Chapter Seven
Ran-Del woke when something tickled his chin. He looked down and saw Francesca’s head tucked into his chest, her hands clutching his vest. Ran-Del disentangled himself gently, moved back from her, then stood up.
The hollow they were in blocked much of his view of the countryside. Irked that he couldn’t move to higher ground without waking Francesca, Ran-Del studied what he could see of their surroundings. The morning sun had barely climbed above the horizon. The stream that sparkled in the early morning sunlight disappeared into a fold of the land. Assuming the small white triangle on the horizon was Mount Fujiama, they had gone twenty kilometers the day before, maybe twenty-five at the most. They would have to do better today.
Ran-Del bit his lip in frustration. He wished he could wash and perform the morning ritual before he had to wake Francesca. He tugged on the cord a couple of times.
Francesca stirred sleepily.
“Wake up, Francesca,” Ran-Del said. “It’s time to get going.”
Francesca groaned once, blinked, then opened her eyes. She frowned up at Ran-Del and groaned again. Then she sat up and used a word that Ran-Del had never heard a woman say before.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she added, staggering to her feet. “I was hoping it was all a terrible dream.”
“Well, it’s not. We need to get going.”
“Before we go anywhere,” Francesca said firmly, “I have to, uh, find a bush.”
They took care of their chores, washing side by side in the stream. Francesca seemed more patient as Ran-Del performed his morning ritual and meditated. Probably she wasn’t eager to start walking. Once they had assembled their supplies into a pack, Ran-Del led the way and they set off again.
Francesca trudged along looking almost despondent, but Ran-Del walked with a spring in his step, glad to be heading homeward. He stayed alert for any sign of either game or Stefan Hayden.
At midmorning, they encountered a herd of unicorns grazing contentedly. Ran-Del eyed them hopefully, but there were no infants among them.
“Aren’t you going to try to shoot one?” Francesca asked.
He tried not to appear contemptuous as he shook his head. “Even if I could bring one down by myself, we don't have the time to gut and skin a full grown unicorn. It would be a tremendous waste, even if I succeeded.”
“But I’m hungry!”
The hint of despair in her voice made Ran-Del more forgiving. “So am I, but it would be hard to kill one. Notice how that female over there stands guard?”
He pointed at a large female unicorn who stood by herself, not grazing but holding her head high, her single silver-white horn curving upward like a hook over her small, flat ears. Her neck arched as she tossed her head, and her long, rope-like tail whipped around angrily.
Francesca nodded.
“I think she scented us already,” Ran-Del said. “She’d alert the others if I tried to stalk them.”
Francesca let out a resigned sigh, gave the unicorns one last hungry glance, and then allowed Ran-Del to lead her onward. A little while later, Ran-Del noticed a flock of day bats circling overhead.
“Something’s died,” he said, “or been killed. Let’s see what it was.”
They detoured slightly and found a pair of the largest day bats Ran-Del had ever seen picking over the new carcass of a unicorn.
“Gliders!” Francesca said at the sight of them. “I’ve never been this close to a glider before.”
Ran-Del studied the scene, trying to determine if the unicorn’s flesh could be tainted. If it had been killed or suffered an accident, the meat would be fine. “Are gliders afraid of people?”
She looked blank and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s find out.” Ran-Del looked around for pebbles. He filled his pockets with a dozen small rocks, then threw one as hard as he could at the larger glider.
The rock hit the animal in the chest. The glider flapped his huge gray wings and gave a piercing cry. He rocked back and forth on his two sturdy legs, and then tucked in his wing tips and went back to clawing his food with the small hands on the middle joints of his wings.
Ran-Del threw more stones in quick succession, hitting the second glider in the head. The animal rose in the air, squawking loudly and raising a terrific cloud of dust. Ran-Del threw the rest of his ammunition as rapidly as he could. Both gliders lifted in flight, screaming indignantly, and circled overhead.
“Come on!” Ran-Del yelled as he ran, almost yanking Francesca from her feet,
When he reached the unicorn’s carcass, one front leg was bent, and a sharp splinter of bone projected through the pearly gray skin.
“He must have snapped his leg somehow.” Ran-Del squatted down and slipped his dirk from its sheath. “He probably died from shock. Bad for him, but his flesh will be safe.”
