He heard sounds outside his half-open door. A light tapping, a gentle coughing.
“Father?”
“Nialli? Is it time to go to the games already?”
“It’s still early. I wanted to talk to you before everything gets started.” A pause. “I’m not alone.”
Hresh squinted into the darkness. “Who’s with you?”
“Kundalimon. We want to talk to you together.”
“Ah.” He pressed the palms of his hands against each other. “All right, come in, both of you.”
They were damp from the rain, but the moisture, instead of soaking into their fur, seemed to cling in shining globules to the tips of it. And they were shining too. There was a radiance about them, a glow of rare joy. They stood before him holding hands like innocent children, brimming with evident happiness, overflowing with it.
Hresh felt an uneasy mixture of pleasure and anxious anticipation at the sight of them. He understood only too well that glow of inner fire that emanated from them both.
They giggled and glanced at each other, but neither spoke.
“Well?” Hresh said. “What have you two been up to?”
Nialli Apuilana turned away, sputtering smothered laughter into her shoulder. But Kundalimon stared levelly at him, smiling in that strange off-center way of his.
The boy no longer seemed like a wild creature. He had gained weight, and he looked far less unworldly, far less the eerie visitor from some unknown planet, more like any other young man of the city. There was new strength and assurance in him.
After a moment Nialli Apuilana said, “This isn’t easy, father. I don’t know where to begin.”
“All right. Let me guess. I won’t need the Barak Dayir for this. You and Kundalimon are lovers, eh?”
“Yes.” Barely a whisper.
He felt no surprise at all. There had been something inevitable about it from the first, that these two should have come together.
She said, “And twining-partners too, father.”
That too? He hadn’t expected that, the deeper bond also. But he took it calmly enough. No wonder they were glowing!
“Twining-partners. Ah. Very good. Twining goes so far beyond coupling, you know. Surely you know that by now. Twining is the real communion.”
“So we’ve found out, yes,” Nialli Apuilana said. She moistened her lips. “Father—”
“Go on. Tell me the rest of it.”
“Don’t you know it already?”
“You want to become his mate?”
“More,” she said.
He frowned. “More? What more is there?”
She made no reply. Instead she turned to Kundalimon, who said, “I will return to the Nest very soon. The Queen calls me. My work is done here. I ask Nialli Apuilana to go with me, to the Nest, to the Queen.”
The quiet words went through Hresh like scythes.
“What?” he said. “The Nest?”
Earnestly Nialli Apuilana said, the words pouring out all in a rush, “You can’t possibly know what it’s like, father. No one does who hasn’t been there. What sort of place it is, what sort of people they are. How rich their lives are, how deep. They live in an atmosphere of dreams, of magic, of wonder. You breathe the air of the Nest, and it fills your soul, and you can never be the same again, not after you’ve felt Nest-bond, not after you’ve understood Queen-love. It’s so different from the way we live here. We lead such frightening solitary lives, father. Even with coupling. Even with twining, We’re all alone, each of us, locked into our own heads, going through the meaningless round of our existences. But they see a vision of the world as a whole, as a unity, with purpose, and pattern, everything and everyone connected to everything else. Oh, father, everyone thinks of them as sinister evil bugs, as scurrying buzzing hateful machine-like things, but it isn’t so, father, not at all, they aren’t anything like what we imagine them to be! I want to go to them. I have to go to them. With Kundalimon. He and I belong together, and we belong … there. ”
Hresh stared at her, numb, stunned.
This too had probably been inevitable ever since her return from the Nest. He should have anticipated it. But he hadn’t allowed himself to think about it. He hadn’t allowed himself to see it.
“When?” he said, finally. “How soon?”
“A few days, a week, something like that. Kundalimon isn’t quite finished here. He’s teaching the children Nest-truth. Teaching them Queen-love. So that they’ll understand, in a way that none of the older people possibly could. There’s still more that he wants to tell them and show them. And then we’ll go. But I didn’t want simply to slip away without telling you. I can’t tell Taniane — she’d never allow it, she’d clap me in prison to keep me from going — but you, well, you’re different, you see everything so deeply, so profoundly—”
Hresh managed a smile, though shock waves still were rippling through him.
“What I see is that you’ve made me a co-conspirator in this, Nialli. If I speak of it to your mother, you’ll never forgive me, is that correct?”
“But you won’t speak of it to her, or anyone. I know that.”
Hresh contemplated the pads of his fingers. Something cold and heavy was spreading within his chest. The full impact of Nialli’s words only now was beginning to reach him: his daughter, his only child, was lost to him forever from this moment on, and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing at all.
“All right,” he said, at length, hoping he could hide the sadness in his voice. “I’ll keep quiet.”
“I knew you would.”
“But one thing you have to do for me before you go. Or else no deal, and Taniane finds out within the hour exactly what you two are up to.”
Nialli was glowing again. “Anything you want, father. Just ask.”
“I want you to tell me about the Nest. Describe the Queen to me, and tell me what Nest-bond is, and Queen-love, and all those other things. You’ve been keeping everything to yourself since you came back to live in the city. Do you know how eager I’ve been to know about them, Nialli? I couldn’t force you, though. And you wouldn’t open up, not for a moment. Now’s the time. Tell me everything. I need to know. You’re the only one who can teach me. And you will, as soon as the games are over today. That’s the one thing I ask of you. Before you and Kundalimon go back to the Nest. Before you leave me forever.”
Curabayn Bangkea was busily polishing his helmet in the little cell beside the Basilica that was his office when Husathirn Mueri appeared. The guard-captain’s mood was somber, and had been for days. Nialli Apuilana haunted him, sleeping and waking. She danced for him in his dreams, naked, grinning, mocking him, hovering just out of reach. He longed for her in a way that he knew was an absurdity. She was beyond his reach in more ways than one, a woman of the city’s highest nobility, and he nothing but an officer of the justiciary guard. He stood no chance. It was ridiculous. All the same, it was eating at his soul. There was a constant metallic taste in his throat, a pounding ache behind his rib cage, all from thinking of her. These idiotic fantasies, this miserable self-torment! And hopeless, absolutely hopeless. From time to time he would see her in the streets of the city, always at a distance, and she would glare balefully at him the way she might at some creature that had come wriggling up out of a sewer.
“There you are,” Husathirn Mueri said, entering the room.
Curabayn Bangkea let his helmet fall clattering to the desktop. “Your grace?” he said, almost barking it, coughing and blinking in surprise.