“Suppose you get pregnant?”
“I’ve got lamb bane in my gear.”
Lamb bane. Of course. He’d heard of it from Hauser, who collected it in season for Arbel. It didn’t keep anyone from getting pregnant, but both sheep and women, if they ate it early enough, miscarried with no trouble. The two of them rode without speaking for several chains. “Look,” she said finally. “I can’t promise I won’t hump with Jeremid again. But I do promise not to do it where you can hear us. Will that help?”
By Oz standards, he realized, that was downright thoughtful. Even sweet. He looked at her earnest face and found himself smiling. Fondly! The realization startled him, left him mentally gawping. You’re in love with her, Macurdy! he told himself amazed. You are! You’re in love with this girl! “Sure,” he found himself saying. “It’ll help a lot. And Melody, I don’t want you to feel bad about it; I really don’t. Because I love you, too.”
She stared at him, surprised, then annoyed. “Macurdy,” she said, “you’re an exasperating bastard.” And pulling aside, fell in a little distance behind him.
Leaving Macurdy wondering what he’d said wrong. But the question was fleeting, giving way to the matter of being in love with two women at once. Truly in love with them. He’d never thought about such a thing before, had grown up accepting that you could only love one at a time. Yet it seemed to him both loves were real. His love for Melody was different than his love for Varia, but it was love, he had no doubt.
The difference that counted, he told himself, was the vow he’d taken. And he’d abide by it in spite of all.
* * *
The weather had turned nearly summery. Gnats were out, though not a kind that bit. The elms along the road were pale green now, with countless millions of disk-winged seeds, while the new leaves of various species were expanding.
This plain, this Green River Valley, was pleasant to Macurdy’s eyes. Tekalos was good farmland. Talbott and Hauser assumed there was a geographical equivalence between Yuulith and Farside, and as closely as Macurdy could figure, if there was a gate here, it would open into Tennessee. Western Tennessee or maybe west-central. From all he’d heard, Tennessee was mostly hills and mountains, and he wondered if it had any area of farmland to compare with this.
In midafternoon, Blue Wing caught up with them. He’d flown back to the site where the bandits had attacked the dwarves, and filled his belly and crop with dead horse meat. Or so he said. But Macurdy was aware that even vultures, with their hooked and powerful beaks, let dead horses and cattle lay longer than that for the hide to soften. It seemed likelier that some dead bandit had been Blue Wing’s meal.
The dwarves slowed their progress. Their ponies were slower, and they took breaks long enough to make fire and boil water for sassafras tea. They felt no urgency. And while Macurdy’s experience with horses hadn’t included long crosscountry trips, he told himself this was probably a more sensible speed anyway. Besides, more than a year had passed since Varia had been kidnapped; what difference would a few days make now? She was no doubt safe enough.
And it seemed to him the dwarves were much more important to him than the time they were costing; they were his passport to the King in Silver Mountain. Meanwhile they were good companions; it was one of them who shot a possum with his crossbow, then carried it along as supper for Blue Wing.
Still, from time to time he felt restless.
Near dusk, the six of them made camp in a pleasant woods, along a river not much more than a creek. It allowed them to bathe again, which they did naked, though the dwarves used a stretch of riverbank screened from the tallfolk by undergrowth. Naked, Melody was prettier than he’d realized, though muscular for a woman. Breaking the spell, he jumped from the cutbank into the river, to conceal his developing erection. The cold water killed it utterly, and he grinned as Melody waded tentatively in, her arms wrapped around herself.