Francesca didn’t even look away while Ran-Del sliced a haunch of meat. He worked quickly, conscious not only of the angry gliders overhead but also the fact that their activity would draw other scavengers.
As Ran-Del stood up, a pair of small, russet-brown bodies slunk out of the bushes nearby and trotted forward. Slightly taller than the pacas, they loped smoothly on four feet and had sharp, pointed faces with huge ears, and prominent eyes. They carried their bushy tails high in the air and moved at an angle, not headed straight for the carcass, but always drawing nearer.
“Look!” Ran-Del pointed. “What are those?”
Francesca glanced around. “Coyotes! They shouldn’t be a problem unless it’s a big pack.”
Two more russet-brown shapes appeared to their right, and then another pair after them. Ran-Del glanced around and saw that there were five more of them behind him.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I don’t want to find out how big a pack has to be before it’s trouble.”
He carried the haunch of meat impaled on his dirk, and took Francesca by the hand. “Move!”
They sprinted away from the carcass back the way they had come. A particularly bold animal almost brushed Ran-Del’s leg as it harried them, but it made no overtly offensive moves. The two humans kept moving, and the coyotes finally turned back to get their share of the carcass.
Ran-Del kept going at a fast jog trot for quite a ways. Francesca was soon panting for breath, and then gasping. Eventually, she tripped and fell, forcing Ran-Del to stop.
“Please,” Francesca gasped, “I can’t go any farther. Can’t we rest for a few minutes?”
Ran-Del frowned. He didn’t want to stop so near to a pack of predators. On the other hand, Francesca looked completely spent. “I want to go farther before we stop and cook this meat. Building a fire might draw the pack on us.”
Francesca struggled to her feet, her breath coming in strangled gasps.
Ran-Del looked her over critically. “Wait a moment.”
“Thanks,” Francesca said, dropping to the ground. “I can use a rest.”
Ran-Del didn’t answer. Instead he took the pack from her, opened it enough to wrap the unicorn meat in the tarp and then tied everything up again.
“Stand up,” he ordered Francesca.
She groaned. “Already?” She staggered to her feet.
Ran-Del bent down, tucked one shoulder into her waist, put an arm around the back of her thighs, and stood up carrying her over his shoulder. Francesca gasped as he picked up the pack and set off walking briskly.
She was quiet for a moment, and then she beat on his shoulders. “This is humiliating.”
Ran-Del grunted. There was no pleasing this woman. “Would you rather walk?”
After a moment, she answered. “No.”
She kept quiet after that. Ran-Del walked until he found a good place to start a fire.
“It’s hard to set a direction when the sun’s directly overhead,” he said, setting her on her feet. “We can stop and cook the meat now.”
They had stopped in a sort of shallow ravine. Francesca helped Ran-Del pick up fuel, and sat down while he lit the fire
. She watched him cut the meat into thin strips and thread them onto makeshift spits. Together they built a wall of stones on either side of the blaze, to prop up the spits and cook the meat without their having to hold it over the fire.
“Mmm,” Francesca said. “It smells almost as good as that paca.”
“It’s better. If we had the right herbs and vegetables, we could make a very good stew from this.”
“If we had a pot to cook it in.”
Ran-Del laughed. “If, if, if. If I hadn’t gone hunting four days ago, neither of us would be here.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t” Francesca said, “but I might well be here with some other unfortunate Sansoussy warrior. Pop was very determined.”
Ran-Del shook his head in disbelief. “It was a crazy scheme—and putting us out here was even crazier.”
“Maybe,” Francesca said pacifically as Ran-Del watched the meat cook. “Don’t the Sansoussy marry very young, compared to us city folks, anyway?”
Ran-Del turned his head to look at her. What had prompted that question? “I don’t know. I don’t know much about city customs.”
She kept her gaze on him. “Most people in Shangri-La don’t get married before their twenty-fifth season. Some of them wait five or ten seasons after that—if they ever marry.”
Ran-Del gave a tiny shrug. So long as it was a general conversation, he didn’t mind talking about Sansoussy customs. “No one can marry before they’ve seen five winters. That means a winter-born can marry at sixteen. Spring-borns have to wait the longest, nineteen seasons.”
“And what season were you born in, Ran-Del?”
