“Yes!”
“He said you would be. But you must go. Your fear will pass.”
Slowly, I gathered my belongings. But my hands were shaking so that I kept dropping things. Cheah came over, oddly silent, and helped me. Jeh led me out of the apartment and through the corridor for some distance to what appeared to be a solid wall. A hidden door.
Jeh felt for the handhold, found it, and pulled the door open. He spoke quietly.
“Go in, Alanna.”
I didn’t move. It was all I could do to keep myself from running away down the corridor. I had come this far by telling myself that I could talk to Diut—talk him out of this… experiment, or whatever it was. And I did not want to disgrace myself before Jeh and Cheah. Now though…
“Alanna!”
I jumped, looked at him.
“Go in.”
I went through the door and he shut it behind me.
There was no one in the room. It was a large room made of the same gray stone as the rest of the dwelling. There were two long chests of polished wood, one on either side of the room. I dropped my things atop one of these chests. There was a doorway on the opposite side of the room and I could hear someone moving around in the room beyond. So the Tehkohn Hao had at least a two-room apartment. Luxury. I could have lived my life happily without such luxury. There was a large animal-skin rug on the floor before the fireplace. I sat down on it and stared into the low fire trying to think. Everything had happened too quickly, too unexpectedly. It made no sense. Diut had hardly looked at me during my stay with the Tehkohn. And surely I could not have seemed sexually attractive to him.
He came into the room, his feet making almost no sound against the stone floor. I looked at him once, then looked away quickly, closed my eyes in desperation. I would keep still. I would not behave stupidly. We would talk, Diut and I, and end this nonsense.
“Tehkohn Hao,” I greeted. My voice was steady.
“Alanna.”
“Am I to have a liaison with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why do men and women usually have liaisons?”
He was standing over me off to one side, towering, huge. I felt powerless and afraid and angry at myself for being afraid. I had to keep calm.
“Are forced matings the way among the Tehkohn?” I asked quietly.
“Have I used force?”
“Have I accused you?”
He whitened slightly and sat down beside me. “We have no tradition of forced matings, Alanna.”
“Will you let me go then?”
“But I have chosen you.”
“I have not chosen you.”
“What man have you chosen?”
“I… none. I didn’t know I would be permitted to mate here.”
“Has any man approached you?”
“No.”
“No man would unless I ordered it. None but me.”
I said nothing.
“Your differences keep others away,” he said. “You come to me as a stranger, an alien in spite of all that you have learned. But when you leave me, you will be Tehkohn. When others see that I have accepted you, they will accept you.”
I began to tremble, and to believe, really believe, that there was no way out of this. I was afraid I would lose control of myself if he touched me. When he touched me.
He reached over, took my hand, and examined it much as the Garkohn huntress Gehl once had.
“The fingers are too long,” he said. “And too slender. The nails are too thin, too weak. You are right to keep them short. The hairlessness is ugly at first—wrong, a distortion of what should be. But the coloring is the greatest distortion. Brown. No blue at all. The lowest artisan has some blue, but you have none.”
I snatched my hand away from him, now more angry than frightened.
“There are* no customs here that apply to you,” he said. “You have no rights, no freedoms that I do not allow. Without the blue, you are like an animal among us.”
I glared at him. “How could you want a woman who is like an animal?”
