Several times, all of a sudden, in the daytime, there had been a moment when she had known him close in mind and could touch him if she reached out. But at night she knew only his blank absence, his refusal of her. She had stopped trying to reach him, months ago, but her heart was still very sore.
“Hu-hu-hu,” said the owl, under her window, and then it said, “Darkrose!” Startled from her misery, she leaped out of bed and opened the shutters.
“Come on out,” whispered Diamond, a shadow in the starlight.
“Mother’s not home. Come in!” She met him at the door.
They held each other tight, hard, silent for a long time. To Diamond it was as if he held his future, his own life, his whole life, in his arms.
At last she moved, and kissed his cheek, and whispered, “I missed you, I missed you, I missed you. How long can you stay?”
“As long as I like.”
She kept his hand and led him in. He was always a little reluctant to enter the witch’s house, a pungent, disorderly place thick with the mysteries of women and witchcraft, very different from his own clean comfortable home, even more different from the cold austerity of the wizard’s house. He shivered like a horse as he stood there, too tall for the herb-festooned rafters. He was very highly strung, and worn out, having walked forty miles in sixteen hours without food.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked in a whisper.
“Sitting with old Ferny. She died this afternoon, Mother will be there all night. But how did you get here?”
“Walked.”
“The wizard let you visit home?”
“I ran away.”
“Ran away! Why?”
“To keep you.”
He looked at her, that vivid, fierce, dark face in its rough cloud of hair. She wore only her shift, and he saw the infinitely delicate, tender rise of her breasts. He drew her to him again, but though she hugged him she drew away again, frowning.
“Keep me?” she repeated. “You didn’t seem to worry about losing me all winter. What made you come back now?”
“He wanted me to go to Roke.”
“To Roke?” She stared. “To Roke, Di? Then you really do have the gift—you could be a sorcerer?”
To find her on Hemlock’s side was a blow.
“Sorcerers are nothing to him. He means I could be a wizard. Do magery. Not just witchcraft.”
“Oh I see,” Rose said after a moment. “But I don’t see why you ran away.”
They had let go of each other’s hands.
“Don’t you understand?” he said, exasperated with her for not understanding, because he had not understood. “A wizard can’t have anything to do with women. With witches. With all that.”
“Oh, I know. It’s beneath them.”
“It’s not just beneath them—“
“Oh, but it is. I’ll bet you had to unlearn every spell I taught you. Didn’t you?”
“It isn’t the same kind of thing.”
“No. It isn’t the High Art. It isn’t the True Speech. A wizard mustn’t soil his lips with common words. “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic,” you think I don’t know what they say? So, why did you come back here?”
“To see you!”
“What for?”
“What do you think?”
“You never sent to me, you never let me send to you, all the time you were gone. I was just supposed to wait until you got tired of playing wizard. Well, I got tired of waiting.” Her voice was nearly inaudible, a rough whisper.
“Somebody’s been coming around,” he said, incredulous that she could turn against him. “Who’s been after you?”
“None of your business if there is! You go off, you turn your back on me. Wizards can’t have anything to do with what I do, what my mother does. Well, I don’t want anything to do with what you do, either, ever. So go!”
Starving hungry, frustrated, misunderstood, Diamond reached out to hold her again, to make her body understand his body, repeating that first, deep embrace that had held all the years of their lives in it. He found himself standing two feet back, his hands stinging and his ears ringing and his eyes dazzled. Thc lightning was in Rose’s eyes, and her hands sparked as she clenched them. “Never do that again,” she whispered.