“I’m a winter-born.” He tried to keep the pride from his voice. “Our people say that winter-borns are tougher than those born in other seasons.”
She smiled as if she found this amusing. “They’re probably right. So why aren’t you married? If you were born in winter, you must be eighteen, twenty-two or twenty-six. I’d say twenty-two is the best guess. What’s the hold-up?”
Ran-Del wasn’t entirely surprised by the question, or by the accuracy of her guess. It was clear she didn’t have enough manners to be deflected from a personal inquiry, but he was still annoyed that she had been so blunt. “I feel no need to tell you the details of my life.”
“We’re chained together, all by ourselves, many, many kilometers from your home or mine. I’d say that situation calls for some candor, don’t you?”
“Candor?” Ran-Del said acidly. “You’re just being nosy. You don’t know how to mind your own business.”
She kept her mouth straight, but her eyes smiled as if he has said something funny. “Right now, you're my business. My father wants me to marry you. If there’s some reason why you’re not married that would help me convince Pop to let you go, then I should know about it.”
Ran-Del was even more peeved at her finding a logical reason for her inquisitiveness than he had been by her prying. “Your father had no right to kidnap me in the first place.”
“I agree. Who is Bettine?”
Ran-Del had a vision of the next few days in which Francesca constantly asked him questions about the more intimate aspects of his life. It wasn’t a pleasant picture. “If I tell you about Bettine, will you stop asking me personal questions?”
“Yes,” Francesca said promptly, “if you tell me what I want to know.”
Ran-Del sighed and decided to get it over with. “Bettine is a young woman in my clan. I wanted to marry her three seasons ago—I asked my grandfather to ask his father for permission to speak to Bettine. He did, but Great-grandfather said no. He even held a seeing, to determine the right thing to do, and then he told Grandfather that I must forget about Bettine.”
Francesca wrinkled her brow. “What’s a seeing?”
Ran-Del felt an odd sense of déjà vu and realized he had been on the other side of this situation frequently in Shangri-La, where every answer led to another question. “A seeing is a sort of trance to induce a vision. A shaman such as Great-grandfather can see things that others can’t—what will happen in the future, what’s in other people’s minds. There are drugs and a special Sixth Discipline that can help him to do this. Once he’d held the seeing, Great-grandfather was very firm in his denial.
“But what had he seen in his vision?”
Ran-Del recalled the frustration of that time, his rage at his great-grandfather’s answer. “I don’t know. Great-grandfather would never say. I argued with him, and he punished me for it, but he never told me.”
Francesca leaned forward, her weight on one arm. “So can your great-grandfather say whom you can marry because he’s the shaman or because he’s your great-grandfather?”
“Both.” As annoying as her prying was, it felt good to be the one who knew the answers instead of the one asking questions. “So long as they’re alive, I would always need both my grandfather’s and my great-grandfather’s permission to marry. But, as the shaman of the Falling Water People, Great-Grandfather could prevent any marriage in the clan if he wanted to, even if it wasn’t barred.”
“What does that mean, barred?”
Ran-Del made a face. Surely this part was obvious. “Don’t you have rules about close relations getting married?”
Francesca curled her mouth in amusement. “Of course we have rules. Siblings can’t marry, or a parent and a child, and an aunt or an uncle can’t marry a niece or nephew.”
“And that’s all?” Such laxness shocked him. “You don’t worry about any other ties?”
Francesca shook her head. “What about your people? How does it work among the Sansoussy?”
Ran-Del leaned over and turned the spits. “When two people get betrothed, they each recite the names of their ancestors for four generations back. The shaman or another elder listens and any time a name is mentioned for both of them, the elder drops pebbles into a bowl—five pebbles for a parent, four for a grandparent, three for a great-grandparent, and two for a great-great-grandparent. When they’ve finished, the couple can’t marry if there are more than four pebbles in the bowl.”
Francesca’s expression reflected a greater level of interest than she had shown before. “What if the common name is one person’s grandparent and the other’s great-grandparent?”
At least she had asked a good question. “It would be four pebbles. It’s always the higher number.”
Francesca tilted her head and lowered her chin, looking rather like a Sansoussy hound on the scent of game. “So a full first cousin would be eight pebbles, four each for the two common grandparents, but if the children of a half-brother and half-sister wanted to marry, there’d still only be four pebbles and that’s okay?”
