They stood in a quiet and deserted garden. Here in the Drylands little grew unless it was planted, except thornbush; but Jalak, tyrant of Shainsa, had spared no expense to create an oasis for himself and his pampered women and favorites. A multitude of fountains splashed, tall trees towered overhead, and flowers grew in lush profusion, with a sweet, damp, rank smell. On silent feet, guided by the sketch Rohana had made after the rapport with Melora, the women threaded their way along the bricked pathway, and paused in the shadow of a grove of blackfruit trees.
“Leeanne,” Kindra whispered.
As the slender, sexless figure moved away toward, Rohana knew, the chamber where Melora’s twelve-year-old daughter slept with her nurse, Rohana found herself wondering incongruously how a neutered Amazon thought of herself. Not as a woman, surely. A man? Some indefinable third thing? She dismissed the thought impatiently. What nonsense to be thinking about now!
They moved toward the unguarded garden door; a moment later they were actually inside. Rohana, moving now from memory of her rapport with Melora, began to move directly toward the guarded room where Jalak slept.
Was Melora awake, alert for them, expecting them? All this afternoon she had resisted the temptation to reach out for telepathic contact with her cousin, but now she yielded; reached for rapport, more easily as the long-neglected skill came back.
-Melora, Melora! And suddenly, in a half-forgotten sensation of blending and merging, she was Melora, she…
… She lay silent, facing the wall, every muscle tense and alert, willing herself to relax, be patient, wait. … In her body the heavy child kicked sharply, and she thought, with weary patience, You are so strong and lusty, little son, and, Avarra pity me, 1 have not even the heart to wish you more like to die It is not your fault but your ill fortune that you are Jalak’s son….
Will it truly be tonight? And the guards . . . how, how? The memory that had been with her, night and day, for ten years now of her foster-brother Valentine, broken, writhing, his fingers cut from his living body, covered in blood, after atrocities too many and too dreadful to think about…. Oh, Evanda and Avarra, Aldones, Lord of Light, not Rohana, too…
No! I must not remember that now! I must be strong….
Painstakingly, muscle-by-muscle, she forced herself to relax.
Jalak slept now, deeply: the first, sated sleep of the night. Beyond him she saw, by the dim moonlight from the courtyard window, the pale forms of the two favorites who shared his bed. They, too, slept: Danette- pale, nude, her long scattered hair enfolding her; Garris snoring a little, lying on his back, folded against Jalak’s long body. At first this had infuriated and humiliated her to silent tears and passionate rebellion; after ten years she was only wearily relieved that she need no longer share his bed. During these months while she carried his son, Jalak, proud, and as near to kindness as he ever came, had yielded good-naturedly to her plea and allowed her to have a bed of her own, that she might sleep in peace and rest well. For years now she had been freed at night, like other Dry-Town women, from the chains she wore by day; only while she was still a rebellious prisoner had she been forced to wear them night and day. More than once, in that first faraway year, she had flown at his throat … ceasing only when she knew her furious resistance excited, amused, stimulated him….
Poor Danette, how she hates me, how she gloated when she took my place in Jalak’s bed, never guessing how willingly 1 would have resigned it years ago-and she hates my child worse than she hates me, she knows she is barren. If only I were…. 7 wish Garris no ill, His parents sold him in the brothels of Ardcarran when he was no older than Jaelle … he loves Jalak no more than 7 … perhaps less. Cruelly as the Dry-Towners treat their women, there are at least laws and customs to protect women to some degree, and not even such laws protect such as Garris. Poor little wretch…he still cries…. How slowly this night seems to pass….