There would be sufficient opportunity later on, she knew, for deep, searching conversations, long hand-in-hand strolls through quiet corridors of the Castle, dinners by candelight, and such. Enough of the old tomboyish Keltryn still remained alive in her, the virginal student of swordsmanship who was so adept at holding boys at bay, that she would tell herself from time to time that they ought not to allow their relationship to be entirely one of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation; but yet, now that she had had her first taste of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation, she found herself quite willing to postpone those deep, searching conversations and long hand-in-hand strolls for some future phase of the affair.
Dinitak, for all the asceticism that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup, appeared to feel the same way. His own appetite for love-making, unleashed now after who knew how long a period of restraint, was at the very least as strong as hers. Gladly they pushed each other again and again to the edge of exhaustion, and beyond the edge.
But establishing that kind of relationship had not been at all simple to achieve. For the first two weeks after their initial accidental meeting outside Lord Haspar’s Rotunda they had seen each other practically every day, but he never even came near to offering anything like a physical approach, and Keltryn had no idea how to elicit one. She had become only too well accustomed to the unwanted attentions of classmates like Polliex and Toraman Kanna; but how did one go about inviting wanted attentions? She began to wonder whether Dinitak might be the same sort of man as Septach Melayn, and whether it would be her peculiar destiny to fall in love only with men who were by innate nature unavailable to her.
She had no doubt that she was in love with him. Dinitak was unlike anyone else she had ever known, both in her girlhood in Sipermit and at the Castle. His dark, brooding good looks, that lean, taut Suvraelinu look that came from having grown up under the harsh, unforgiving sun of the desert continent, held a powerful, almost irresistible, appeal for her. That he was slender, almost flimsy, of build and hardly an inch taller than she was herself made no difference to her. When she looked at him she felt—in her knees, in her breast, in her loins—a sense of overpowering attraction of a sort she had never experienced before.
He was unusual in other ways, too. There was a bluntness, even a roughness, about his way of dealing with people that must have come, Keltryn thought, from his upbringing in Suvrael. He was a commoner, for one thing: that made him different right there from the boys she had grown up with. But there was something else. She knew very little about his background, but there were rumors that his father had been a criminal of some sort, that the father had tried to play some sort of ugly trick on Dekkeret when Dekkeret was a young man traveling in Suvrael, and that Dinitak, appalled at his father’s schemings, had turned against him and helped Dekkeret take him prisoner.
Whether that was true or not, Keltryn had no idea, but it felt true. From various things Dinitak had said, to her and to other people around the Castle, she knew that he held a hard, austere view of things, that he had no patience with any sort of irregular behavior along a range that ran from mere laziness and sloppiness at one end of the scale to criminality at the other. He seemed driven by a powerful moral imperative: a reaction, someone said, against the lawlessness of his father. He was an idealist, honest to the point sometimes of brutality. He was quick to denounce lapses of virtue in others, and, to his great credit, he did not seem to commit any such lapses himself.
Such a person, Keltryn knew, could all too easily seem prudish and preachy and self-righteous. Yet, strangely, Dinitak did not strike her that way. He was good company, lively, entertaining, graceful in his manner, capable of a certain sharp-edged wit. No wonder that Lord Dekkeret was so fond of him. As for Dinitak’s powerful sense of right and wrong, one had to admit that he lived by his own strictures: he was as hard on himself as he was on anyone else, and asked for no praise for that. He seemed naturally upright and incorruptible. It was simply the way he was. One had to take a person like that as he came.
But was a person like that, she wondered, too high-minded to indulge in the bodily passions? Because she herself had finally decided it was time to indulge in those passions herself, and she finally had found someone with whom she would like to indulge, and he seemed utterly unaware that she felt that way.
In her desperation it occurred to her, at length, that she had an expert in such matters right within her own family. And so she consulted her sister Fulkari.
“You might try putting him in a situation where he really has very little choice, and see what he does,” Fulkari suggested.
Of course Fulkari would know how to go about it! And so one afternoon Keltryn invited Dinitak to join her for a swim in the Setiphon Arcade’s pool that evening. Hardly anyone seemed to be using the pool these days, and no one at all—Keltryn had checked—went there in the evening. Just to be certain, though, she took the trouble to lock the door to the pool from within once she and Dinitak arrived.
He had brought a swimsuit with him, naturally.
Now or never, Keltryn thought. As he started off to one of the dressing rooms she said, “Oh, we don’t really need to wear suits here, do we? I never bring one. I haven’t brought one tonight.” And she slipped quickly out of the few garments she was wearing, trotted blithely past him with her heart thundering so violently that she thought it would crack her ribs, and executed a perfect dive into the pink porphyry tank. Dinitak hesitated only a moment. Then he stripped also—she looked up from the pool, staring in wonder and awe at the beauty of his trim, narrow-waisted body—and leaped in after her.
They splashed around for a while in the warm, cinnamon-scented water. She challenged him to a race, and they streaked side by side from one end of the pool to the other, ending in what they could only call a tie. Then she hauled herself up out of the pool, found some towels to spread out on the tiled margin, and beckoned to him to join her.
“What if someone comes?” he asked.
She made no attempt to conceal the mischievous mirth she felt. “Nobody will. I locked the door.”
She could not have made it more plain, lying there naked on this pile of soft towels in this warm, humid room that they had entirely to themselves, that she had brought him here to give herself to him. If he disdained her now, it would be the clearest possible message that he had no interest in being her lover—that he found her physically unattractive, or that he was not a man who responded to women, or else that his own hyperdeveloped moral sensibility would not permit him to enjoy the pleasures of the body in any free and easy way.
None of those things were true. Dinitak lay down alongside her, and easily and capably gathered her into his arms and put his lips to hers and sent one of his hands roving over her firm little breasts and downward then to the juncture of her thighs, and Keltryn knew that it was going to happen to her at last, that she was about to cross the great boundary that separated girls from women, that Dinitak would initiate her this evening into the mysteries that she had never dared to experience before.
She wondered if it would hurt. She wondered if she would do things the right way.
But it turned out that there was no need to think about right ways and wrong ways. Dinitak obviously knew what he was doing, and she followed his lead easily and after a time she was able just to let her own instincts take charge. As for pain, there was only a moment of it, nothing like what she had feared, though it was a bit startling for an instant and she did let a little gasp escape her lips. After that there were no problems. What had happened felt strange, yes. But very fine. Fantastic. Unforgettable. It seemed to her that she had stepped just now through a doorway which had admitted her to some altogether unfamiliar new world where everything glowed with bright auras of delight.