“Yes, so long as that grandparent was the only ancestor in common.”
“I see.” Francesca nodded, as if his answer had satisfied her curiosity on the cultural trivia of the Sansoussy. “How many pebbles did you and Bettine have in the bowl?”
Ran-Del gritted his teeth. He had thought he had distracted her from his personal life. “We would have had two.”
“So it wasn’t that you were too closely related? Isn’t Bettine a nice person?”
Ran-Del looked away and didn’t answer. It would have been difficult to answer anyway, considering Bettine’s desires, and he didn’t want to encourage Francesca.
“Didn’t she want to marry you?” Francesca asked. “Maybe her family was pressuring her?”
Ran-Del had to smile at the idea that anyone could pressure Bettine. “She wanted to continue the line of Ji-Ran Jahanpur. Bettine has no psy gift herself, and I have very little, but still I carry Great-grandfather’s line. The talent can sleep for a few generations. She hoped it slept in me.”
Francesca stared at him open-mouthed. “She told you that?”
Ran-Del nodded. It surprised him to hear himself confiding these things to her. He had never discussed Bettine with anyone except his grandfather. “I could tell she didn’t love me; there was desire there, but it wasn’t a desire fo
r me.”
“And you still wanted to marry her?”
“Yes.” Ran-Del had no intention of extending his confidences to tell Francesca about his dreams after seeing Bettine bathing in the waterfall. A distraction was in order. “What about you? You said that you knew your father would arrange a marriage for you. Aren’t people in the city free to marry as they choose?”
Francesca smiled as if she recognized his efforts at turning the tables. “Not people in Great Houses.”
She pulled up her knees and put her arms around her legs, resting her chin on one knee. “You saw our complex; each Great House is almost a city in itself, making its own laws and having its own leader. The head of the House has dominion rights over his family and his employees. Within his dominion, he’s answerable to no one, accountable to no one.”
No wonder Stefan Hayden hadn’t worried about keeping Ran-Del’s capture a secret. “So your father controls your actions as much as my shaman controls mine?”
She grimaced. “Maybe more. The situation has gotten worse with the advent of the cartels.”
Ran-Del felt a tug of curiosity. The peddlers he had encountered had never spoken of Great Houses, so he had had no idea how thoroughly people in the cities were stratified. “But you wait until you’re twenty-five or older to marry? Isn’t it hard for everyone to wait that long?”
Francesca’s mouth twitched in a smile. “I don’t think we mean the same thing when we say ‘wait.’ We wait to get married, but we don’t wait to take a lover.”
Ran-Del froze in the act of poking the fire with a stick and stared at Francesca, wondering wildly if this was her idea of humor. She met his gaze levelly, and he realized that she was quite serious. He wanted to blurt out a demand for details, but it would be very bad manners.
Francesca laughed. “You should see your face. Yes, I’ve had lovers. I’ve had quite a few, in fact. I turned twenty-four on my last birthday, but I haven’t been a virgin since I was nineteen.”
Ran-Del said nothing. There was nothing he could think of to say that would be a polite reply to such a revelation.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” Francesca added. “Pop said it would be better if you didn’t know. He said you’d never understand.”
“He was right,” Ran-Del said, relieved to have a way to express his feelings without resorting to calling her names.
“I expect it’s hard for you to understand,” Francesca said. “I know I have trouble understanding how your people can deny nature for so long.”
Ran-Del frowned at this implied criticism of Sansoussy customs. “People aren’t animals. They have self-control.”
“I know we’re not animals,” Francesca said, unruffled. “I also know that sex isn’t evil or sinful.”
“I never said that it was.”
“But you think it’s wrong to have it unless you’re married?”
Ran-Del found it disturbing to hear the basic tenets of Sansoussy life criticized. He picked up a spit, poked the meat with his dirk to be sure it was done, then handed the stick to Francesca. “Here. It’s cooked. Eat quickly. We have to get moving soon.”
Francesca accepted the meat. “So,” she asked, as if they had never left the subject, “did Bettine marry someone else.”
