“We cannot! Tellator, not here, not like this!” She was horrified, not only by his assumption that she would agree but also by her body’s hungry response to him.

“Oh, but we can. And I must. I cannot wait, not another moment. Not another breath.”

Something. Distress. Danger.

Thymara pried her eyes open. She was sitting, not on a table in a garden on a warm summer evening but on the hard stone steps with a chill winter day dying around her. Yet she was not cold. She was panting still with the passion she had shared, and Amarinda’s heat and desire still warmed her. She cleared her throat, coughed, and then was suddenly aware that she held his hand. Tellator looked at her from Rapskal’s eyes. “Here,” he said quietly. “And now. There is no better time than this.”

He set his long, scaled hand to the line of her jaw and lowered his face to hers. Rapskal kissed her knowingly, his mouth moving gently on hers. She was paralyzed with desire and wonder. Where did they stop, where did they begin? It was all one. The man who knelt suddenly on the steps before her, opening her worn blouse to his greedy kisses was not a clumsy boy but a skilled lover. Her own skilled lover, long schooled to what would most stir her. There was nothing new in how he touched her or what she longed to do with him. She gasped at the touch of his teeth and put her hand on the back of his head. Her fingers tangled in his dark hair, and she guided his mouth against her. She sighed his name and he laughed softly, his mouth still against her skin. “Rapskal,” he corrected her. “But you can call me Tellator. Just as I can call you Amarinda.” He lifted his face to smile deep into her eyes. “Do you see now, Thymara? Do you understand? Everything we need to know about being Elderlings, we can learn here. Even this. And you won’t fear it anymore, because you’ve already done it. And you know how good it will be between us.”

She didn’t want him to talk. She didn’t want him to pause, didn’t want to think about what she was going to do. He was right. She didn’t need to. Others had made all the decisions for them, all those years ago. She leaned back, letting him do as he knew she wished.

“I didn’t fear this,” she told him breathlessly. “It was just . . .” She lost her words and her thought in his touch. Why had she been so reluctant?

“I didn’t think you did, really.” His voice was deep with pleasure as he fumbled at his clothing. “I knew Jerd was wrong when she said that you were afraid, that watching was as much as you’d ever want to do.”

Jerd? The name was like a bucket of cold water dashed against her. Thymara jerked back from Rapskal and then hitched away from him, pulling her shirt closed over her breasts. “Jerd?” she demanded of him, incensed. “Jerd! You discussed my doing this with Jerd? You took her advice on how best to accomplish what you wanted?” Fury washed through her, drowning desire. Jerd. She could just imagine her laughing, mocking, making lewd suggestions to Rapskal as to just how he could persuade her to mate with him. Jerd!

She shot to her feet, her arousal vanished. Her fingers flew as she refastened her clothing. She sought for furious words and couldn’t find any sharp enough to fling at him. Turning away from him, she stared at the wall feeling dizzied, almost ill. It had all changed too swiftly. She had been Amarinda and so infatuated with Tellator. Then she had entered that odd middle ground in which she had felt as if she possessed two lives and had absolutely no qualms about sharing herself with him. Now she didn’t even want to look at him.

I’ll have to hold on to him when I fly back on Heeby. That intrusive thought only intensified her anger. Right now, all she wanted was to walk away from him and never speak to him again. Jerd. He’d gossiped about her with Jerd! Believed that Jerd knew what she was talking about.

“Thymara! It wasn’t like that!” Rapskal stumbled to his feet, stuffing himself back inside his trousers and tying up the ragged drawstring. “I was just there, and Jerd was talking to some of the others. It wasn’t that I asked her advice. Some of us were just sitting around a fire a few nights ago, talking, and someone said something about Greft and missing him despite all he had done. And she agreed, and talked about him a bit, and then she told how sometimes you’d follow them and watch them when they were mating. And she was the one making mock and saying it was probably as much as you’d ever do. Saying you were pretending that you were saving your virginity or didn’t want to get pregnant, but actually you were just afraid of doing it.”

Thymara spun back to stare at him in horror. “She talked like that about me in front of everyone? In front of who? Who was she talking to? Who heard all this?”