Weisel desired total conquest.

And so eventually the war would come here to the deep south, to Febretree. Perhaps this was why she was able to care so little about neglecting her other studies in favor of this assignment, despite the fact that she was straying dangerously from the path toward academic success and security.

But such deviating was encouraged, her coldly capable mind argued. Iconoclastic thinking was a far surer means of advancement within the University than sticking rigorously to the curriculum. That made her actions and behavior matters of pure logic, which pleased her.

What pleased her more, though, was Xink.

She liked the campus's Blue Annex. The quarters of a sixth-phase Attache were indeed superior to her old cell, and a palace, when compared to conditions in the dormitories. It was roughly four times the space she'd had before. The floor was finished wood, not stone. (She even recognized the type of wood—blood-ash, a fine wood —and was surprised and amused that she retained any knowledge of timber from her Dral Blidst childhood.) There was a brazier where she heated water for tea—the tallgreen tea, of which Xink seemed to have an unaccountably inexhaustible supply.

The two most important furnishings in the chamber were the desk and the bed.

It was a broad, solid desk, and the chair was upholstered and quite comfortable. The bed was to her

old bunk what... well... being sexually experienced was to being virginal!

She hummed a bright little laugh to herself at the thought. That was something she was having to get used to. Laughter. Also smiling. Lately, when Xink fixed her with that gorgeous smoldering stare of his, she was able to return what she thought was an equally wanton look. She laughed a bit harder now, thinking of their first kiss and how awkward she had been, nearly swooning—not from passion, but from abject terror and uncertainty.

It was incredible to think that before Xink no male had ever touched her in the least lustful way, had ever expressed the most minute carnal interest in her. She did not feel slighted in hindsight by this inattention. Quite simply, she hadn't known what she was missing out on. Whatever normal curiosities she might have experienced in her life had been ground under by her deep-seated social timidity and her overwhelming academic urges. Those had served to effectively bank her hormonal fires for all those years. It had taken Xink to awaken everything in her.

He'd done a fine job. Her laugh turned to an outright snicker.

'Did old Honnis bury a joke in there somewhere?' Praulth looked up from the papers. The desk was broad enough that she could spread them out. She had the detailed maps of the Felk battles arranged chronologically.

Xink was rather pleasingly arranged himself, slung across the wide mattress of the bed, his robe on a hook near the door, next to her own. Since the brazier was lit several times a day for her tea, the chamber remained constantly and comfortably warm. She wondered how it would be in the winter. Surely warmer than any accommodations she'd enjoyed since arriving at Febretree six years ago.

The gauzy shift—like those they all wore beneath their robes—clung to Xink's sleek, but muscular body. He was long-limbed, long of finger too. His hair was wildly over-grown and so dark it seemed to suck the lamplight from above. (That was another remarkable improvement about these lodgings—an actual clean-burning lamp; it hung from a bronze hook in the middle of the room, and they never seemed to run out of oil.) And his face, oh, his face...

He was so beautiful, it defied all reason. His brows were thin but as dark as his lush, cascading hair; his eyes were limpid blue flecked with gold and seemed to see always right through to her heart. His cheekbones were high, elegant, he had an angular jaw, and the sweet soft lips of his luscious mouth ...

He had said something, asked a question. With a start, she made to answer. She loved him, yes, loved him dearly and desperately; but she didn't want to appear foolish in any way in front of him.

'No, no joke,' she said hastily. 'Umm ... just more of the usual.'

He was smiling easily, so at ease with himself, so confident. He had been glancing over some of Mistress Cestrello's papers, which he needed to organize by the end of the next watch. It was nice that Xink sometimes came here to their quarters to work, since here was where she was throughout the day, and where she sometimes missed him terribly, waiting hungrily for the night, and bed. Bed had once meant only sleep.

'What new doings of your Lord Weisel?' he asked casually.

He knew of her assignment. Of course he knew; of course she had told him. How could she not share everything about herself with him? She wanted to give herself, utterly. How sweet the surrenders so far.

'It's not what he does, it's what he will do,' she said, trying to match his effortless smile but knowing hers was more of a giddy grin. 'That's what interests Honnis.'

Knowing that Weisel was imitating Dardas's war techniques, Honnis had charged her with predicting the future movements of the Felk army. Weisel was presently within striking distance of three different city-states. Trael, Grat, and Ompellus Prime.

Praulth had already had some success in predicting this war's smaller engagements, the military operations that overran the lesser burgs among the larger city-states. Since the Felk had moved on from Sook, she had calculated those moves that sacked villages and captured roads.

Sometimes her deductions had the taste of intuitive leaps; yet they were not. She was always able to prop up these 'feelings' with the hardest facts. She felt obligated to do so—to prove to Master Honnis that none of this was guess-work and, perhaps, to remind herself of that same thing.

The surface of the desk started to blur slightly.

She shifted on her chair. Comfortable or not, sitting in it watch after watch was its own sort of ordeal. Her body, beneath her own gauzy shift, felt stiff. She returned her gaze to Xink.

She saw his bulge then, growing. She saw the new look in his eyes, one she recognized, one that set her blood singing. Suddenly her throat was dry, where elsewhere she suddenly was not. Longing that was agony, and bliss stole over her. She was rising to her feet, and he was there, waiting, ready, on the bed. Wanting her, needing her. So much she had learned. So much he had taught her. He was twenty-five to her twenty-two years. He had knowledge, worldliness, experience. Just as she now had experience, a dizzy mental satisfaction that complemented the bodily gratification so sublimely.

It was a vast new vocabulary: manhood, nipples, engorgement, clitoris, ejaculation, contraceptive. How confused she had been when he'd first fit on that small tube of animal bladder, until he'd explained the function, until she understood that only ignorant country maids need bear children that they didn't want.

She lay down on the bed. He buried himself in her, and it seemed to go on forever.

IT WAS HARDLY unheard of for two students to cohabitate, but Praulth had never imagined she would find herself doing so. Had never successfully imagined so many things, in fact.

How quickly Xink had come into her life. Less than half a lune had passed since he had first left that cup of tall-green tea and the note outside her door. And now she was living with the handsome student who had achieved the academic rank of Attache, a fine intelligent individual with a bright future, currently serving the University's sociology council and Mistress їestrello in particular. Incredible.

She was happy. Impossibly happy.

He had made it all so easy, from the first moment he introduced himself in one of the study parlors. He had confessed to bringing her the tea and to having had an infatuation for her for some while.

She couldn't remember ever having seen him on campus before, but she wasn't one to focus on people. At least not people who weren't part of history.

Later she returned to the desk, spent and thoroughly refreshed all at once, and knowing that the city-state of Trael was Lord Weisel/General Dardas's next logical target.

RASTAC (2)

SHE HAD NEVER been so high off the ground in her life. They built magnificent tall buildings in the Southsoil's grander cities, to be sure; but these Petgradites had something of a mania for towers, it seemed. In this administrative district of the city, the great stone spires punched toward the sky. This was evidently the tallest of all:

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