Ran-Del suppressed a stab of irritation. He might as well answer. Francesca wouldn’t let it rest until she knew everything. “No. She’s had offers, but so far she’s turned them all down.”
“She’s waiting for you? Or maybe she’s waiting for your great-grandfather to either change his mind or die?”
Ran-Del’s patience was gone. “It’s well for you,” he said, wrath spilling into his voice, “that your father forced a true oath from me not to hurt you. Otherwise, I would most certainly beat you until you were quiet.”
Francesca was unrepentant. “You can’t blame Pop for looking out for my interests.”
Ran-Del gave in to his irritation. “Yes, I can. I blame him for taking me by force from the forest, I blame him for leaving me kilometers from nowhere. But most of all, I blame him for chaining me to you!”
“Well,” Francesca said with asperity, “I’m not wild about the idea, either.”
Ran-Del got up and walked to the other side of the fire. He laid the cable across the coals and watched as it got hotter and hotter.
“Flexitron won’t burn,” Francesca said. “It’ll get plenty hot, but it won’t burn through.”
After several minutes, Ran-Del had to admit that she was right, which didn’t improve his mood. He poured a little water over the white hot part of the cord to cool it off, and then tried whacking that spot with the flat of the hatchet, hoping the sudden change in temperature would have made the cable brittle, but it seemed to have had no effect.
Ran-Del cursed, calling down dire threats on Stefan Hayden’s head. Francesca listened unmoved.
“Hadn’t you better eat something?” she asked. “I thought you were in a hurry?”
Ran-Del grabbed a spit and hastily chewed on a piece of unicorn.
Francesca watched him sympathetically. “I’m sorry if I upset you. It’s just that I have just as much trouble accepting your people’s customs as you have accepting mine.”
When Ran-Del made no answer, Francesca let the conversation stall. He finished eating and wiped his hands on the grass, then made Francesca come with him while he hunted for wide-leafed plants so he could wrap up their remaining meat.
Once their bundle was repacked, they prepared to start again. Francesca shouldered the pack without any prompting, and they set out in silence.
After they had traveled a good distance, Francesca’s shoulders began to droop.
Ran-Del took the heavy bundle from her. “I don’t think we’ll see any game for a while. And we have enough meat for tonight. I’ll carry it.”
She gave him a relieved smile. They still walked in virtual silence, but it was more companionable now.
Francesca almost staggered from weariness by the time Ran-Del finally called a halt to their day’s journey just as they came in sight of a pool of water. The stream that had been out of sight for most of the day had meandered back into their path; one loop of its length had become so elongated that it formed a small pond.
Ran-Del pointed to the pond. “It’ll be good to stop now, near the stream. Our water bottles are half empty. Now we can drink all we want.”
They walked closer so that Ran-Del could pick out a good site to camp. He chose a place on a slope overlooking the water, far enough away that the noise of the stream wouldn’t diminish his ability to hear anyone or anything approaching.
They built a fire quickly. Francesca had learned what to look for in gathering fuel, and she didn’t need any prompting to help in spreading out the tarp or the blankets.
Ran-Del warmed the meat by the fire, and they ate the remains of the unicorn haunch and then drank their fill from the water bottles.
At Ran-Del’s request, Francesca got up to walk with him to fill the bottles. As they neared the water’s edge, he paused to look out on the serene expanse of liquid. The last rays of the setting sun made a wide line of golden sparkles on the surface.
“Ran-Del,” Francesca said, bending down to unlace her boots, “I hope this won’t shock you, but I’m going to bathe. I’m tired, sweaty, and covered with grime. I want to really bathe, not just splash my face and hands with water. If you don’t want to watch, you can look the other way.”
Horrified, Ran-Del hastily averted his eyes as she sat down to pull off her boots. He could hear her ripping open the fastenings of her clothes, dropping garments to the ground. He stood with his face turned determinedly away, fighting the urge to turn his head ever so slightly to watch her. A moment later Francesca clucked in annoyance and muttered an imprecation on her father.
“What’s wrong?” Ran-Del asked.
“I can’t take my shirt off all the way,” she said. “Or rather, I can only take it off if I bunch it up on the cable. How did Pop t
hink I could seduce you if I couldn’t take my clothes off?”
“Francesca!” Ran-Del kept his eyes determinedly on the horizon. “Please don’t speak in that way.”
