Hours later, she woke to see Jaelle standing in the doorway, barefoot, her face flushed, her short hair tousled. Her eyes were very bright. She came across the room and sat on Magda’s bed.
Magda said lightly, “I didn’t expect you back until later.”
Magda could smell the girl’s sweet heavy breath, and knew she had been drinking; was not sober now Jaelle said, “Oh, don’t be angry with me, sister. I didn’t want this to happen, I know how you feel.”
“Angry?” Magda sat up and put her arms around Jaelle. “Darling”-the word she used was breda- “what right have I to be angry? Do you think-” Abruptly, it dawned on her just what Jaelle did think. “Do you think I’m jealous?”
• Jaelle said with a nervous giggle, “This kind of thing is easier at midsummer when there are gardens. We have spent most of the night in the long galleries.” Her teeth were chattering, whether with cold or nervous excitement Magda could not tell. “I-I should have gone with him as he asked me.” She looked at the connecting door into Peter’s room. “But-but I wanted to be sure, I don’t like deciding things in a hurry and,” she added after a moment, looking at Magda in appeal, “I did not want to-to tread on the hem of your garment.”
Incongruously Magda realized that she was still making mental notes about the curious idiom. She hugged the trembling girl tight, and said, “Jaelle, anything between Peter Haldane and me was a long, long time ago.” As she said it, she knew that it was really true. “Do you love him, breda?”
“I don’t know,” Jaelle said. “I’m not sure. I’ve never felt like this before.”
Magda found herself wondering if Jaelle were a virgin. From her flippant jokes, and sophisticated comments, she had not thought so; but could an experienced woman be so uncertain? As if Jaelle he’d picked up the thought directly from her mind-and by now Magda was almost ready to believe that-Jaelle said in a low voice, looking down, “It’s foolish, isn’t it? I’ve come near to it many times. Before I took the oath, when Kindra saw that I liked to-to laugh with men and to flirt with them, she told me that before I bound myself, I should take a lover, test myself that way; she said that it might someday seem hard to me that I was bound by law never to marry. But somehow there was never anyone I could-could trust that much.”
She added defensively, “So it never came to more than laughter or foolishness. Nor did I ever leave any man wounded by my teasing, or heart-scalded. But now”-she looked and sounded forlorn-“I have no more laughter. I think I am more afraid now, when I-when I love him, when I want him, than when I was a girl and the very thought of giving myself to any man seemed frightening, an open door to bondage and slavery. … I don’t know myself anymore!” Her voice was snaking and she was very close to tears. “I don’t know what I want! Oh, Margali, Margali-sister, what shall I do?”
Magda felt wrung, helpless. What can I say to her? She could understand that to Jaelle, brought up as she had been among women close-bound to one another by oath, it seemed completely natural to turn to another woman for comfort or counsel. I am bound to treat every woman as my mother, sister, daughter…. but I’ve always lived by such different laws. . God help me, I don’t know what to say to her! If one of her own friends in the Terran Zone-Bethany, for instance-• had come to her with such a question, Magda could have turned it off with a casual or even a crude joke. But she could not do that to Jaelle.
What would Rohana have said to her? Finally, in a voice shaking as much as Jaelle’s, she said, “Darling, I can’t advise you. I don’t know if anyone could. You must do what you feel is right.” Then, to her own surprise, she found herself whispering the words of the oath of the Free Amazons: “I swear I will give myself to no man save in my own time and season and of my own free will. …”