Rohana had foreseen this, but had still been dismayed by the actuality. She felt Jaelle had as yet no idea what she was renouncing.
She had said: “Be very sure, Jaelle; very sure. This is no game, it is your whole life. Don’t throw it away like this!” And then she had begged: “Jaelle, will you give me three years, more time, as you gave Kindra, to prove to you that my life is no less happy than hers?”
She knew Jaelle was remembering, too (Or did the girl’s awakening laran share her thoughts?), when Jaelle said softly, “Three years seemed a lifetime then; longer than I could bear to wait. And-forgive me, Rohana- you wanted to prove your life was happy; and yet I knew you were not happy. So it seemed-hypocrisy.” 4 Rohana bowed her head. No, she had not been happy then, but she thought she had concealed it more carefully from Jaelle. She had felt harried then, trapped by the life she led, after her brief taste of freedom. She had been much beset with her adolescent children, and with the three-year-old Valentine, who was at the most active and troublesome age. And at that time she had been pregnant again with a fourth child she did not want; that had been the price she paid for Gabriel’s final forgiveness. And though she had not wanted the child, Rohana was too much a woman to bear a child for most of a year and see it die without anguish. So when it had been stillborn, she had grieved as bitterly as if she had longed for it. But she had carried the child, that year, in anger and desperate rebellion, feeling that perhaps she had paid too high a price for Gabriel’s goodwill and peace in her home. Now, before Jaelle grown to womanhood, she bowed her head and said, almost inaudibly, “You were right; I was not happy then. Now I feel more guilty than ever that because of my unhappiness you rushed to take the Amazon oath.”
Jaelle laid her cheek against Rohana’s hand. “Don’t blame yourself; I don’t think it would have made any difference. Even Kindra said I was stubborn and headstrong; she, too, urged me to delay a little. Perhaps”- she smiled fleetingly-“I am my father’s daughter, too, though I do not like to think so.”
Never before this day had Jaelle spoken her father’s name in Rohana’s hearing. She had some idea of what it had cost Jaelle to say this. She was silent, asking after a long time, “Then you will stay with your Terran lover?”
“I_I think so.”
But she is not sure. “Is it fair to any man, Jaelle, to give him so little of yourself as a freemate gives?”
“Rohana, I give him what he wants of me! The Terrans do not make their women slaves to their will!”
“Just the same-don’t be angry, Jaelle-it seems to me that a freemate gives little more than a prostitute.” She used the coarse word grezalis, knowing that on her decorous lips it would shock Jaelle into listening. “It seems to me that it is no marriage unless you commit yourself to a man for all times: good and bad, in happiness or misery. You know that when I was wed, Gabriel was nothing to me but a burden I had to bear, because I had been born Comyn, and the laws of my caste required me to marry within my clan and bear him children with laran.”
“And you can call me whore? When you were sold like a slave for your family’s pride of position, and I -choose to give myself freely to the man I love and desire?”
Rohana put out a hand to stop her. “Jaelle, Jaelle darling, I did not call you a whore, or anything like it! I said: this was how my marriage seemed at the beginning, a grave burden I must bear for my family’s sake. Yet now Gabriel is the very center of the world we have built together. A freemate says to her lover, because of this storm of desire, I will remain with you while it suits my pleasure; but if we lose our happiness I will leave you, sacrificing the happiness we have had and the good times that may come in the future, all because of the unhappiness of a year or two. There is no obligation to remain together and work to turn the evil times into good again.”