Far too many hours later we saw lights interrupting the gloom. This, I discovered later for there was no talking to be had in the weather, nor among people so miserable, was the town of Saintly, and the last large settlement north of Evertrue. From here on we would be limited to small villages or Church properties until we reached the remains of Vigil, where the amenities of a small town had accreted around the outpost of scholars and philosophers who’d gathered to excavate the site.

Saintly was a town of considerable size, and from what we saw of it approaching, a prosperous one. I sensed its weight on the landscape more than discerned its buildings, for between the vespertine gloom and the rain there was no seeing them in any detail. My impression instead was of a place slumbering, battened tightly against the wind and weather, and empty gray streets lit by only the few street lamps that had not yet blown out behind their glass shields.

Saintly’s church complex was not the size of the Cathedral in Evertrue, but it wasn’t much smaller; perched on the edge of town, it claimed more acreage than the Cathedral, and I had the impression of many small buildings when the Vessel guided us into their yard. From there we were hustled indoors, lightning flashing over our backs as we turned them on the rain at last. I worried about the drake, but it suffered itself to be led away and the ostler who took it showed no surprise at the sight of it. The situation would have to do.

The stone hall into which we were led would have been beautiful even had we not been desperate for shelter: a stern beauty, and its austerity lent itself to that impression. When there was little to distract the eye, one’s attention was drawn to the single thing that mattered, and in this tall gray hall, without ornament or statuary, it was the distant ceiling: enormous rows of small lancet windows with colored panes, cobalt blue, royal purple, frosted white, clear glass, the latter now the dark gray of storms, occasionally bled white by lightning.

“Thank God we got here before that really got the bit in its teeth,” Eyre said, looking up at the windows. “Or we’d have been hard-pressed to find safe shelter at all, for us or the horses.”

“I don’t know a horse that would have suffered this weather,” Chester said.

“Ivy’s maybe,” Radburn said, for by now her mare’s placidity had been noted by everyone.

“Would that we were all so indefatigable,” Eyre said, mouth twitching. “But I find I for one am grateful for the roof.”

Divine Vessel Rose was speaking softly with someone in a high priest’s robes, their faces lit by candle-glow. When they finished, the priest glanced at Last and the other elves—and me—and then back at her. He didn’t speak, but there was resolve in his face. He looked a little like his hall, and I thought of Amhric and hurt.

“This way,” someone said, pulling me from my thoughts.

We were led upstairs, into what appeared to be one of the church’s towers, for it was studded with dormitories for the knights and priests, and for the petitioners who came seeking retreat. Each of us was assigned a cell; its small size was a blessing, for the two fat candles and the brazier in each room were more than adequate to warm it. A novice came for my wet clothes and left me with a nightrail and a tray: slabs of dense, brown bread spread with butter and honey, a wedge of cheese, and sliced baked apples redolent of nutmeg and cinnamon, and hot mulled cider.

I looked from my new dry nightclothes to the damp genets and stripped back off. “Sit in front of the brazier,” I said to Kelu. As she glowered, I went through my pack until I found my brush. “Sit,” I said again, and this time she did.

Brushing them all took time. A great deal of time. But I couldn’t leave them untended.

“You’ve lost all your human prudery,” Kelu observed, watching me work on Nine.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re sitting here naked while combing us?” Kelu snorted. “We could barely get you to bare your chest back in Serala, where you needed it to keep from having sun-sickness.”

I began to retort... and couldn’t. “I’m not completely naked,” I said at last, dragging the brush carefully so as not to fray Nine’s necklace. “I do have on smallclothes.”

“And your name,” Almond murmured.

The pendant seemed so much a part of me that I rarely thought of it anymore. The cord was long enough that it usually hung near my navel; bending over Nine’s shoulders lowered it so that it rested in my lap. The steel was warm, a reminder of promises I had yet to keep. “And my name.”

“Still mostly naked.” Kelu was sitting with her back to one of the walls, hugging her knees. “What changed?”

What indeed? “I still wouldn’t go bare-chested in casual company.”

“Oh!” Almond exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Are you... you’re saying we are not casual company!”

What were they? Mine? I felt so, or at least, that they were my responsibility. Should I call them family? They shared my blood through my brother, had been crafted of his magic, of the royal blood gifts.

Perhaps they were all of these things. And more importantly, I cared about them. “No,” I said, quiet. “You are not casual company.”

“And we are less wet company now,” Nine observed, spreading the fur over her belly. “Thank you, Master.”

