortitude as much as his. “Did you and your friend the Pontifex have a lot of interesting things to talk about?” she asked, taking a couple of steps back from him.
Dinitak looked very uneasy. His eyelids flickered three or four times very rapidly in what seemed almost like a tic, and a muscle twitched in one of his lean, sun-darkened cheeks. “It’s—not something I can really discuss,” he said. “Not now, anyway.” His voice sounded strained and hoarse. “We had meetings—the Pontifex and the Coronal and I—there are some problems, political problems, they want me to provide some technical assistance—” He was still staring at her hungrily all the while. Keltryn loved that, the fierce way he looked at her. Those dark gleaming eyes, that powerful gaze, that tremendous intensity of his, the powerful magnetic force that emanated from him, that coiled-spring tension: those aspects of him had fascinated her from the first moment.
“And the funeral?” she said, deliberately continuing to hold him at bay. “What was that like?”
“I got there too late for it. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t for the funeral that they asked me down, you know. It was for the other thing, the technical assignment.”
“The thing you won’t tell me about.”
“The thing I can’t tell you about.”
“All right, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s probably enormously boring, anyway. Fulkari’s told me about the official things that Lord Dekkeret does all day long, now that he’s Coronal. They’re colossally boring. I wouldn’t be Coronal for anything in the world. They could wave the starburst crown in front of me and the Vildivar necklace and Lord Moazlimon’s ring and all the rest of the crown jewels and I still wouldn’t—” Abruptly she had had enough of this game. “Oh, Dinitak, Dinitak, I missed you so horribly all the time you were at Muldemar! And don’t say that it was only a few days. It felt like centuries to me.”
“And to me,” he said. “Keltryn—Keltryn—”
He reached for her, and she went willingly to him. The robe fell away. His hands ran eagerly up and down her body as she tugged him to the carpeted floor.
They were still new enough as a couple so that the physical part of their intimacy had a ferocious, almost compulsive urgency about it. Keltryn, to whom all of this was entirely unfamiliar, felt not only the excitement that came with the release of pent-up desires but also a powerful sense of wanting to make up for lost time, now that she had at last allowed herself to experience this aspect of adult life.