“Better let me handle it.”
“All right.” Certainly she couldn’t handle it herself. She would kill him if she did. Let the actor Stavia do it.
She put on her clothes, fastening them tightly, went back to the place she had met him, and kicked him sharply in the ribs.
He woke with a whoof, staring wildly about him.
“If you ever do that again,” she told him, “it will be the last time you ever see me.”
“Do…,” he mumbled, gradually focusing on her. “Do… what did you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to act civilized. I did not expect to be attacked. Is that kind of behavior considered honorable in the garrison?”
He couldn’t answer her. Certainly it was. It wasn’t acceptable in Women’s Country, he knew that, but in the garrison? Of course it was. With… with… certain kinds of women. Women who came out to the camp for you….
She saw the way he looked at her, looked away, the quick darting of those suddenly guileful eyes. “So, Chernon,” the actor Stavia demanded, “is this your idea of getting even?”
He blushed. Maybe. A little. It had been.
“Did you expect me to like it? Accept it?”
He shook his head, searching for an acceptable reply, remembering too late that he had been sent to woo information from her. “I didn’t think at all. I’ve been… I’ve been waiting for you for weeks. I’ve been… I’ve been thinking about you. I just couldn’t… I couldn’t wait, that’s all.” He flushed again, got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Stavia. I wasn’t even… I wasn’t even here, I guess.”
“Shall we get some things straight?”
He nodded, giving a crafty appearance of willingness though he was beginning to feel aggrieved. Saying it once had been quite enough. She could let it go. It wasn’t anything they needed to go over and over.
“We’re supposed to be companions on this trip. I agreed to this whole thing at least partly to make up to you for having misled you when we were just kids. Well, when I was a kid—what was I, ten, eleven years old?—we agreed to make this a kind of adventure. Fulfillment of some kind of fantasy for both of us. Right so far?”
He nodded. Of course that is what they’d said, what he’d said, mostly. Did she think he had forgotten?
“I’m not some girl you’ve seduced out to a Gypsy camp for your pleasure. The pleasure is supposed to be mutual. That means we both work at it and are careful of one another’s feelings.”
He couldn’t think of any suitable response. Certain things about the encounter had just struck him, and he was trying to figure them out.
After waiting for a time she said, “I’m hungry,” in a neutral voice which hid a mild nausea. She got the necessary supplies out of the donkey pack and set about putting together a meal of bread and cheese, lighting a tiny, smokeless fire to heat water for tea. “I left very early,” she went on, still in that neutral, impersonal voice. “Before breakfast.”
They ate together, silently on the whole, though Chernon managed one or two comments on his trip with Septemius. Stavia thought the remarks were unnecessarily carping, but said nothing. He might merely be trying to be funny.
Finally he found a source of his discomfort and blurted, “That was the first time you ever…? Wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you all started when you were real young. Beneda did.”
“Beneda may have been teasing you. She certainly had not had any assignations when I left for Abbyville.”
“You were gone nine years,” he said in a hostile voice, as though she had somehow offended him by being a virgin.
“I know.”
“Eighteen carnivals,” he asserted. “I…”
“I’m sure you took part in carnival, Chernon. I didn’t expect you not to. But, except for a little drinking and singing at the one just past, I didn’t. I didn’t have time.” She gave him a look which he did not return. What was it that bothered him? She could not find an explanation for his reasonless hostility. “Look, we were never ‘lovers.’ I loved you, I think. The way a kid does. Infatuation, maybe. For you—well, I was your little sister’s friend and you used me to get books. Then I realized what I was doing and stopped it, and you got angry at me. And then I went away. That’s all there really was between us. Let’s not pretend there was something more than that.”
She said nothing about all that time in Abbyville, the carnivals there that she had avoided, always thinking of him, of Chernon, of that boy with the wheat-colored hair and the wary, hurt look in his eyes. She wanted him to listen to her, to hear her. She wanted him to say something that told her he saw her. “This adventure—this is my way of saying, ‘I’m sorry I hurt you when we were young.’”
My way of saying I love you, Chernon.
“But it can’t go on unless it’s enjoyable for both of us….” She was not really seeing him there before her, the man’s body, the man’s face. She was seeing the boy, still, wanting the boy, still. The boy wasn’t in there. The boy was gone. Somewhere in there, Chernon had metamorphosed into something different, not merely grown up but changed in kind. “… that wouldn’t be fair to either of us,” her voice went on.
Trite. What was fair? Was anything fair? This whole thing was a cliché. He wasn’t answering her at all.
Inside, she wept. It had all been a stupid idea. Septemius had tried to tell her. Kostia had known. Tonia had known. Her own ten-year-old self would have known. What was it Stavia herself had said about Myra’s infatuation for Barten? “She doesn’t have any sense at all.”
“No,” Morgot had yawned. “None of them do. Neither did I, when I was that age.”
“I refuse to be that age!” Stavia had asserted.
“I wish you luck,” Morgot had replied.
Meaning, we all do it, daughter. All of us. We know