Almond was last, because she’d insisted the others be tended first. As I brushed her, Nine asked, “Where will we sleep? This bed is very small.”

“Why is this bed so small? Is it for children?” Seven added.

“This is a place for people to seek solitude, pray, return to simpler things,” I said, running the brush down Almond’s back. The room now smelled a little like wet fur as well as mulled cider, but I didn’t mind. “The bed is small because one is not supposed to find it luxurious. Luxury is of this world. It is distraction.”

“That is very wise,” Almond said.

“That is ridiculous.” Kelu snorted. “You try to sleep with your feet hanging off the bottom of your bed, and the wood presses into your skin and gives you bruises and you twist and turn and try to get comfortable all night and can’t, and then you wake up sore and cranky. How are you going to not be distracted by the world?”

“Discomfort is of this world too,” Seven agreed.

“Is there any other world?” Nine wondered.

I looked up.

“If there is another world,” Kelu said, “We’re probably not welcome in it. We’re not even welcome in this one.” Almond’s ears were back. At the sight, Kelu said, “Admit it.”

The smaller genet shook her head and answered, “We make our own welcome. If you don’t open the door to others, no one will come in.”

“Opening the door to others lets in bad people,” Nine said, more curious than upset. “So closing the door is good.”

“Which is it?” Seven asked, looking at me. “Should the door be open or closed?”

All four sets of ears twitched toward me as I pulled the brush through Almond’s tail. The rhythmic strokes calmed me as much as it did her. I counted them as I let the question settle. Open door, open heart; closed door, safe heart. Partaking in history, or reading about it. Accepting the love of an unexpected brother... suffering the violence of his unexpected captors.

Acknowledging that those captors were my own people. Being willing to continue on anyway.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as safety,” I said finally. “If the bad will come to you no matter what you do, you might as well leave the door open for the good.”

Grudgingly, Kelu said, “That’s probably the smartest thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Have no fear,” I said. “I’ll soon lapse back into ignorance and confusion and you’ll be able to return to mocking me.”

She eyed me, ears flat, and I laughed.

“Fine,” she said. “I guess I’ve earned that.”

“You are not kind to our master,” Nine observed, studying Kelu.

“Is it because he doesn’t punish you?” Seven added. “That doesn’t make sense. A master who doesn’t punish you is the master you should be kind to.”

“Is it because he is safe to be unkind to?” Nine narrowed her turquoise eyes. “Yes?”

Kelu stared at them, then pushed herself up. “I am going to go for a walk. There is far too much cutting wisdom floating around in here for me.”

“That’s right,” Seven said, nodding. “You prefer biting wisdom.”

Kelu stopped on her way to the door, then laughed. “All right, that was funny.”

Seven grinned; it was the first such expression I could remember seeing on her face, and it animated her. “Can we come with you? There is only one blanket on this bed. There are five of us.”

“Five blankets for a person is luxury,” Nine said. “One blanket for five people is something else.”

“Cruelty,” Seven offered.

“Difficult,” Almond murmured.

“Funny,” Kelu said. “With everyone fighting for it and squirming and getting elbows in one another’s faces.”

Nine wrinkled her nose. “We should sleep on the floor.”

“For that we definitely need more blankets,” Seven said. She rose. “Master, may we?”

“Find blankets?” I smiled. “Of course.” Thinking of magic, I added, “If you find anything else that seems useful, you may bring it back also.”

All three genets vanished, leaving me with Almond, who by the sway of her body was already drowsing. I finished off her tail and pulled her into my lap, savoring the sweetness of her scent and her trust. The Pearls were right: I was the elf Kelu could abuse because I wouldn’t punish her. That they all knew it, that even Kelu with her damaged spirit knew it, soothed me. Becoming an elf had not changed my essential nature.

I supposed that would make a good topic for tomorrow’s ride. Had my essential nature been subject to change by the removal of the enchantment that had made me look human? Or had I been born with my character, and the enchantment’s effect on my body been irrelevant? We could delve into everyone’s belief that I had changed, and not changed. It would be amusing, and less fraught than a discussion of whether bleeding me might fill the empty souls of my friends until they overflowed with magical potential.

I had a few sips of the now lukewarm cider and watched the candle flame until I too drowsed, and there I might have remained all night had not the genets returned with a blanket... and someone wearing it.

“We found a blanket,” Seven said, ears perked. “And something useful.”

