Shayat batted my hand away. “Roots?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sorcha is…he keeps me grounded in myself. There is no need for privacy with him. There is no judgment, no expectations, just solace. Is any of this making sense?”

Shayat propped herself up on her elbows. She gave me a long look. “No wonder you ended up in Vilahna. You know, I always thought people were one way or the other, normal or deviants. I didn’t know someone could move back and forth from one to the other like you do.”

I was shocked into silence. I wanted to tell her how wrong she was, but I could not bring myself to say I was what she had decided was normal. The truth was a slippery thing that, perhaps, did indeed slide between categories. I sat up, rigid, unnerved. I threaded my legs through my pants in jerky, uneven movements.

“You’re going?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask why?”

I turned to face her. I pointed at her, then me, then back at her. “What is this, Shayat?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking what this is, what we’re doing. Is this normal? Is this deviant? Does it matter?”

She sat up and pulled on her shirt, a frown already breaking across her face. “This is just sex, professor.”

“All right. Fine. But who back home would see ‘just sex’ between you and I as a harmless thing? And we both know which of us—if people found out about this—would get shunned. Who the landlords would refuse to rent to. A sullied woman brings bad luck.”

She sat tall, the long line of her spine rigid and steely. Her face was a mask. “Get out of my tent.”

“It isn’t right that you should be punished more than me. It’s not fair. If normal means you are shamed for something we both want, for something we both did, something that hurts no one, wouldn’t you want to be deviant? Some of these rules we have, that we struggle so hard to live by, sometimes they should be torn apart. I know they haven’t been, and I know they might never be, but they should be shattered.”

She cut a hard, dark look at me. I waited for her to throw me out. There was fire in her eyes. She looked away from me. She let out a mirthless, hostile laugh and looked down at her hands. “You are so strange.”

“I’m sorry.”

“None of the others has ever understood any of that. I swear the tahrqs are wrong, and we get reincarnated, too, and you must have been a woman in some past life.”

Silence settled heavy on the moment. “I will go if you want me to,” I said.