Gissa was seated by his desk. She’d turned the chair to face the door and was sitting calmly, patiently, with her hands folded in her lap.
He let out a “Gahhh!” before his brain caught up with his scream and cut it off. “Gissa! You surprised me. How long have you . . . Have you been waiting long?” Also, why was she here? Why not wait until he was in his room and then knock, as was customary? “Is everything all right?”
“You tell me.” Gissa rose, circled around him, and shut the door.
Yorbel instinctively backed away, though he wasn’t sure why. This was Gissa, one of his oldest friends. Still, she looked as if she was about to lecture him like his second-year teacher, whose approach to reading auras was to yell at you until everything blurred red.
“You said you were finished with all that kehok business, that you’d be staying in the temple, yet every time I look for you, you’re out again. I’m here because I’m concerned about you, Yorbel.”
He chuckled. “I don’t need a mother hen, Gissa. I’m a grown man.” She saw him as too hopeless to keep a plant alive, much less take care of himself. Pointing to the plant on his windowsill, he said, “See? Not dead yet.”
“You are darkening your soul.”
He sank down onto his cot, feeling as if the air had been sucked out of him. He knew it wasn’t possible for Gissa to read him, any more than it was possible for him to read her. Gissa, though, was looking at him as if she could see every shadow that stained his soul, and it unnerved him.
“You know beyond Becar,” she said, “at the mouth of the Aur River, where it opens to the wide sea, there’s a lighthouse that stands so that ships can find their way to the river even in the darkest night. You have always been my lighthouse here in the temple, guiding me back home. You have always been that solid, dependable beam of goodness, reminding all of us why we do what we do. Yorbel, please, tell me what is going on with you. Tell me the truth!”
Yorbel dropped his face into his hands.
There were a dozen truths he could tell her, and perhaps if she’d asked him another day, he would have chosen a different answer. But there was just one dominating his thoughts at the moment his old friend demanded the truth:
Muffled through his hands, he whispered, “I think I may be in love.”
The room was absolutely silent, as silent as the old stone that formed the walls and the floor, as silent as the shadows in the corner.
“With whom?” Gissa asked, and the two words sank like stones into still water.
“Trainer Tamra Verlas.”
He then heard an odd kind of strangled noise. Raising his head, he saw Gissa was tucking something into a fold in her tunic, and that her face was contorted as she tried to hold in—
“You’re laughing at me,” Yorbel said.
And Gissa burst out laughing, a full belly laugh, bent over, with her hands on her knees. “You. Yorbel. That was . . . I was not . . . Oh, by the River . . .” She laughed for a solid minute while Yorbel waited, feeling himself blush to the tips of his ears. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I mean, it’s not that you aren’t lovable . . . You absolutely . . .” She dissolved into laughter again.
“You are not making me feel good about confiding in you.” He didn’t see the humor in this. He was, as he’d pointed out just a few minutes earlier, a grown man. He had control of his thoughts and emotions, he’d believed. He’d dedicated his life in service to the temple, to higher intellectual causes, which left little time for things like . . .
Things like living in the moment, he thought.
She got ahold of herself and sat down next to him. A giggle escaped her lips, and she swallowed it back. “So this trainer . . . She is the one you brought back to the emperor-to-be? She is who you see when you go to the royal stable? And the racetrack, where you’ve never set foot in your life?”
“I saw the Becaran Races once,” he said defensively.
“And you thought they were barbaric.”
“She’s not barbaric.”
“I’m sure she’s not.” Her face was contorted with the effort of not