Ivy blushed, her eyes sparkling. She wore the blanket as a cloak, closed over her breast with a hand, and none of that kept me from noticing her feet in their pale stockings and the fringe of the nightrail that brushed her calves above the ankle. I had seen naked elven women of pulchritude fit to shame angels, had even tumbled one if one could count a shapechanging sorcerer who’d spent half the night as some woman or another... and not one of them had affected me the way the sight of those little toes in their filmy white socks did.

“We’re going to go use her bed for the night,” Kelu said as one of the Pearls roused Almond.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, startled. I had risen at some point, because one did when ladies entered a room, but ladies who entered rooms were generally more dressed and I found this impaired my thinking considerably.

“She’d like to spend some time with you,” Nine said. “So we are going to go lie down in her bed while she does that.”

“Spend some time with—”

“That is a very good idea.” Almond sat up sleepily, rubbing her eyes. She smiled up at me with such happiness that I found it impossible to deny her. “You should spend some time with Lady Ivy, somewhere warm and dry.”

“And private,” Seven murmured.

“With a bed,” Kelu finished, grinning with teeth. “Good night, ‘Master’.” She chivvied the other Pearls out. Almond, rising more slowly, stopped to hug me.

“Thank you for brushing me.”

“You’re welcome—” I began, and stopped when I realized I was on the verge of asking her to remain. A furry chaperone? Not likely! She would be more apt to curl up at the foot of the bed and radiate her contentment at our first kisses, and later confess to being honored at being allowed to stay while we made love.

I was perhaps rushing ahead of the situation. Feeling the bright flush on my cheeks, I kissed the top of Almond’s head and said, “Come by if any of you need anything.”

“We will knock, Master,” she said, and left.

Ivy watched the door close, then turned to me with a laugh. “They are precious, your friends. I daresay they came seeking me, all ready to matchmake on our behalf.”

I collapsed back into the space I’d been lately warming and covered my face with my hands. “Please tell me they did not steal into your room and insist you place yourself in a compromising position in order to oblige me....”

The mattress above me crinkled beneath her weight as she sat. “Is that what you think, then? That I am in a compromising position?”

“You are alone with an unmarried man in a bedroom—”

“In a church,” she said, cheeks dimpling.

“In a nightgown!”

“True,” she said, pursing her lips. “I had thought to leave it off before arriving, but judged the journey through the halls would be too cold with only the blanket and my stockings.”

“Ivy!” I exclaimed, torn between horror and a surge of want so dizzying I thought I might faint.

Her laugh then was kind. “Oh, Morgan. I’ve loved you so long. Do you blame me?”

“Of course not—”

“Then sit up here with me, please? I don’t fancy discussing this with the top of your head.”

But if I sat on the bed, I would be able to touch her. And if I touched her, I might not stop touching her. I hesitated, then reluctantly rose and sat on the edge of the bed, leaving a palm’s width between us.

“Better,” she said. “Now we can work this out properly.”

“I’m not certain there is anything to work out....”

As I spoke, she leaned across the distance and set her palms on my shoulders. The blanket slid down to her lap, leaving her upper body shrouded only by a nightrail washed so often it had become diaphanous. I could see the shadows gathering beneath her collarbones through the fabric, and if I looked lower I could only imagine what I’d see next. I focused instead on the chain that hung just above her breastbone and sought words. “Ivy—”

She was tracing the length of my neck with one fingernail.

“We were going to have a discussion,” I said as a last effort to preserve us from sin.

“No,” she said, touching my chin with that finger. “We were going to work this out properly. That doesn’t necessitate conversation.”

She brushed her lips against mine, dry satin chafing, and my senses shattered. Nor did she stop, until I could barely move for the sensation, for the sweetness and the heat and the fact that it was Ivy, Ivy whom I’d wanted for so long, gentle, intelligent Ivy with her tea-brown hair and eyes....

I broke it off, shaking, and said, “You’re asking me to ruin you...!”

“Oh, Morgan,” she said, stroking my lower lip with her finger. “I’ve been ruined for anyone else since I met you.”

This time, when she kissed me, I didn’t stop her.

In a single, endless night, Sedetnet had schooled me in every form of intimacy available between two people, from the most innocent to the most perverse. When I’d dared imagine this moment, I had envisioned myself using that knowledge to make the experience good for Ivy... to teach her only the best of what two people could be to one another, for one another. In those dreams, she had exclaimed over my tenderness, and the experience that let her feel nothing but pleasure and comfort in my arms. I had assumed I had nothing left to learn.

How wrong I was.

