Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

But Molin was home: She could hear Torchholder’s voice, and that of another

Rankan, coming from the front rooms.

She froze in horror, realizing suddenly that she couldn’t face him-not now, with her thighs sticky and her blood up, and all her father’s heritage aroused in her so that she wanted nothing to do with the half-Rankan, half-Nisi who had saved her life, and whom she owed so much.

But was debt the same as love? Zip’s faked and fated “trial” had broken her heart thrice over.

The outcome-the verdict of conditional acquittal-was assured, by Tempus’s decree. Zip was the only one who hadn’t known it.

It was the crudest thing she’d ever seen men do to another man, and she’d been a willing part of it, the operator in her fascinated by all she saw, by human emotion and its interplay, by the passions of those who’d lost loved ones, and face, trying to justify the one and regain the other-all because Kama’s father had ridden down from Ranke, looked upon the doings of Sanctuary’s puny mortals, and not been pleased.

Sometimes she hated Tempus more even than she hated the gods.

And so she’d stayed with Zip, after the others had left, to lick the nervous sweat from his fine young body and to wipe the confusion from his heart in the only way she knew.

Zip was… Zip, her aberration: a physical match such as Molin could never be.

But that was all. She could never make it more, or let it make itself more, or let Zip convince her it could be more.

He needed help, that was all. And everyone was’ using him, dangling him this way and that. She felt sorry for him.