Too bad, she thought. It was time for a little romance in Keltryn’s life.
Then abruptly Keltryn said, as they reached the pool, “Tell me, Fulkari. Do you know Dinitak Barjazid at all well?”
Fulkari frowned. “Dinitak? What makes you ask about him?”
“I’m asking because I’m asking.” And now, to her immense surprise, Fulkari saw the signs of tension that had been absent when Audhari’s name had come up. “Is he a friend of yours?” Keltryn said.
“In a very casual way, yes. You can’t spend much time around Dekkeret without getting to know Dinitak too. He’s usually to be found not very far from Dekkeret, you know. But he and I have never been particularly close. Acquaintances, really, rather than friends.—Will you tell me what this is about, Keltryn? Or is it something I’m not supposed to know?”
Keltryn now wore an expression of elaborate indifference. “He interests me, that’s all. I happened to run into him yesterday over by Lord Haspar’s Rotunda, when I was on my way to fencing practice, and we talked for a couple of minutes. That’s all there is. Don’t get any ideas, Fulkari! All we did was talk.”
“Ideas? What ideas would you mean?”
“He’s very—unusual, I thought,” Keltryn said. She seemed to be measuring her words very carefully. “There’s something fierce about him—something mysterious and stern. I suppose it’s because he’s from Suvrael originally. Every Suvraelinu I’ve ever met has been a little strange. The hot sun must do that to them. But he’s strange in an interesting way, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” Fulkari said, calibrating the gleam that had come into her sister’s eyes just then. She knew as well as anyone did what a gleam like that in the eyes of a seventeen-year-old girl meant.
Dinitak? How odd. How interesting. How unexpected.
Dekkeret said, “I owe you an apology, Fulkari.”
Fulkari, out of breath after a long frantic sprint through the interminable coils and twists of Lord Stiamot’s Library, was slow to reply. She had arrived twenty minutes late for her audience with the Coronal, having taken one wrong turn after another in the endless miles of the collection. She had never seen so many books in her life as she had just now while running through those corridors. She had no idea that there were that many books in existence. Had anyone ever read any of them? Would there be no end to these thousands of shelves? Finally an ancient, fossilized-looking librarian had taken pity on her and guided her through the maze to Lord Dekkeret’s secluded little study in the Me-thirasp Long Hall.
“An apology?” she said at last, if only to be saying something at all.
Dekkeret’s desk was a barrier between them. It was piled high with official documents, long parchment sheets formidably festooned in ribbons and seals. They seemed to be marching across the brightly polished surface of the desk toward him, an encroaching army demanding his attention.
Dekkeret looked tired and ill at ease. Today he wore no fine regal robes, only a simple gray tunic loosely belted at the waist.
“An apology, yes, Fulkari.” He appeared to be forcing the words out. “For having drawn you into such an unhappy, impossible relationship.”
She found his statement baffling. “Impossible? Perhaps. But I was the one that made it that way. Why should you feel that you have to apologize for anything?—And why call it ‘unhappy,’ Dekkeret? Was it really such an unhappy relationship? Is that how it seemed to you?”
“Not for a long while. But you have to agree that it ended unhappily.”
The phrase went reverberating through her soul. It ended. It ended. It ended.
Yes. Of course it had ended. But she was unwilling to hear the words themselves. Those few crisp syllables, spoken aloud, had the finality of a descending blade.
Fulkari waited a moment for the impact to lessen. “Even so,” she said. “I still don’t understand what it is that you feel you need to apologize for.”
“You couldn’t possibly know. But that’s why I asked you to come here today. I can’t conceal the truth from you any longer.”
Restlessly she said, “What are you talking about, Dekkeret?”
She could see him groping for words, struggling to organize his reply.
He seemed to have aged five years since they had last been together. His face was pale and drawn, and there were shadows under his eyes, and his broad shoulders were hunched as though sitting up straight was too much of an effort for him today. This was a Dekkeret she had never seen before, this tired, suddenly indecisive man. She wanted to reach out to him, to stroke his brow, to give him whatever comfort she could.
Hesitantly he said, “When I first met you, Fulkari, I was instantly attracted to you. Do you remember? I must have looked like a man who had been struck by a bolt of lightning.”
Fulkari smiled. “I remember, yes. You stared and stared and stared. You were staring so hard that I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the way I was dressed.”
“Nothing was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop staring, that was all. Then you moved along, and I asked someone who you were, and I arranged to have you invited to a levee that the Lady Varaile was holding the following week. Where I had you brought forward to be introduced to me.”
“And you stared some more.”
“Yes. Surely I did. Do you remember what I said, then?”
She had no clear memory of that. Whatever he had told her then, it was lost to her now, swept away in the confusion and excitement of that first moment. Uncertainly she replied, “You asked if you could see me again, I suppose.”
“That was later. What did I say first?”
“Do you really suppose that I can remember everything in such detail? It was so long ago, Dekkeret!”
“Well, I remember,” he said. “I asked you if you were of Normork blood. No, you replied: Sipermit. I told you then that you reminded me very much of someone I had known in Normork long ago—my cousin Sithelle, in fact. Do you recall any of that? An extraordinary resemblance, your eyes, your hair, your mouth and chin, your long arms and legs—so much like Sithelle that I thought I was seeing her ghost.”
“Sithelle is dead, then?”
“These twenty years. Slain in the streets of Normork by an assassin who was trying to reach Prestimion. I was there. She died in my arms. I never realized until many years later how much I had loved her. And then, when I saw you that day at court—looking at you, knowing nothing whatever about you, thinking only, Here is Sithelle restored to me—”
He broke off. He glanced away, abashed.
Fulkari felt her cheeks flaming. This was worse than humiliating: it was infuriating. “You weren’t attracted to me for myself?” she asked. There was heat in her voice, too, that she could not suppress. “You were drawn to me only because I looked like somebody else you once had known? Oh, Dekkeret—Dekkeret—!”
In a barely audible tone he said, “I told you that I owed you an apology, Fulkari.”
Tears crowded into her eyes—tears of rage. “So I was never anything to you but a kind of flesh-and-blood replica of someone else you weren’t able to have? When you looked at me you saw Sithelle, and when you kissed me you were kissing Sithelle, and when you went to bed with me you were—”