Not about all of it, for my experience did allow me to make it comfortable for her. But that I had nothing left to learn, and that my experiences in the bed of a stranger for whom I’d felt no connection would prepare me for someone I loved... I had no idea how different it would be. How much better. That we would weep, and kiss the tears off one another’s cheeks. That we would laugh, and smother our laughter against one another’s necks. That she would be ticklish. That I would be conquered by her simplest touch, at the look in her eyes. That I could melt and be on fire simultaneously; be overjoyed and rent by the poignancy of it.

That love would transfigure the act so completely.

I had known that rape and sex were different. I learned that love-making was as different again as the first two are from one another.

“Can we talk now?” I said later, when we were replete and she was tucked against me with her head on my chest.

“Only if you will not harangue me for allowing myself to cavort with an unwed man.”

I stared at the ceiling. “I am finding it difficult to muster the requisite disapproval when I am the fortunate man in question.”

Her giggle was muffled against my skin, and I was grateful I was too tired to react to it. She began winding her finger through the cord of my pendant. “Good. As I have no regrets, and will not, even if we never marry.”

“I would marry you in a heartbeat,” I whispered.

“Would you?” She looked up at me. “You hardly know your responsibilities, my dear. What if elven princes must marry for state, as human princes do? What if you are expected to have heirs?”

“What if none of those things apply?” I kissed her brow. “I want no other. Must I use my life to lie about it?”

A shudder traveled her spine. I stroked her back to still it. We did not enjoy that silence, I thought, but we found comfort in one another nonetheless.

A tug at my neck brought my eyes down to where she was handling my pendant. “Do you ever take it off?”

“Not by choice.” I watched the black cord slowly wrapping her finger. “It seems a part of me. Clothing I’ll doff but this stays on.”

She smiled. “My ring is like that for me.”

“And yet I have never seen it?”

“Oh no.” She shifted to look down at it, cheek dragging against the skin of my chest. “It is not a thing I would casually share; I keep it hidden. It is my great-grandfather’s ring, and before you ask, I didn’t meet him or my great-grandmother, who is responsible for keeping it. But she was a heroic figure in the family, so I took it for my own from the family treasures my mother offered me.” She resumed winding her finger in my necklace. “Great-grandmother married a man who was called off to the war a year later, and decided it was no use staying home while her husband was off saving the country for lovers of democracy. She packed her bags for the front and put herself to work in the hospital tents, and became a more than passable nurse.”

“A strong-willed woman,” I observed.

“She was fearless, if what few entries she left in her journal were any indication,” Ivy said. “Well, they came home from the war—him minus a leg, and she’d overseen the amputation herself as aid to the surgeon!—and had the usual run of children. He died some fifteen years later, leaving her widowed at what she considered to be a prime age. So she went to work doing accounts for a doctor while crusading for the rights of injured soldiers and the women who worked in their camps. And she lived to a grand old age, almost ninety, surrounded by her horde of grandchildren and still speaking for the disenfranchised.”

I lifted the ring now, turning it in my fingers. The metal looked old, scuffed and dim. It also felt old to my touch, like distant memories of mountains. “A model ancestress.”

“My grandmother thought her outrageous,” Ivy confessed. “But I think she was secretly proud of her. My family has always had a tradition of strong-willed women, no matter how well-mannered we might appear on the exterior.” She propped her chin on my chest and grinned at me. “As you have just experienced, when there is something we want, we rarely allow anyone to stop us.”

“I may have observed so, yes.” I ran a finger down one of her curls framing her face, now limp. “And if I have not said so, I am grateful.”

“Grateful.” She brushed her lips over my chest. “Somehow a woman wants to hear a little more than that after being made love to….”

“Shattered. Astonished. Overmastered. Flattened—”

“Better!” she said, laughing. “Better.” Pulling herself up, she kissed me, and in that kiss was a gentleness that could reshape worlds. Did reshape mine, until I could not think of a world without her. I thought of the promises that my name represented, the steel that had been used to break skin and expose the blood of vows, thought of the promises she had spoken of when we met beneath the tree and she saw my true face.

“Will you wear it?” I asked suddenly. “My necklace.”

She looked at me. “Your name. The name that you never remove by choice.”

“My name,” I said. “Yes. That I never remove by choice. But would, if I thought the recipient half of my heart. In such case, I am not removing it at all, am I? Merely transferring it from one part of my flesh to another.”

Such a tender smile then. She touched my cheekbone, just beneath the eye. “Of course.”

On her, the pendant hung well down to the cradle of her pelvis. “That will never do,” she murmured. Gathering the cord, she knotted it so that the slip of metal rested on her breastbone. “There. Now it won’t be trapped in my stays.”

