smart as she was likely to be: she had that hard shining in her eyes, about her
face, that he knew all too well: it was youth’s conviction it was without sin or
error; and if he troubled he could think his way through the maze of all the
things she thought, but he did not trouble: there was enough to occupy his
mind, and Kama was only a shallow part of it, shallow as a young fool was
likely to be, though complex in her potentials. She had the potential for
surprises to an enemy; was one part crazy and one part calculating and he had
not missed the gravitation of the two points that were her and Molin. The look
of a young woman in love? Not in Kama. The look of a young woman with a complex
of things seething in a still callow mind, which muddle he evaded with a
mental shrug of something close to pain: another complex fool, not born to be a
fool ultimately, but at that stage of growing when the wisest were prone
to the most wearisome, repetitious mistakes as if they were new in the world.
He knew what she had come to say. He read it before she opened her mouth,
and that irritated him to the point of fury.
“I’m going back into the town,” she said. “I can’t sit still here.”
Of course she couldn’t. Who of her age and her nature could? The battle was
going on here, but it was nothing she could get her hands into, so she went out
to find trouble.
“I’m going to find this Haught,” she said, and he could have mouthed the words a
second before they left her mouth.
“Of course you are,” he said. And did not ask Where are you going to look?