“So you’ve taken me to serve you because of feelings of insult,” I grumbled, finally seeing the point. “Do you also mean to take the others to your furs?”
“The others are by no means as attractive as you, wenda,” he answered with a laugh, keeping his eyes on me as he put his sword aside. “I shall therefore allow you to make reparation for the group.”
“And if I should refuse?” I asked, seething with the unfairness of it all. “You feel desire for me now, yet the state need not continue.”
“I am aware of the fact that you are able to take the desire from me.” he said with a calm nod, reaching for the bottom of his shirt to pull it off over his head. “Should one face attack, one is well within one’s rights to raise a skillful defense, and I shall ever recall the time you did indeed take my desire. And yet, your memabrak has given me his word. Will you shame him with a refusal of either body or mind’?”
He tossed the shirt away and simply stood looking down at me, his fingers on his hips, his blue eyes calm, his mind comfortable and completely undisturbed. He wasn’t in the least afraid of what I might do to him, and that despite the fact that he’d had more than one taste of what an empath’s self-defense could consist of. I suddenly began feeling very strange, an emotion I couldn’t define flooding all through me, one I had, until then, felt only with Tammad. It wasn’t love or anything like that, and it made me very uncomfortable.
“You know well enough that I will not shame him,” I muttered, looking down at my twisting fingers at my waist.
“You may do as you will, yet shall I find only a small part of the pleasure I find with him. I have no desire to be here, and will not lie with a pretense of eagerness.”
“That is only as it should be, wenda,” he said gently, putting his hand under my chin to raise my face to him. “No man takes another man’s woman with the belief that her pleasure will be as full with him as it is with her chosen. And yet do I sense an oddness here, centering about your great concern to speak the truth. Can it be you seek to shame not Tammad but me, with the intimation that I intrude between two who should be in the arms of no others save each other’? Am I now to release you from your obligation, and gallantly return you to the side of your hamak?”
The amusement in his mind was about of the same intensity as the twinkle in his eyes, and as dim as the tent was it still wasn’t too dim for him to see the sudden blush in my cheeks. I might not have been free to touch his mind, but there was nothing to keep me from trying to manipulate him with words-nothing, that is, but that damnable talent of his for seeing through to the truth of things no matter how little data he had to work with.
“I expect nothing in the way of gallantry from Rimilian beasts!” I snapped, jerking my face out of his hand. “You seek only to humiliate me in revenge for what was said of you, and I shall never forgive you for taking your revenge only upon me!”
“But I do not take revenge only upon you,” he said, laughing, suddenly throwing his arms around me and bearing me down to his sleeping furs with him. “My brother Cinnan’s yearning for Aesnil has given his body the belief that he has not had a woman for days without number, and seeing you sent to me was very painful for him. My brother Tammad, on the other hand, had wished to do no more than hold his wenda, to remove the memory of nearly having lost her. Retention of that memory will do best for him, I believe, therefore have I callously taken you from him for this darkness. ”
“How do you know all this?” I demanded, immediately checking the minds of those we’d left outside. Cinnan sat moping at the fire with his mind groaning, his body so badly in need that he should have been up in flames. Tammad, however, was sunk deep in thought, and there was a definite emptiness shaping and tinging those thoughts. It was painful for me to sense him feeling that way, and I automatically began struggling against the wide arms holding me, trying to get free to go to him.
“No, wenda, to spare him the pain would be no service,” Dallan insisted, holding me tighter against my struggles. “A man must learn to know the consequences of his actions, so that his decisions may be made on a basis of thought rather than feeling. No denday may act as hastily and thoughtlessly as Tammad has, a thing he has forgotten in the face of his new-found abilities. He must relearn the lesson of thought, Terril, and in such an instance you may not aid him.”
“How do you know all of these things?” I asked again, staring up at his sober face, endlessly upset that he refused to release me. “Almost does it seem that you are able to read them as easily as I.”
“Cinnan’s state I know of from his own lips,” Dallan said, his careful calm an obvious attempt to soothe me. “He spoke of Aesnil, referred obliquely to his needs, and from those things his condition became obvious. Tammad’s feelings, too, were obvious, largely from the manner in which he bade you accompany me. His lack of anger and discomfort were clear to any with eyes, and am I not familiar with his thoughts upon what occurred between you and the difficulty he has had with his strengthening abilities? What need have I of your power, wenda, when these things are all so clear to me without it?”
Everything he said was completely logical, but something still seemed to be wrong with his explanations. I wanted to look into it further, question him more thoroughly, but the upset was growing in me instead of lessening, especially when I saw him look at me in a very strange way.
“And you, wenda, you, too, require this darkness with me,” he said, rolling over to hold me down with his body while his hands smoothed my hair back, “You cannot deny that you continue to think upon the matter of aiding your memabrak by making it possible for him to leave you, and such a thing should not be. You must see for yourself what life would be, should he allow another to band you. You would not find it possible to deny that other save with your power, a doing which may now be beyond you. You have not yet grown to the height all l’lendaa must have—an inner height from which vantage point a warrior may see the pleasure in victory.”
I began to protest what he’d said, tried to tell him as sincerely as possible that he was wrong, but he wasn’t wrong and we both knew it. He used that night to show me what it would be like to belong to someone other than Tammad, what it would be like to be used by a man who was fond of me and had no intentions of hurting me, but who cared about little other than his own pleasure. Dallan had never before made me give him everything while he gave back almost nothing, but one thing I didn’t let him take—I waited until he was asleep before I hid my face in my hands and shuddered.
6
When Dallan let me go the next morning, I had to swallow down the urge to run to the barbarian and throw myself into his arms. It had been a really terrible night, but even the dim gray half-light of dawn was bright enough to let me see clearly the facts of Rimilian life. If I ran to Tammad just as everything inside me screamed for me to do, my memabrak would probably challenge Dallan right on the spot. Tammad knew Dallan had used me before, and knew as well that I’d had pleasure from those uses; a man like Dallan was able to give an unbelievable amount of pleasure, as most Rimilian men were. If I hadn’t had pleasure the night before it was only because Dallan hadn’t wanted me to have it, and Rimilian men don’t look kindly on other men who do that to their women. It might not matter to Tammad that Dallan had been trying to make a point, and I didn’t care to take the chance.
The barbarian crouched beside the fire, prodding it into fuller life, his eyes and his surface thoughts seeing something other than the newborn flames. He was again calm but now there was something new, something hard and determined, and right in the middle of it was Tammad’s thought-feeling of me. I wasn’t sure I liked being in that position in his thoughts, but then he saw me and smiled, and everything else became unimportant.