“Your kinsman, will it damage his pride too much, to accept rescue at a woman’s doing? Or don’t the Terranan have that kind of pride?”
“Not usually. On other worlds men and women usually share the risks equally,” Magda said. But Peter was reared on Darkover, like me. And I found my Darkovan training too strong even for the Empire. Will it damage him, destroy him, as it might a Darkovan man?
And suddenly Magda understood something about herself that she had never realized before.
Brought up as I was, at Caer Donn, only a Darkovan could have attracted me; they say the way you react to the opposite sex is conditioned before you’re seven years old. None of the Terran men, I knew seemed right, none of them had the right sort of emotional-or sexual-wavelengths for me. The sexual cues were all wrong. So Peter was literally the only man 1 knew to whom I reacted as to a male at all.
And when I was ripe for a love affair, he was the only man I knew; literally the only one. It wasn’t that I cared more for him than others: it was that there were no others.
She realized that this might very well be the most important insight of her life, and resolved that she must somehow manage to hold on to it, even after she met Peter again.
Sain Scarp was an enormous fortress, isolated beyond a long rock causeway. The next day at noon the two women rode across the causeway, and Magda, at least, had the sense of eyes watching them from the tower at the far end. At the end of the causeway a big, rough-looking man stopped them, demanding their business.
Now. This is the culmination of it all; everything else that has happened-even the Amazon oath, dividing my life in two-was all for this. Strangely, Magda had almost forgotten that. She said, “I am the Free Amazon Margali n’ha Ysabet”-(how strange that sounded)- “come on a mission from the Lady Rohana Ardais. There is a prisoner and a ransom to be paid. Carry this word to Rumal di Scarp.” They waited, shivering in the bright cold air, until the bandit chieftain came.
Afterward she could never remember what Rumal di Scarp looked like, except that he seemed a small man to carry such weight of rumor and horror tales: a small, wiry, hawk-faced man with fierce eyes. Behind Rumal, his hands bound, Magda saw a slender, familiar figure. Peter! He was thin and pale, dressed in shabby and torn mountain garments; a narrow fringe of coppery-red beard shadowed his face, but Magda knew him.
Rumal di Scarp came slowly toward them. “Well, mestra, I hear there is a ransom to pay. Who are you?”
Silently, Magda held out her safe-conduct; Rumal took it, handed it to the huge bandit at his side, who overshadowed him physically as much as the little man seemed to dwarf his giant companion in every ^ other way. The man read it aloud to Rumal. “Lady Rohana Ardais… empowered to deal in a family matter…”
Rumal took the safe-conduct, crumpled it contemptuously and tossed it back to Magda. He said, laughing, “Gallant are the men of Ardais, that they send women to pay ransom for their menfolk! Why should I deal with you?”
Jaelle said, “Because I am the Lady Rohana’s kinswoman, and if you do hot honor your word I will spread it far and wide, from the Hellers to Dalereuth, that Rumal di Scarp does not honor his bargains. And then you may sit here in Sain Scarp and make soup from the bongs of your captives for all the good they will be to you, since no one will ever again pay a single coin hi ransom!”
Rumal made a gesture of contempt, signaled for Peter to be brought forward. “Well, there he is, heir to Ardais, whole and well, sound in wind and limb as a horse in spring market. And so, my ladies”-he used the intimate inflection, which made it sound even more contemptuous-“let us see the color of that ransom, then.”
Magda knew her hands were trembling as she counted out the copper bars. Rumal shrugged, signaled to his giant henchman to wrap the ransom money in a cloth and take it away. “You have your kinsman. Take him away, then.”