“Facts won’t go away just because you refuse to look at them.” She sounded as practical as his grandmother disposing of food gone bad. “Pop must have had that thought in mind when he tied us together like this.”
“You said it was to keep me from leaving you behind.”
“I’m sure that was part of it,” Francesca said. “And at least he didn’t chain us by the ankles.”
Ran-Del swallowed hard and made no comment. He heard water splashing.
“Ooh, it’s nice and warm,” Francesca said. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in with me, Ran-Del?”
He muttered a negative.
“Just to warn you,” she said cheerfully, “I have absolutely no clothes on. I’ve slipped my shirt onto the cable a little ways, and I’d appreciate it if you could try to keep it out of the water. I need you to move close to the water’s edge, now, Ran-Del. If you don’t, I won’t be able to get in very far, and I’ll just be standing here, stark naked.”
Ran-Del backed up hastily, trying to banish from his mind the image her words had conjured up. At Francesca’s urging, he finally sat on a rock with his back to her and his arm extended out over the water.
“Mmm,” Francesca said, “This feels really good. You can look if you like. It’s too dark to see anything.”
Ran-Del turned his head apprehensively, but she was right. She was in up to her neck and he could see nothing of her body but a dim outline. He didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Francesca made an effort to wash, although it was of limited use without any soap. She good naturedly abused her father for not providing any.
“It would kill the plants and animals,” Ran-Del said.
“Maybe, but it's hard to care right now,” Francesca said. “I’m coming out, by the way. I wish I’d brought a blanket with me. It’s going to be chilly walking up that hill in the buff now that the sun’s gone down.”
Ran-Del jerked his head around so he was looking away from her. “Aren’t you going to put your clothes back on?” he asked, appalled at her continued lack of modesty. Even Bettine had had the grace to appear chastened when she discovered him watching her.
“I don’t want them to get wet. I thought I’d just wrap up in a blanket and sit by the fire to dry off before I got dressed.”
Ran-Del led the way up the slope, his jaw clenched as he fought the temptation to look backwards. He heard her dump her clothes and boots on the tarp as soon as they reached the fireside.
“There,” she said. “You can turn around now, Ran-Del. I’m all covered up again.”
He turned around and found that she was indeed covered by a blanket, but she had wrapped it tightly around her and tucked it under her arms so that it fitted her snugly, almost like a gown. Her arms and shoulders were completely bare.
Francesca held her hands out to the fire as she sat down. “That felt good. You should try it.”
“No, thank you,” Ran-Del said, sitting beside her, still unnerved by the experience of being so close to a woman wearing so little. “I’ll wash tomorrow, for the morning ritual.”
“You never explained that,” she said, leaning sideways with her weight on one hand. “Do you say a prayer to the sun every morning?”
“No.” Ran-Del found it difficult to concentrate on her question. The firelight picked out the lines of her face and neck, casting shadows in the hollows, highlighting the golden skin over her cheekbones and collar bones, and making the valley between her breasts into a dark, inviting canyon. Ran-Del jerked his mind back to the conversation.
“We don’t pray to the sun,” he said. “We face the sun because it’s a sign of life, but we pray to the One who is the spirit of all life.”
Francesca nodded. “I’m glad you don’t see the sun as a divinity. I try to respect everyone’s religious beliefs, but that would be difficult to accept.”
Ran-Del found that his desire to discuss religious philosophy had evaporated. “Francesca,” he said, swallowing hard. He meant to ask her to put her clothes on, but somehow the words didn’t come out.
“Yes?” She looked up at him, smiling.
“Francesca,” he said again. He couldn’t say anymore. He had no idea what to say. Desire welled up in him so strongly that it overwhelmed any thought of clan or honor, any remembrance of the laws of the Sansoussy.
Comprehension dawned on her face, followed by surprise. “It’s all right, Ran-Del.” She reached out and took his hand and held it against her cheek for a moment, and then moved it down so that it rested on her breast.
That and the surge of desire he felt from her were all the invitation Ran-Del needed. He reached for her, pulling her against him in a crushing embrace. When his mouth found hers, Francesca’s passion swept over him like fire rushed over dry kindling.
