All of these things had something to do with honor, but nowhere in all that tangle of honor and dishonor, as Chernon understood it, was there anything about rotting away on a bed for fifty days before you finally died. Casimur should have taken the Well Water. Morgot herself had come to him and offered it three times. Each time, Chernon had hidden himself, not wanting to see her, not wanting to think about her or her family. Not wanting to think about Stavia.
It had all gone wrong with Stavia. He had done exactly what Michael told him to do, but it had gone wrong. Instead of becoming Chernon’s willing informant, Stavia had gone away. One afternoon she was there, holding him in her lap while he cried, inexcusable, babyish tears. Five days later when he tried to find her to tell her the tears hadn’t meant anything, she was gone. She had been sent to Abbyville to the Medical Institute, Beneda told him. Gone two years earlier than expected. Gone for nine years, and she would only be able to come home to visit once or twice, if at all. It made him angry, not so much that she had gone but that she had never said a word to him about the fact that she might go. It did not occur to him that she might not have mentioned it because she hadn’t wanted to go.
No, he told himself, he had simply been wrong to think Stavia would behave differently from other women. All women cheated. His mother cheated, and Beneda, and so Stavia did, as well.
There had been the time that crazy Vinsas had been alive. Vinsas had told Chernon to go home at carnival time and say these things to Chernon’s mother, not nice things exactly, but interesting things. “I cut her with my knife at the tip of her breast,” Vinsas had said. When he talked like this, his lips wobbled loosely and the spit ran out onto his chin. “It made a scar. I bit her in a certain place. I left my teeth marks on her. Make her show you….” Chernon found it interesting to imagine what she would say when he quoted Vinsas to her. That very first time she could have told him she wouldn’t discuss it, but instead she’d tried to explain about Vinsas. If she hadn’t intended to talk about it, she should have said so the first time. But she did say some things. Things about women and how men looked at women and what some men wanted. He didn’t really want her to cry, but it was interesting that she did. Having her talk to him that way made him feel older and stronger. He had wanted to talk about it again, but after the second time she hadn’t let him talk about it at all. Instead, she had sent him away, to his Aunt Erica’s house.
And Stavia. It was the same with Stavia. “You’ve got to get them to break the rules, boy,” Michael had said. “They think they’re safe so long as they keep the rules. It’s like their silly ordinances are a kind of protection for them. You get them to break the rules, all of a sudden they don’t have that protection anymore. Then the only protection they’ve got is you, and they have to please you to get it, right?”
So he got Stavia to break the rules, but she had twisted on him. She had threatened to go to the Council.
“Give her the book back,” Stephon had said. “Keep her quiet. Wait a few months and we’ll try her again.”
But there had been no opportunity to try again. She had gone. Would be gone. For years.
You couldn’t trust them. That’s what Michael said. You couldn’t trust them. He was right. Even Beneda. Sometimes when he used to visit at home during carnival she’d ask him what he wanted to eat and fix it for him, then the next time she’d say she was too busy. Women had no right to do a thing and then not do it, to say yes and then no. The warriors said sometimes a woman would be with them at one carnival and the next carnival she’d say, no, she wanted to be with someone else! Even Barten had said that once about some girl. How she had said she’d stay at the Gypsy camp for him, but she didn’t. Women had no right to do that. Once a woman consented to something, that was it, no saying no later or running away.
The worst part of Stavia’s being gone was that Chernon’s usefulness to Michael seemed to be over. Now there was only this waiting! Waiting until Stavia came back, if she came back. Waiting until Michael found something else exciting for him to do. Which would not be soon. Michael had decided that now was not the time to do anything.
“I’ve got this philosophy,” Michael had said in his smooth, lazy voice. “You can plan all you want to. Plan and plan, and maybe something will happen and maybe it won’t. Life’s like the city. There’s a wall around it with a gate in it. A Warriors’ Gate. Once in a while that gate is going to open, and if you’re ready, you can get through it before it shuts again. The thing we have to do is be ready. Someday the gate is going to open for us, for you, too, Chernon. If you’re ready when it does, then you
