“You said you were so passionate about everything because of the way you were reared.”
“Yes. Mama thought feelings should be expressed. Whatever they were, it was healthier to have them out in the open, and neither Yma nor I could do it quietly. It’s our sense of drama, you see. We inherited it from a scandalous ancestress who was well-known in her day, as Yma is now. Yma made a career of it. I merely play at it.”
“You play very intently,” I said. “You and Leelson. I saw you that time, at the pool. I’ve watched you. Like magnets, one minute pulling at each other, then turnabout and you’re pushing at each other.”
Lutha flushed and gave me a half-angry look. I had no business commenting, and I was slightly ashamed of myself for being rude to her.
“It’s always been that way,” Lutha admitted. “Like some kind of shackle we didn’t know existed until then, tying us to one another. The relationship was never suitable. Not at all.”
“You don’t like his mother?”
“She’s … contemptuous. Of me. Of Leely. Fastiga woman are that way, just like Fastigats. She wanted Leelson to have children with one of his cousins—Fastiga is quite inbred, though they deny it—and of course, I’m far from being a cousin. She used to send some of the relatives over to look at Leely. I’m sure she did it to infuriate me and so she could say ‘I told you so,’ to Leelson.”
“What about Leelson’s father?” I asked, before I thought. I had opened a new floodgate!
“Leelson’s father disappeared. Grebor Two, his name was. And his father disappeared, too. Grebor One. They each fathered one son and then disappeared. Leelson’s mother was afraid Leelson was following in their footsteps.”
“Twice doesn’t make a habit,” I said, giving up rudeness in favor of letting her talk.
“Three times,” Lutha said. “There was a granduncle, too. One of Bernesohn’s twins. He did the same thing Leelson did, got some unsuitable person pregnant.”
“Who?” I asked politely, not caring who.
Lutha frowned for a moment, then came up with an answer. “Dasalum Tabir.”
I laughed, intrigued despite myself. “D’ahslum T’bir! That means skeleton. That’s not a name you’d forget.”
Lutha said the words over to herself, this time with the Dinadhi accent. The root words were for bones and for ladder, or tree.
“She was famous for more than her name, or infamous, depending on how you look at it. A cradle robber, according to the Fastigats. Twice Paniwar Famber’s age.”
I heard disapproval in her voice. “Maybe she couldn’t help it any more than you can. Try pretending you were hit by lightning. You can’t feel guilty about being hit by lightning.”
“It is rather like that,” Lutha confessed with a half smile.
Without meaning to, I said, “I know about that kind of lightning.” I spoke then of Shalumn, and Lutha responded with stories of her own life, of her own family.
“Was your mother pleased with you?” Oh, such a pang I felt when I asked her that, but I wanted to know.
“Yma and I have always felt that she’d have been pleased with us, that we had done well for her. Thank the Great Org Gauphin she was gone before …”
“Before Leelson?”
She spoke between gritted teeth. “Oh, Saluez! I swore I wouldn’t get entangled with him. I swore I wouldn’t, but I kept … feeling him. Smelling him, tasting—fore-tasting—his skin, seeing parts of him that I hadn’t realized I’d noticed, like the lobe of an ear or the way his hair grew at the base of his neck.
“Yma said I was smitten. She laughed at me. Of course, she hadn’t met Leelson. As events conspired, perhaps luckily, she never actually met him.”
Now I was really curious. “How did events conspire?”
“Leelson showed up at my door a few days after our chance meeting. He looked oddly subdued, and I felt … oh, I felt as though I were being pumped full of sunlight. He stepped inside and took me in his arms before he said a word. I don’t think either of us said anything that evening. Words would have been … misleading.”
“That’s how you were for each other? Made for each other?”
“That’s how. He said never one like me before. For me it was never anyone before and never one since.”
“It’s like your edges are dissolved, and you feel yourself spreading out….”
“Gossamer thin,” she said, giving me an astonished look. “Feeding on starlight.”
We stared at one another. “I know,” I said at last. “I know.”
She dropped her head, scowling at her shoes. “After a while Leely was born. Not long after that, my former self reasserted itself. And then Leelson left me.”
“Did he leave you? Or Leely?”
“He wanted me but not Leely. I wanted them both. I wouldn’t let Leely go because he needs me.”
Hearing those words, I accepted that she was a serious person. There was something implacable in her voice. Something rigorously dutiful. Leely needed her. I thought it possible that until Leely, Lutha had never known herself truly, and Leelson had never known her. Likely he had known only a soft and corrupted creature who dangled from his lips like fruit from a vine, sweet and yielding, rotten with juice. That woman had laughed and cried and tempted. That woman had been sensual and mindless. But finally she had remembered herself and became Lutha Tallstaff again, saying no, no, I will not send Leely away.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” I asked softly.
“I can’t,” she snarled, half-angry, half-amused. “The only way I can resist him is by being furious at him. The only way I can stay furious is to remember what Leely and I came here for. We’re not going to be disposed of just because Leelson would prefer it so! I will do my duty!”
“Yes,” I murmured. “Yes, of course, Lutha.”
“I promised,” she said. The words had the feeling