The crimson of the tassel seemed to burn against her skin, there where it stretched near translucent over the bone. I drew my fingers along it, bringing forth a shiver from us both.

“Except now I am wearing too much jewelry,” she said, and undid the clasp of her necklace. She paused, and for the first time since my return I saw uncertainty in her. “Unless it is too much?”

Because, of course, it was a wedding ring, and whether we were pledging ourselves formally or not it was still a symbol of promise. But had I not said that she was like my own flesh? What was that, if not a commitment, and a line taken complete from the vows of matrimony we would have spoken in the formal ceremony? It seemed right that we would trade our jewelry as symbol of our vows, even if the church we’d shared them in had been witness only in secret.

“I’d be honored to wear it,” I said, and let her put it on me; the chain was short enough that it sat in the notch between my collarbones, and she stroked it with a considered look.

“You are all winter colors,” she said. “And here a piece of golden summer. Not at all a harmonious match.”

Thinking of Amhric’s autumnal splendor, and Ivy’s warm hair and eyes, I said, “Perhaps not. But it will remind me of the people I love.” I stroked the hair back from her face. “Should you not repair to your own chamber?”

She huffed. “I doubt being found there in the morning will fool anyone as to our status.” She cuddled against me, and perforce I sank back down onto the narrow mattress. “The only one surprised that we might have consummated our feelings is you, my dearest.”

“The Vessel might find it distressing.”

“The Vessel,” Ivy said with a yawn, “heads a religion that once sponsored bacchanals, apparently expressly for the purpose of men spreading their seed and women sharing their wombs as widely as possible. Any pressure society has exerted on women not to dally with men comes solely from mothers who do not want to see their daughters raising children without a man’s financial support… or fathers who do not want to see their sons muddy the succession with children they may or may not know are theirs. And I do not much care what they think right now. What I would care to do is to sleep in your arms, Morgan, on the occasion of my first night with my lover.”

I slid my arms around her and murmured, “So would I.”

So we did.

In the morning, Almond slipped into the room and woke me with her nuzzle, damp nose to cheek. “Master,” she whispered. “The others are stirring.”

Ivy opened sleepy eyes and stiffened, then relaxed at the sight of the genet. I merely leaned to kiss between the two earnest lilac eyes and said, “Thank you, Almond. We’ll rise now.”

By the time one of the Vessel’s priests arrived to summon us to our breakfast, we were both presentable, though the look in Ivy’s eye when she met mine boded poorly for anyone who would take issue with the intimacy she plainly did not plan to hide. I thought it a lost cause myself. Having touched her, I felt as if some part of her remained in me still… I could sense her clearly from across the room, and half-felt we were breathing in tandem.

Concealing it was also plainly useless because somehow it was written all over my body. Guy had one look at me and grinned. “Good night, eh?”

“Very good,” I said, with what I hoped was some dignity.

Chester hid a smile behind a hand. Radburn sniffed—was he offended? I couldn’t tell.

Eyre merely clasped my shoulder and pointed me at the table. “Eat, my student. I sense this may be the last formal table we use between now and Vigil.”

The food was plain but I could taste the world in it: the sun coaxing the sap through the maples, the freshness of the soil nourishing the oats, the taste of the grass in the milk and the butter. I grew drunk on it, spilling my soul into everything around me, until I swayed and Last was forced to steady me and murmur, “Lord Locke. Do not lose yourself.”

Fortunately, no one else had noted my lapse, and I applied myself to eating the food rather than soaking through it into the world. My exertions the previous evening had given me a good appetite, at least.

When they were bringing our mounts around, I asked Last what it signified, my episode over the porridge. He said, quiet, “You have the prince-gifts.”

“I thought I was bound by the immortality enchantment, as all elves are.”

“You are. But a man powerful enough to inherit the royal gifts usually has some power past Dissipation. You may be coming into yours, now that you’ve been released from your human seeming.”

I pondered that, watching the Vessel and her knights as they brought their mounts from the stables and began packing them with the gifts offered by Saintly’s high priest. “I feel no different.”

“You may not, if the worldsense is drawing all the well has to give,” Last said. “But the worldsense can be a great power on its own. Do not dismiss it.”

I closed my eyes, sensing the weight of human presence defining the circumference of Saintly by the pressure it exerted on the soil... reached past it to feel the sore of the ancient battlefield toward which we journeyed. I tasted autumn in the slowing of the vital earth, and it had a bouquet like wine I could feel on my tongue, in my blood. “I shan’t.”