And in that silence Dekkeret, in astonishment, thought that he did indeed hear something—a rusty, grinding sound, so faint that it scarcely crossed the threshold of his hearing, a sound that might have been rising from the ground out of the roots of the tree before which he knelt. Was it the huge old tree swaying in the first breeze of evening? Or had the oracle—how could it be possible?—actually spoken, offering the new Coronal a couple of groaning syllables of unintelligible wisdom?
He glanced again toward Fulkari. There was a strange look in her eyes, as if she had heard something too.
But then Kriskinnin Durch broke the spell with a cheerful, robust clapping of his hands. “Well done, my lord, well done! The trees have welcomed your gifts, and have, I hope, imparted their wisdom to you! What an honor for us this is, after all these years, a Coronal paying homage to our marvelous trees! What a wonderful honor!”
“You didn’t really hear anything, did you?” asked Fulkari in a low voice, as she and Dekkeret moved away.
Had he? No. No. Of course not, he decided.
“The murmuring of the wind is what I heard,” he said. “And maybe some shifting of the roots. But it’s all very dramatic, isn’t it? And spooky, even.”
“Yes,” said Fulkari. “Spooky.”
7
“Sabers today?” Audhari asked, surprised, as he entered the gymnasium room where he and Keltryn held their twice-weekly fencing session. “You and I haven’t ever dueled with sabers before.”
“We will today,” said Keltryn, in a voice tight and hard with anger.
She had arrived at the fencing-hall five minutes early to select her weapon and make herself familiar with its greater length and heft. Septach Melayn had thought she was too light-framed to work with the saber. Probably he was right about that. She had tried it a couple of times without much show of aptitude, and he had excused her from saber drills thereafter.
But she had no desire today for the elegant posing and prinking of rapier-work. Today she wanted the big weapon. She wanted to slash and bash and crash, to inflict damage and if necessary to be damaged herself. None of this had anything to do with Audhari. It was her boiling fury over Dinitak, mounting up and mounting up and mounting up until it overflowed within her, that drove her actions today.
Keltryn had lost track by now of how many weeks it was since Dinitak had gone off into the west-country with the Coronal and Fulkari. Four weeks, was it? Five? She could not say. It seemed like an eternity and a half. However long it was, it felt like a far longer span of time than her entire little romance with Dinitak had covered.
It all seemed like nothing more than a dream, now, those few strange weeks with Dinitak. Before he came along she had guarded her body as though it were a temple and she were its high priestess. Then—she was not even sure why; had it been real physical attraction, or the impatience of her own maturing body, or even something as trivial as wanting to step forward finally into the kind of existence that her sister had had so long?—she had opened herself to Dinitak, and permitted him to penetrate in more senses than one the sanctuary of her self, and he had led her into realms of pleasure and excitement far beyond anything she had imagined in her virginal fantasies.
But there had been more to it than sex, or so she had thought. For those few weeks she had ceased at last to think of herself as I and had begun to be a we.
And then—as casually as though she were a worn-out garment—he had discarded her. Discarded. No other word applied, so far as she was concerned. To go jaunting off into the west-country like that with Dekkeret and Fulkari, and to leave her behind because it was—what had Fulkari told her?—because it was “politically inappropriate” for him to be accompanied by an unmarried woman while he was traveling in the Coronal’s entourage—
It was hard to believe that any man in the early throes of a passionate love affair would take such a position. Dinitak was famous for his bluntness, for his rugged honesty: he was surely capable of speaking up even to Lord Dekkeret, telling him, “I’m sorry, your lordship, but if Keltryn doesn’t go, I don’t go either.”
But he hadn’t said any such thing. She doubted that the Coronal would have been troubled in the slightest by her presence on the journey. It had been Dinitak’s idea to leave her behind, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s. How could he do such a thing? Keltryn asked herself. And the ugly answer came too fast: Because he’s grown tired of me already. I must be too eager, too demanding, too—young. And this is his way of dumping me.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Fulkari had said. “He’s crazy about you, Keltryn. I assure you, he hates leaving you at the Castle like this. But he’s just too prim to bring a young woman like you along with him on an official journey. He said it would be degrading to you, that it would make you seem like a concubine.”
“A concubine!”
“You know he has some extremely old-fashioned ideas.”
“Not so old-fashioned that he wouldn’t sleep with me, Fulkari.”
“You told me yourself that he seemed pretty hesitant even about that.”
“Well—”
Keltryn had to admit that Fulkari was right on that score. She had practically had to throw herself at Dinitak, that day at the pool, before he was willing at last to accept what she was offering. And even then there had been that odd reaction of dismay and chagrin, afterward, when he realized that she had given him her virginity. He is just too complicated for me, Keltryn had decided. But that did not help her get over her fury at being excluded from the west-country trip, or at being separated for so many weeks from the man she loved while their romance was still in its full early heat.
In the days that followed her anger with him came and went. Sometimes she thought that she had ceased to care, that Dinitak had merely been a phase in her late adolescence that she would look back toward eventually with amusement and nostalgia. At such times she would feel entirely calm for hours at a stretch. But then she grew furious with him for having wrecked her life. She had given him more than her innocence, she told herself: she had given him her love. And he had thrown it mockingly back in her face.
This was one of the angry days, today. Keltryn had dreamed a vivid dream of him, of the two of them together; she had imagined that he was in her bed beside her; she had reached hungrily for him, only to find herself alone. And had awakened in a red haze of frustration and rage.
She would be fencing with Audhari this day. Sabers, she thought. Yes. Slash and bash and crash. Work the anger out of her system with some heavyweight swordplay.
The tall freckle-faced young man from Stoienzar seemed baffled and bemused by her desire to use the big weapon. Not only was she inexperienced with it, but his advantage of height and strength would be enormously more significant with sabers than it was with rapiers or batons, where technique and quick reaction time mattered as much as simple force. But she would not be gainsaid.
“On your guard!” she cried.
“Remember, Keltryn, the saber uses the cutting edge as well as the point. And you have to protect your arm against—”
She lowered her mask and let her eyes blaze at him. “Don’t condescend to me, Audhari. On your guard, I said!”
It was an impossible match, though. The saber was a little too heavy for her slender arm. And she had only the sketchiest idea of the correct technique. She knew that the fencers had to keep farther apart than they did when using rapiers, but that meant it was impossible for her to reach him with a simple lunge. She had to resort to crude inelegant back-alley lateral swings that would surely have brought yelps of outrage from Septach Melayn had he been there to witness her performance.