of my spell. I’m not of the people. What happens to me can be kept outside the village. It won’t embarrass anybody, will it? Outside. You can’t be made to marry me. You can’t share with me what you can share with any other woman on this island.”
“That’s not so, Leodora.”
“It is so. We’ve pretended for so long that something would simply appear when we needed it to change everything. We made our pact as children, Tastion, and we’re still trying to be children. But we’re feeling things beyond what children feel, and almost doing them. Sooner or later we’re going to do them, because we want to. There never has been a solution. Not on Bouyan. The whole world here would have to change for us.”
“Where, then?” His uneasy question.
She turned, pointed through the trees to lights no brighter than stars. “Up there.”
“Lea, you know I can’t go up there.”
“I can.”
Tastion seemed lost then, as if he’d never before considered the real limits imposed upon her and upon him, as if for him things were always going to roll along, allowing him the freedom to glide through the imposed rules. She was sorry for what she’d said because of what could not, as a result, happen between them, but what she’d said was the truth, and they both had to acknowledge it now. She had. Tastion was not prepared to, and he left her.
She called to him but he didn’t stop. The darkness swallowed him up.
Leodora returned to the path and followed it to Soter’s hut.
He didn’t seem to be home. She entered anyway, going straight to the rear. In the doorway to the back room, she lingered, regarding the two stretched undaya cases lying in the recesses. She’d always had a plan of sorts, unformed but lurking at the edges of her life. Now she must shape it. She needed Soter’s help to do that.
She left the hut and continued on the path to Tenikemac.
The long house lay at the center of the village. All the other abodes were built along paths radiating from it. It had a low, nearly flat roof containing smoke holes for three different fires. Off the side facing the ocean, a huge carved merwoman figure reached with both arms as if she had been transformed in the midst of jumping through the wall, though her presence there, Leodora knew, was supposed to represent the bestowing of her blessing upon the whole village. Meetings, ceremonies, and entertainments took place in that house, and the goddess’s name was never spoken except inside it. Leodora had performed there numerous times. In two nights she was to be married there.
Soter brought his fermented product to the long house to sell. Often, after he’d bartered the liquor for food, clothing, or utensils, he would linger to drink with the men. “Absorbing my expenses,” he called it.
Tonight he seemed to have absorbed rather a lot. She walked in on him regaling half a dozen others with a rude story about a hermaphroditic mermaid. Leodora entered at the far end of the long house and had passed the first two, untended fires before anyone noticed her.
A couple of the men turned at once. One of them was Agmeon. His eyes were bloodshot. They went wide as he recognized her. He jumped up, barring her way. She nodded, making the requisite shallow, respectful bow, but when she looked up again anger still burned in Agmeon’s eyes, and he still blocked her way. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Soter had stopped talking. He gazed at her, bleary and unfocused.
“I came to get him. I need to talk to him.”
“Have you no decency, girl?”
She looked at herself as if expecting to find she’d forgotten to wear clothes. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I come here all the time. I was here only a few nights past, performing for you. You saw me.”
“That was before. Now you’re betrothed to Koombrun. You do know you’re betrothed?”
“Yes.”
“It’s unseemly to be found in one man’s house with him, even worse to be here. It’s the behavior of a mispel. You leave now.” He thrust a finger past her and spoke with such vehemence that she started to turn, to leave; but her will overrode her instinct and she stopped. She had never been a part of their world, nor governed by any of their rules. Now suddenly she was required to submit, even though she would gain the respect of no one for it.