Owlsight

were getting wobbly. When she suggested a hot soak, he was only too happy to agree.

But when she led him, not in the direction of the communal pools, but down a tiny, vine-shadowed path that threaded between trees away from the sounds of celebration, he started to wonder if she had something more than a soak in mind.

Steady on, he told himself. She just might want some privacy rather than the mob.

But things were certainly promising to be interesting. . . .

She stopped at a place where the path appeared to end, and parted a curtain of flowering vines. On the other side of the vines lay a bubbling pool, one fed, obviously, by the same hot springs that fed the communal pools. Beside the pool on a small stone bench was a thick pile of towels - well, why not? It wasn’t as if they were going to get rained on in the middle of a Vale!

“Here, isn’t this better than jostling for a space with everyone else?” she asked, as she slipped unselfconsciously out of her dress and into the pool without making so much as a splash. He lost no time in following her example; the water was deliciously hot, and all of his tired muscles melted under its influence.

Ah, there is no comparison with Errold’s Grove! he thought blissfully, as he closed his eyes and slumped until his chin touched the surface of the pool. Here I am, entirely alone with Summerdance, no one will care what we do or don’t do - she’s of age, I’m of age, that’s all there is to it. Back home, if anybody found me with a girl like this, her father would be hunting me down with a pack of male relatives and her mother would be making wedding arrangements.

He took a peek out of one eye at Summerdance; apparently she wasn’t as inexhaustible as she’d been at pains to appear, for she was relaxing in the water with the same expression he’d been wearing. Beads of moisture collected on her forehead, and the hair around her face started to curl in the heat and damp.

“Where are we, exactly?” he asked, having only a vague notion of how far they had gone.

“At the farthest end of the Vale. My ekele’s up there.” She pointed straight up, and he followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Squinting upward through the rising team, past vines and foliage obscuring everything, he made out a bit of staircase against a trunk, and what might have been a piece of floor. “I got tired of having to tramp forever to get a hot soak - or to have to tramp forever after I got a hot soak. When we got a reasonable amount of magic back, and I got to pick something I wanted, I picked this.”

“Good choice,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back again.

But not before he’d managed to find a fresh blossom growing within reach.

Now came the moment for internal debate. So, do I offer her a flower? In Tayledras terms, especially in a situation like this one, offering Summerdance a flower would express without words not just his admiration for her, but that he wanted to share decidedly more than just her platonic company. Chased, rather than chaste, as the saying went. It wasn’t that he was debating whether he wanted to offer her a flower, he was debating the etiquette of it. This was her pool, beneath her ekele; her territory, so to speak. So, did he make the first overture, or would it be polite to wait and see if she did? But what if she was waiting for him to express an interest? What if she would be disappointed and hurt if he didn’t make the offer?

Of course, all this might be innocent, simply companionable. But among the Tayledras, being offered a flower didn’t imply acceptance, and she could always turn him down.

I’m thinking too much. He reached out and picked the flower without opening his eyes, held it for a moment, then turned toward her. “Ah, Summerdance?”

He opened his eyes as he spoke.

Only to stare at her, seeing that she had just turned and was offering him a flower at the same moment.

They stared at each other for a long breath, then broke nto helpless laughter, leaning into each other’s arms for support.

Then, when their laughter faded, they found other things to share.

Sunset, normally all but imperceptible beneath the huge trees, was spectacular from Summerdance’s ekele high in the boughs of a tree on the edge of the clearing - and they were both in a position to appreciate and pay attention to the sight by then. Still, neither Darian nor Summerdance was prepared to end the celebration quite so early, so they collected themselves and their belongings and rejoined the dancing just as dusk fell. Special illuminations had been planned for after dark, effects that required magic, and Darian was happy to see that they appeared on schedule. Even though he wasn’t in charge of the entertainment, he had something of a proprietary interest in it.

The main event was a display of underwater lighting, with constantly changing colors, beneath the cascades of one of the more elaborate waterfall-arrangements. It had three levels of falling water, with each of the three levels subdivided into additional cascades, all plunging into a small, but deep, pool, frequently used for acrobatic