father did. Later he would sneak into the boathouse to meet her. Where his family thought he had gone, she didn’t know. His work was done for the day, so perhaps no one was watching, no one noticing his absence. He risked a great deal to meet her, but not as much as he pretended. The risks had limits. Any punishment meted out would affect her more than him.
His marriage had been arranged years earlier, to a girl named Vosilana. If he’d been found alone in the boathouse with Leodora, the marriage arrangement might have been nullified, and his family would be humiliated by the revelation. He would certainly be whipped, most likely banished from his home for a time. But he was strong and handsome, his family one of the most powerful on the island. Punishments would be temporary, and if reparations could not be made with the bride’s family some other girl would be happy to take Vosilana’s place. Leodora could not replace her even had she wanted to. Tenikemac’s response to her in that event would, by comparison, make their bare tolerance of her now seem tender and loving. It would be she who had led him astray, she who had corrupted him. Gousier would have a new witch in his household. And her uncle…well, the whipping Tastion got would be far preferable to anything Gousier would do.
Given all that, she could not quite explain even to herself why she continued to see Tastion, except that she had done so for so long.
There was kissing, of course—she could hardly have denied her own lips their sweet fulfillment. Kissing scorched them both, but when the heat of passion consumed him, and although she had loved Tastion forever, a small whisper of reason stopped her from relinquishing control. In his importuning she thought she heard a tone that said once satisfied, he would go off in search of other fruit. Because she loved him she did not deny him some familiarity, and sometimes she became dizzy with him. Because she knew her place in his world, she stopped short of drowning in pleasure—which served only to frustrate and further incite her would-be lover. To his credit, he had never sworn falsely to marry her—that is, if one discounted that the two of them had been promising to run off together since they were children. Tastion never claimed that he could defy his parents, his village, or the assignment of his bride. He never pledged to give it all up, only to find ways around the rules. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had.
Today, angry and frustrated, she entered the boathouse with an urgent need for Tastion that had nothing to do with passion. She needed to ask questions if only to hear herself ask them so that she would know what her questions were. She needed him, but Tastion wasn’t there, and her spirits plunged further. She sat on her bed, took off her boot, and rubbed her toes that she’d bruised when she kicked the stool.
The force of her rage caught up with her, exhausted her. The warmth of the room added to her torpor. She leaned back on her elbows, and finally lay back to stare at the beam over her head. She saw in the grain of the wood weird faces and creatures she’d identified years before, when she was tiny; once recognized, they could never be random patterns again. One of them she’d decided was her father’s face. Another was the torso of her mother, twisting out of strings of seaweed like a mermaid. A weight like that of gathering tears filled her head with a kind of forlorn pressure but without enough weight for the drops to fall. The thick air hung about her, pressing down upon her, and she drifted to sleep.
When she awoke it was dark in the room. The sky outside was purple, streaked with the last glory of sunset at the very edge of the sea. Her head ached when she sat up. She knew that she was hungry, and that the evening meal must be ready soon. Hunger at least was easy to think about.
She got up and drew on her boots. She left the trapdoor to her room open in case Tastion turned up.
The sea rice in its broth was salty. Leodora chewed and tried not to make eye contact with Dymphana, which was facilitated by Dymphana’s preoccupation with the empty stool where Gousier usually sat. While