This was the third time he’d had taken her boating. The first two trips had been overnighters, exploring the coast first westward, then eastward. Bypassing fishing hamlets, they’d skirted wild beaches, snooped cliffs, and explored the lower reaches of streams, Raien unstepping the spar and using the oars when necessary. She’d loved the places he’d shown her; some looked as if no one had been there before. They’d poled up one rocky gorge which in spring, he said, was a raven rookery, loud with the croaking of the large black birds, hundreds of them, their nest trees clinging to rocky walls, where fledglings gripped the branches determined never to let go despite the noisy urgings of their elders.
Sometimes she’d rowed. At first her request had surprised him, but he’d overridden his cultural conditioning and let her take the oars. More than once, she’d told him, she’d rowed Will’s rented boat on the Mustoka River, while Will worked the water with his casting rod, for bass. Raien had frowned, and she’d asked him why. He’d been trying to visualize it, he’d said. Trying to visualize Will, and Varia’s marriage to him. He had less difficulty, he told her, visualizing her life with Curtis, though he wasn’t at all sure his images were realistic.
It seemed to her she handled the complications of her past more easily than Raien did.
With the following breeze, sailing was simple, and Cyncaidh’s attention remained largely on Varia. Her lovely eyes opened only for seconds at a time. Her aura, he noted, was almost as calm as if she slept; whatever she was thinking was pleasant but unexciting. Shortly they drew even with the nearer islets, and he angled toward the one they’d picnic on. Most were mere skerries, bare black rocks overswept by waves in the heavier storms. Three, however, had developed shallow soils and a bit of vegetation, while the largest had not only scrubby aspens and birches, but a small stand of black spruce, complete with nesting birds that fed on bearberry and bilberry, and the seeds of other dwarf shrubs that grew there.
“Here comes our picnic ground,” he said, and opening her eyes, Varia turned to see. He lowered his sail and manned the oars as they coasted in, letting the tiller trail, pulling up beside a natural dock he knew, a finger of dark basalt. The bow slid gently onto shiny black shingle rock, and Varia, stepping onto the natural dock beside her, pulled the bow farther up, grounding it securely. Someone in the past had driven a steel picket into a crack, and Raien tied up to it, then took the picnic basket ashore, putting it down higher on the narrow beach, where he spread their blankets on the sand.
“It’s a little early for lunch, don’t you think?” Varia asked.
He grinned down at her from his six-feet-four. “I thought we might do other things. Here where we have both privacy and sunshine.”
She grinned back, put her arms around him and raised her face. “What did you have in mind, your lordship?”
He began to show her, his hands in the back of her tights while they kissed. After a minute they lowered to their knees, then lay down, dallying and petting, and before long made slow love in the sunshine. Afterward they had their lunch: coarse bread, apple butter, cheese, and a flask of beer cooled in the shallows. When they’d eaten, he led her into the shade of the spruce grove, and spread the blankets on feather moss. There they made love again, then dressed and napped, and afterward sat in the beached skiff to finish the contents of the basket.
He pointed northeast, out at the farther islets. “You can see the farthest two from here,” he said.
The non sequitur remark sharpened her awareness. His aura reflected watchfulness, a certain tension; he had something to tell her, and wasn’t sure how she’d take it. Puzzled, she looked where he pointed.
“Out there is the Sea Gate.”
“Sea Gate?”
“There’s a gate there, presumably to Farside. I thought you should know.”
Frowning, she stared at him, not yet angry.
“It’s called the Sea Gate because it opens over the water between the last two skerries. And it’s different in other respects. The other gates I’ve heard of open when the moon is full, at midnight or high noon. This one opens irregularly during periods of northern lights, and apparently stays open for hours at a time. Perhaps days sometimes.