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Liaden 11 - Mouse and Dragon
Chapter Eleven
A scholar is illuminated by the brilliance of her students.
—Liaden proverb
Aelliana stirred toward wakefulness, not knowing what roused her, nor with any memory of having gone to sleep. They had returned late to The Luck, tipsy with wine and drunk on the good wishes of their comrades. She had gone up the ramp, Daav a warm shadow at her back, opened the hatch, and stepped within. They had talked; though she failed of recalling their topic. The sound of his voice—that she recalled, serious and comforting; his arms when he embraced her warm and certain.
Someone tickled bristles across her nose. Aelliana sneezed, and opened her eyes.
A large orange cat looked curiously into her face from its nest on the pillow beside her. Its whiskers had precipitated the sneeze and, very likely had been what had set her on the path to wakefulness.
“What have you done with Daav?” she demanded, and pointed an accusing finger at its nose. “I know you—you were prowling in the garden last night!”
Which meant, she thought with a start, that she wasn't on The Luck, after all.
The cat bumped a damp nose companionably against her finger and purred gently. She rubbed its ears absently while she looked about her at the sun-filled room, the blue coverlet, the wooden wardrobe with its fanciful carvings of winged lizards lounging among fruit-heavy vines.
“This,” she told herself, or perhaps the cat, “is the apartment Daav has given me in Jelaza Kazone.”
The cat pushed his head into her fingers, demanding more robust attention.
“Brute,” she said, which was how one addressed Patch, the resident cat and co-owner of Binjali Repair Shop, when he made demands upon one's affections.
To judge from the increased level of purrs, the orange cat likewise found this to be an acceptable mode.
She had been so certain that she—that they—had come home to The Luck! Aelliana sighed.
“All very well for the Healers to give one the capacity for amusing dreams,” she told the cat, “but I believe I would prefer the reality.”
And that quickly, memory arose, as if all she needed to do was wish for it.
The tangled skeins of desire and need, the heat in her blood, Daav's flesh under her hands . . .
Aelliana gasped and sat up, clutching the coverlet to her, abandoning the cat utterly.
“I—repelled him,” she whispered, shivering with the memory of cold horror. “How—it was everything he desired; I—I felt it . . . ”
The cat yawned, stomped across her thighs and jumped to the floor.
Aelliana swallowed.
The Healers' gift was plainly a double-edged blade, new to her hand and risky to wield. That she had in some way misused it—and Daav! Would he even see her, after he had thrust her from him so coldly?
She closed her eyes, visualizing a gradation of color, and felt the panic growing in her stomach subside. Daav had done copilot's duty; he had succored her when she had asked for his aid. Someone must have brought her—and the cat!—here to her rooms, and she thought it had not been Mr. pel'Kana.
“I must speak with him,” she said firmly, as she would to a row of attentive students. “Surely, we can sort this out.”
She pushed the cover back and followed the cat's example. Once on the floor, however, she hesitated, looking down at herself. The olive trousers were rumpled and grass-stained, the black sweater flecked with stems and small bits of fluff.
“First a shower,” she told her invisible class. “This is not something to be discussed in less than a clean face.”
The cat was sitting in the window, gazing down into the garden, the tip of his striped tail flicking—one . . . two-three!—when Aelliana came into the parlor, her hair damp and loose along her shoulders.
In the shower, she had decided that the best course would be to send him a note through the house base, asking when they might speak together. She would be careful not to touch him, or in any other way offend him. In the time between, she would study the problem as she knew it to exist. She would, she vowed, do better for Daav than she had for Clonak.
She loved him, she thought, coming 'round the desk. Ought she to tell him so? She glanced at the computer; the message light was glowing a steady blue. Slipping into the chair, she touched the proper key.
Words bloomed on the screen; his name was the first she saw.
Good morning, Aelliana. I trust and hope that you slept well in our house. Korval's business rules me today, and so I am early away. That being so, I have asked my sister Anne to come to you and take you to the city to acquire clothing and whatever else you may need or desire. Please do me the honor of placing yourself entirely in Anne's care, and be guided in all things by her judgment.
Daav
