It was satisfying, in its way. It did allow her to vent some of her wrath. But what she was doing was not fencing at all. It had no style, no manner, no form. She would have accomplished just as much by grabbing up a hatchet and hacking up some firewood. Audhari, perplexed by her frantic assaults, had to abandon his own well-developed technique and parry whatever way he could. Whenever he intercepted the attack of her blade with his own, the collision sent an agonizing shiver of pain through Keltryn’s hand and arm. And finally he blocked one onslaught of hers so ringingly that her saber flew clattering to the floor.
She knelt to pick her saber up and remained kneeling for a moment more, struggling to catch her breath.
“What’s going on here today?” Audhari asked. He tossed his fencing mask aside and went closer to her. “You seem all worked up over something. Is it anything I’ve done?”
“You? No—no, Audhari—”
“Then what is it? You’ve chosen a weapon that’s obviously too heavy for you, and you’re swinging it around like a battle-axe instead of trying to fence properly with me. The best saber men deploy it almost like a rapier, you know. They go for lightness and speed, not for brute power.”
“I suppose I’ll never be a good saber man, then,” she said sullenly, accenting the man. She was maskless now too.
“That’s hardly anything to be ashamed of, though. Look, Keltryn, let’s forget this saber business and start over with something lighter, and—”
“No. Wait.” She shut him up with an impatient wave of her hand. A new and strange thought was coming into her mind.
It’s time to move on beyond Dinitak.
Dinitak had served his purpose in her life. Whatever had existed between them was over and done with, as he was going to find out whenever he returned from his trip to the west-country. She didn’t need him any more. She would be a fool to go on pining as she had for a man who could abandon her so lightheartedly.
To Audhari she said, “Maybe we should just forget about fencing this morning. There are other things we could be doing.”
Her tone was sly but not ambiguous. Audhari looked at her uncomprehendingly, blinking as though she had spoken in the tongue of some other world. Keltryn stared straight into his eyes and gave him a hot, intense smile that she was certain he could interpret in only one way. Now it seemed that understanding was dawning in him.
Her own boldness amazed her. But it was very pleasing to be doing this, and doing it all on her own initiative, without relying for once on Fulkari’s advice. She was glad now that Fulkari was away from the Castle. The time had come, she knew, for her to learn to make her own way through the whirlpools of life.
“Come on, Audhari!” she cried. “Let’s go upstairs!”
“Keltryn—”
Audhari appeared totally astounded. He was bright red from the collar of his fencing jacket to the roots of his hair. His lips moved, but no reply emerged.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, finally. “You don’t want to, is that it?”
He shook his head. “How weird you are this morning, Keltryn!”
“I’m not attractive, is that it? Do you think I’m ugly? Do you, Audhari? I wouldn’t want to impose myself on a man who thinks I’m unattractive, you know.”
All too obviously Audhari felt as though he would rather be in the depths of the Labyrinth right now than having this conversation. “You’re one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, Keltryn.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that that’s not enough. Whatever we did upstairs would be completely meaningless. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me, that way, and I’ve known it and I’ve respected it. Now you change your mind just like that? That isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. It feels like you just want to use me.”
“And if I do, what of it? You can use me too. Would that be so terrible?”
“I’m not like that, Keltryn. And it wouldn’t be any good. Any more than your trying to fence with a saber was.”
Now it was her turn to look astounded. After all that she had heard while she was growing up about how men were nothing but mere monsters of lust, why was it her bad luck to keep running into ones who worried so much about morality and respectability and propriety? Why was it so difficult to find simple uncomplicated debauchery when she wanted some?
Audhari, still red-faced, went on: “Please, can we just drop this talk, all right? Please. If you want to fence, let’s fence, and if not, not. But we’ve been such good friends for so long, and now—what you’re doing now is so damned confusing, Keltryn! I beg you, stop it. Just stop it.”
She glowered at him. This was the last thing she would have expected. “Oh, I’m confusing you, am I? Well, then. I humbly beg you to forgive me for that,” she said frostily. “I’d never want to feel that I was guilty of having confused my dear sweet friend Audhari.”
Putting her saber back in the weapons rack, she went from the room without another word.
She knew that she was being cruel, and that she was the confused one. It didn’t matter. She hated him for having refused her in a moment of—
Need? Spite? She didn’t know what it was. What she knew was that she understood a great deal less about men than she had thought a few months ago.
She was still simmering with rage half an hour later when she was crossing the Pinitor Court and caught sight of Polliex of Estotilaup, her former fencing-class partner, coming from the opposite direction. As he drew near he smiled at her in a mechanical, impersonal way, but showed no sign of wanting to stop to talk. Since her last and most emphatic refusal of his invitations to her to join him for a weekend of fun and frolic at the pleasure-city of High Morpin, he had maintained an attitude of the most rigorous properness in such sporadic contact as they had had. He was, after all, a duke’s son, and knew how to behave once he had been turned down.
But Polliex also knew how to behave when an attractive young woman, even one that had treated him earlier with disdain, indicated at some later time that his attentions would not be unwelcome. Keltryn greeted him with a warmth that she doubted he would misinterpret, and he very smoothly responded without revealing the faintest trace of surprise when she began to speak of High Morpin, its power-tunnels and mirror-slides and juggernauts, and expressed regret that she had never found time to go there even once since coming to Castle Mount.
Polliex was remarkably good-looking and his courtly, polished manners were extremely pleasing in comparison with Audhari’s awkward boyishness and Dinitak’s stern rigorous virtue. Her three days and nights with him at High Morpin were filled with delight. But why, she wondered, was she holding herself back, as she found herself again and again doing, from full enjoyment of all that Polliex offered? And why did thoughts of Dinitak keep stealing into her mind, even now, even here, even when she was with someone else? She was finished with Dinitak. And yet—Oh, damn him! she thought. Damn him!
8
In Thilambaluc, a medium-sized city four hundred miles farther along the road to Alaisor, Dekkeret, remembering something that Prestimion had told him he had done in the first months of his own reign, went out at midday into the marketplace in the gray clothes of an ordinary wayfaring man to hear what might be heard. It is useful, Prestimion had said, for the Coronal sometimes to learn at first hand what people were saying in the marketplace. The Castle atop its Mount was too far up in the sky to provide a clear enough view of the real world.