Ran-Del laid her back on the tarp, his hands moving over her body to reassure himself that she was real. The blanket came open, and Francesca lay there naked, under him. She opened her eyes and looked at his face in the firelight.
His need consumed Ran-Del. He closed his eyes and kissed her, then began to nuzzle her neck. When he opened his eyes, Francesca stared into them.
“Ran-Del!” She took his hand. “Wait, Ran-Del!”
He took a deep, shuddering breath, as if he were coming out of a trance, and let it out with a gasp. “You want me to stop?”
She shook her head. “No, just wait a moment. This is all happening too fast. You need time to think.”
Ran-Del felt almost drugged. It took a few seconds for comprehension to sink in. “Time to think about what?”
Francesca sighed and touched his cheek. “Think about whether you really want to do this or not. I don’t want us to make love if you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and hate me—maybe blame me for what happened.”
Ran-Del felt as if he had been held under water and then suddenly dragged to the surface. She was right. He had lost control. He lay on his side next to her and mentally recited the mantra for the First Discipline to calm himself, and then took a deep breath and sat up.
Francesca hastily pulled the blanket around her body and sat up next to him.
Ran-Del hunched his shoulders and ducked his head in shame. “I’m sorry.”
Her face looked almost solemn. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Ran-Del. You didn’t do a single thing I didn’t want you to do—except to stop.”
Still feeling his shame, he looked at her without comprehension. “Then why did you ask me to stop?”
Her smile was anxious rather than happy. “I didn’t really ask you to stop; I simply asked you to think. Unfortunately for me, that was all it took for you to make up your mind to stop.”
“But why?” he repeated.
“I told you. I didn’t think you really wanted to make love—not to me, anyway. Maybe you do with Bettine, but with me it was just plain lust.”
Ran-Del looked at her with new eyes. He hadn’t thought she could be so sensitive to his feelings. “Do you have psy sense?”
Her mouth curved in a wicked smile. “No, but I’ve had a lot of experience with men.”
Ran-Del flushed, remembering what she had told him earlier. He felt a sense of gratitude for what she had done that made him feel he should confide in her. “I’ve never made love to a woman.”
She nodded wisely, rather like a shaman counseling a youngster. “I thought not. You were never betrothed, were you?”
Ran-Del shook his head.
“Why not?” she asked gently. “If your great-grandfather wouldn’t let you marry Bettine, why not someone else? You said it was three seasons ago.”’
Ran-Del shrugged. “There was no one else I wanted.”
Francesca sighed. “Well, I had better put my clothes on.” One corner of her mouth twitched like she was trying not t
o smile. “Do you want to bother turning your back? You’ve seen all there is to see.”
A half-smothered laugh burst out from her when Ran-Del turned away hastily. Once she had tugged on her clothes, complaining about the flexitron cable the whole time, Ran-Del turned around again.
“There,” Francesca said. “All dressed.”
“We need to sleep,” Ran-Del said, changing the subject determinedly. “We have a long way to go tomorrow.”
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Francesca asked, spreading out the tarp again.
Ran-Del calculated. “At least fifty kilometers—maybe sixty.”
Francesca’s forehead wrinkled in concern. “We must be getting close to the border of Hayden. Don’t forget, Pop could show up at any time and collect us just like he did to you that morning in the forest.”
Ran-Del clenched his jaw at the thought. “He may show up, but I won’t be taken so easily the next time.”
Her eyes went wide in sudden terror. “You won’t hurt him, will you, Ran-Del?”
He gave her a level stare. “I’ll kill him if I get the chance.”
Francesca bit her lip. “I know he’s made you unhappy, but he hasn’t done you any permanent harm. If I can just make him give up this idea, he’ll let you go back to your home and you won’t have to see either of us again.”
Ran-Del lay down and pulled the blanket up. No need to alarm her unduly. “Don’t worry about it too much. I may never get a chance.”
Francesca lay down next to him, shivering.
“Are you cold?” Ran-Del asked, putting his arm around her.
“A little,” Francesca lied, snuggling up against him.
Ran-Del smiled in the dark. She wasn’t used to being around someone with psy sense.
“I’ll let the fire go out by itself,” Ran-Del said, still holding her close. “Go to sleep, Francesca.”
Francesca sighed again, leaned her head against his shoulder, and did as she was told.