She said, “Old habits! A puppy you don’t housebreak almost before his eyes are open will still be wetting the floor when he’s an old dog. I’ve had this habit since I was a little girl; Kindra told me that it was just a nervous habit, and that I’d outgrow it. But I haven’t, see?”
Magda knew, there was more to it than that, but she knew she could not ask questions; knew it with that indefinable inner knowledge she was beginning to trust. Instead she asked something she knew to be safer.
“Jaelle, are you pregnant?”
Jaelle’s green eyes met hers, just a flash, and then looked away. She said, and sounded almost desolate, “I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.” Quickly she jumped off the windowseat, barricading herself again. “Come on, let’s find one of those silly women of Rohana’s and ask her if she can mend your outfit, and make her happy by thinking she is superior to a Free Amazon!”
Watching the girl as she bundled Magda’s torn traveling clothes together, Magda thought, She’s so young and vulnerable! If Peter breaks her heart, I think I’ll want to kill him!
What was going to happen to Jaelle? For that matter-if this involvement was serious and lasting, as Magda was beginning to guess-what would happen to Peter? Could he really sacrifice his career for a woman? And for one who was not, by oath, even free to marry?
It was easy to talk about the inevitability of liaisons, love affairs, even marriages between members of separate peoples on Empire worlds. Magda had thought of them as inevitable statistics, before this. But it was different-completely different-when you knew the people involved, and guessed what they meant in purely human and personal terms. No statistics could give you even a clue to that.
Is this my fault, too? By refusing Peter, did I bring this on both of them?
Chapter FIFTEEN
The winter drew on; the snow lay deep over Ardais. To Jaelle this was a precious interlude, a time separated from anything else in her life, before or after. For the first time since her thirteenth year, she lived surrounded by ordinary women; she wore women’s clothes, shared in the life of the household, and spent her days with women who did not live by the terms of renunciation and freedom of the Amazon oath. –
She had tasted this life-but briefly, and unwillingly-when she was fifteen. Rohana had insisted that she must know the life she was to renounce, before she made that renunciation irrevocable.
But I was too young; I could not see it clearly.
And now it is too late. All the smiths in Zandru’s forges can’t mend a broken egg, or put a hatched chick back into the shell. I can never, never be one of them, not now.
I do not think I want to be. But I am not sure, not now….
And there was the Terran, her lover….
Like any young woman in the grip of her first serious love affair, it seemed to her that he filled her whole sky. The Guild-house and the life there seemed very far away. She knew this was only an interlude, that it must end, but she tried to live entirely in the present, neither remembering the past nor thinking ahead to the future, but simply savoring each moment as it passed.
But there were times when she woke in the night, held close in her lover’s arms, and realized that she no longer knew what she was doing, or who she was, or what lay ahead for either of them. None of the thousand uncertainties could be answered in words, or even asked; so she would turn to him in desperation, holding herself close to him, demanding the one thing she could be sure about, the one certainty they shared. She had ceased to be cautious. She no longer cared to conceal what was between them. She knew that sooner or later this would precipitate a crisis, but in some indefinable way she felt that even this would be a relief from the terrible uncertainty.
And then, one night, when she woke, she heard around the towers the soft dripping of rain and running of melting snow, and knew that the spring-thaw had begun. Now reality would close again over their enchanted isolation; and whether anything would remain, she could not even guess. She dared not even weep, for fear of waking him. She knew he would have only one comfort to offer, and now even that was no comfort at all, before the knowledge of the inevitable.