For three more days they rested, for all were drained and exhausted, as if the dance and the outpouring of energy they had given to Adelinda and An-Shai had spent all their resources. During all this time, An-Shai and Adelinda avoided each other, keeping the width of the camp always between them. They had been too close to be able to bear each other’s company, a sharing of memories and thoughts and emotions that were almost too chaotic to comprehend, and a baring of weaknesses before each other that was deeply humiliating to the two proud spirits. They each had much sorting and thinking to do.
On the evening of the third day, An-Shai came walking purposefully across the camp to Adelinda’s resting place, knowing, as he would always know her every feeling and she his, that she was ready to discuss with him what was to be done. Wordlessly, she shifted to the side to give him room, and silently he dropped onto the blanket. The others, aware that the time for decisions was at hand, gathered around.
“I’ll send you and your people home, if you wish,” he offered, knowing that for him at least, that was as impossible as to cut off a part of his body and send it away, but also knowing that the offer had to be made. To try to keep her against her will was now unthinkable.
Adelinda was no more able to contemplate separation from him than he from her. “For my people, I accept, if that’s what they want,” she said gravely.
They turned with an uncanny harmony of movement to the rest of the travelers. “I want to go home,” said Tobin immediately. “There’s someone waiting for me.”
“Me, too,” said Ina. “There isn’t anyone waiting for me, but there will be.” Her wicked smile promised a fair degree of havoc among the young men who had never noticed her before.
“I’d prefer to stay here and find out what the clergy of Godsland know about the supernatural,” said Orvet. “Len, if it would please you to stay, your scholarly talents would be more useful here than in the Kingdom.”
“I’d like to stay,” said Len shyly.
“Oh, yes,” said Adelinda. “Please stay, Len. I need you.” Then she turned to An-Shai, jolted by the sudden surge of jealousy he felt and almost as quickly mastered. “I owe Len,” she explained, though it wasn’t really necessary; An-Shai knew her feelings as well as she did. He reached oat and gently touched her arm, soothing a little the familiar guilty sadness of Dep’s loss.
“I think I’ll head for home,” said Karel, when they all turned to him. “I’ve had enough of adventuring for a while. That little cottage in the cottonwood grove looks pretty good to me. I have it in mind to marry and raise a family.”
“A wife could be found for you here,” offered Li-Mun, “I hope to have some influence with the new bishop of the Vale, and I could see to it that you got a pretty one.”
“Thanks,” said Karel dryly, “but I prefer to choose my own wife, and it won’t be one who’s been so downtrodden from birth that she’s afraid of her shadow. I want a woman with a bit of spirit. The women of Godsland are pretty, I’ll grant you, but they’ve got no character.”
“Things are going to change in Godsland,” said An-Shai quietly. “The practice of using supernatural predators to control the population is going to stop. Schools are going to be opened to the children of peasants and nobles—girls as well as boys. The clergy are going to teach as well as protect and comfort the people.”
“I hope you realize that you’re talking about reforming your entire society,” said Orvet interestedly. “Just educating the children is going to rock your religion to its foundations.”
“It needs to be rocked,” said Li-Mun heatedly.
“There is no religion,” said An-Shai bitterly. “It’s a!! a fraud, designed to control the people and backed up with magic and the supernatural.”
“What do you intend to do, tell everybody that?” asked Adelinda.
“No, the people need the crutch—until they’ve learned how to cope without it. It may take generations. For now, just stopping the use of supernatural predators like the night stalkers and starting schools for everyone should be enough.”
“You’ve changed a lot since we arrived.”
“No, I haven’t. I always felt that the duty of the clergy was to protect the people. I became a novice because I wanted to help.” His glance fell. “Children do things for reasons like that. I learned ambition later, as I rose through the ranks, and forgot or put aside my first reasons for accepting the religious life.” It was Adelinda’s turn to give him a comforting touch.
“How do you intend to accomplish all these things?” asked Li-Mun. “I hardly think the initiates are going to welcome your revolutionary ideas with open arms.”
“Therejs only one way. I’ll have to rise through the ranks of the initiates as fast as possible and make myself the highest of all. It means facing and mastering every initiate from the lowest right up to the highest in tests of will, of control in the overmind, of handling the supernatural, and from what Tsu-Linn tells me, of skill in cards and dice.” His face was grim.
“That could be quite a task,” commented Orvet.
“I can’t do it alone,” said An-Shai bluntly. “If you will come with, me and lend me your knowledge of the supernatural, and if Len will help me with the research I’ll need to do and won’t have the leisure for, that would help. But you would have to come to the Hall as my servants. I don’t like to ask that of you.” He paused, searching for the right words. Everyone looked uncomfortably away; they didn’t have to have been in contact with him through the overmind to know that it was cruelly hard for him to say what he must say.
“Adelinda, if you will come with me and support me in the overmind, and with your will and courage, and I have reason to know that you’re more than amply supplied with both, I might have a slim chance of succeeding. But there’s only one way a woman would be permitted at the Hall.” He stopped again and took a deep breath. “That’s as my wife.” He faltered again, aware of her sudden inner rebellion. The impulse toward freedom was very strong in her. If she had loved him as a man, her choice would have been easy, but her heart had been given long ago. Even though Dep was long dead, he was only recently dead to her, and she had not yet grieved properly for him nor come to terms with her own guilt. He felt these things even though he didn’t understand. “I know that I’ve given you plenty of reason to hate and fear me, and I don’t know how to behave toward a wife. I wouldn’t ask you to—well, be a real wife—have children, and all those things.”
If he failed to understand her, she was uncomfortably aware of his feelings. She understood too well that the sexual escapades of her youth, mere adventures to her, were loathsome to him, and that the thought of taking a real wife was at best confusing and upsetting. His youth and young adulthood had been spent denying and repressing all natural feelings in those directions. It would be very long before he would be able to establish a natural sexual relationship with any woman, if he ever could, and she was probably the least likely woman on the face of the earth to inspire affection or desire in this proud, cold man. The only way he could be touched, she thought, was through his strong protective instinct, and she had taught him well that she neither needed nor wanted his protection. Nor did he appeal to her; a man more unlike the warm, loving, merry Dep would be hard to imagine. He could never respond to her need for affection and gentle kindness.
The others were silent, waiting for her decision; she knew that if she refused to go with An-Shai that both Orvet and Len would follow her lead.
But in the last analysis, was there really any choice? The experiences in the overmind had melded An-Shai and Adelinda into something more than two individuals. They were two halves of a whole. Could they flourish or even survive for long if they parted? Would the breadth of two continents and an ocean sever the bond that had formed between them? She rather thought not, and she knew without quite knowing how she knew that so wide a separation would become in time a nagging pain that would draw them inevitably together. Even before they had merged to become a dragon
they had been acutely aware of each other.
Sensitive to the trend of her thoughts, if not their exact content, An-Shai said, “I need you, Adelinda. If you leave me, I’ll never be able to change the things that need to be changed, or even to live content with my limitations.” He held out his hand for her to take.
She hesitated for only a moment. Then she sighed and laid her hand in his. “I need you, too, An-Shai. It seems our destinies are linked and we have a role to play in Godsland. I’ll stay.”
Claudia J Edwards - [Forest King 02] Page 24