There was a silence between them that went on and on and on. If only he would reach out his hand to her, she told herself, she would hurl herself into his embrace in front of all these others, these great men of the realm, these princes and counts and dukes. But he did not reach out.
Instead he said in that same tight tone, after what felt like years but more likely had been only five or six seconds, “I’ve been meaning to send for you, Fulkari. We need to speak, you know.”
Fatal words. The words she had hoped not to hear.
We need to speak? Of what, my lord? What is there left for us to say?
That was what she wished she could say. And then move past him and walk swiftly on. But she kept her gaze level and maintained a cool tone of high formality in her reply: “Yes, my lord. Whenever you wish, my lord.”
Dekkeret’s forehead was glistening now with sweat. This must be as hard for him as it was for her, Fulkari realized.
He turned to his chamberlain. “You will arrange a private audience for the Lady Fulkari for tomorrow afternoon, Zeldor Luudwid. We will meet in the Methirasp Hall.”
“Very good, sir,” the chamberlain said.
“He wants to see me, Keltryn!” Fulkari said. They were in Keltryn’s modest, cluttered apartment in the Setiphon Arcade, two flights down from the more imposing suite that Fulkari herself occupied. She had gone straight to Keltryn’s place after her encounter with Dekkeret. “I was passing through one of the Vildivar Balconies, and he was coming the other way with Vandimain and Dinitak and a lot of other people, and we had no choice but to walk right up to each other.” Quickly she described the brief meeting, Dekkeret’s uneasiness, her own conflicting emotions, the arm’s-length nature of the quick conversation, the appointment for her to see him the following day.
“Well, why shouldn’t he want to see you?” Keltryn asked. “You aren’t any uglier than you were last month, and even a busy man like the Coronal likes to have someone next to him in bed now and then, I’d imagine. So he saw you there in front of him, and he thought, ‘Oh, yes, Fulkari—I remember Fulkari—’ ”
“What a child you are, Keltryn.”
Keltryn grinned. “You don’t think I’m right?”
“Of course not. The whole notion is contemptible. Obviously you must think that both he and I are completely trivial people—that he sees nothing more in me than a handy plaything for lonely nights, and that all it would take for me to go running to him is a quick snap of his fingers—”
“But you’re going to go to see him, aren’t you?”
“Of course. Am I supposed to tell the Coronal of Majipoor that I can’t be bothered to accept his invitation?”
“Well, then, you’ll find out fast enough whether I’m right or not,” Keltryn said. Her eyes were sparkling triumphantly. She was enjoying this. “Go to him. Listen to what he has to say. I predict that within five minutes he’ll be sliding his hands all over you. And you’ll turn to jelly when he does.”
Fulkari stared at her sister in mingled fury and amusement. She was such a child, after all. What did she know about men, she who had never given herself to one? And yet—yet—standing as she did outside the whole sweaty business of men and women, Keltryn just might have a certain perspective that Fulkari herself, caught in the thick of all this intrigue, did not.
After all, Keltryn at seventeen wasn’t all that callow and raw. There was a no-nonsense wisdom about her that Fulkari was beginning to come to respect. It was a mistake to go on regarding her as a little girl forever. Changes were taking place. You could see it in her face: Fulkari was startled to see that she looked less boyish, suddenly, as though she were finally making the transition from coltish girl to real womanhood.
Fulkari roamed around the room, restlessly picking up and putting down one and another of the cut-glass bottles that Keltryn liked to collect. A flood of contradictory thoughts roared through her.
At length she turned and said, the words coming out in a high-voiced fluty tone that gave her that odd feeling once more that Keltryn was the older sister and she the younger one, “How can he seriously want to start it all over again, Keltryn? After what I said to him when he asked me to marry him? No. No, it just isn’t possible. He knows there’s no point in stirring everything up a second time. And if he’s merely interested in a bedmate, with no complications involved, the Castle is full of other women, much more suitable than I am, who’d be happy to oblige. He and I have too much history to allow anything of that sort to happen now.”
Keltryn gave her a wide-eyed, serious stare. “And if he does still want you, anyway? Isn’t that what you want also?”
“I don’t know what I want. You know I love him.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s looking for a wife, and I’ve already said I don’t want to marry a Coronal.” Fulkari shook her head. She felt some measure of clarity returning to her troubled mind. “No, Keltryn, you’re wrong. The last thing Dekkeret wants is to get entangled with me again. I think that the reason he’s asked for me to come to him is because he’s realized that he never did get around to telling me formally that it’s over, and he feels a little guilty about it, because he owes me that much at a minimum. He’s been so busy being Coronal that he’s left me dangling, essentially, and it’s time for him to do the right thing. And when we ran into each other like that on that balcony he must have thought, ‘Oh, well, I really can’t let things drift on like this any longer.’”
“Maybe so. And how do you feel about that? That he’s summoned you just to finish everything off? Truthfully.”
“Truthfully?” Fulkari hesitated only an instant. “I hate it. I don’t want it to be over. I told you: I still love him, Keltryn.”
“Yet you told him you wouldn’t marry him. What do you expect him to do? He has to get on with his life. He doesn’t need mistresses now: he needs a wife.”
“I didn’t refuse to marry him. I refused to marry the Coronal.”
“Yes. Yes. You keep saying that. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it, Fulkari?”
“It wasn’t, when I said it. He hadn’t been officially proclaimed, yet. I suppose I hoped he’d give it all up for me. But of course he didn’t.”
“It was a crazy thing to ask, you know.”
“I realize that. He’s been preparing himself for the past fifteen years to succeed Lord Prestimion, and when the moment comes I say, ‘No, no, I’m much more important than all that, aren’t I, Dekkeret?’ How could I have been so stupid?” Fulkari turned away. This was giving her a headache. She had come running to Keltryn, she saw, in some kind of frenzy of muddled girlish excitement—“He wants to see me!”—and Keltryn had methodically exposed the full extent of her confusions. That was valuable, but also very painful. She wanted no more of this discussion.
“Fulkari?” Keltryn said, when some time had passed in silence. “Are you all right?”
“More or less, yes.—What about going for a swim?”
“I was just going to suggest the same thing.”
“Fine,” Fulkari said. “Let’s go.” And then, to change the subject: “Are you still keeping up with your fencing, now that Septach Melayn’s gone to the Labyrinth?”
“Somewhat,” Keltryn said. “I meet twice a week in the gymnasium with one of the boys from Septach Melayn’s class.”
“Audhari, is it? The one from Stoienzar that you told me about?”
“Audhari, yes.”
That was interesting. Fulkari waited for Keltryn to say something more about Audhari, but nothing was forthcoming. She scrutinized Kel-tryn’s face with care, wondering if some telltale sign of embarrassment or discomfort would show through, something that would reveal that her little virgin sister had finally taken herself a lover. But none of that was visible. Either Keltryn was a more accomplished actress than Fulkari had given her credit for being, or there was nothing more than innocent fencing-practice going on between her and this Audhari.