I didn’t want to. Such frank discussions of sex still embarrassed me. They embarrass me even now. I blushed, and I stammered, and Halaavi looked on in amusement. “I never wind up with you,” I managed, finally, to get out. “Anyone but you.”

“I’m right here. We’re together now.”

“No. Well, yes, we are, but that…no, I mean in there. In the yurt.”

“We share the yurt.”

“No! I mean—ah, those nights, the…when the fire breaks out, I lay in the ashes with everyone but you.”

“Oh.” I stared hard at vim, willing vim to answer me, but ve looked off thoughtfully at the grass. Halaavi was quiet for a long time. Halaavi had a way with quietness, a consonance with it. “I thought you were fluent in Droma,” ve said.

“I am.”

Ve cracked a smile. “You’re not.” Ve looked at me, head cocked slightly to one side. “This is a simpler thing with us, you know. Had you been gold on the outside, too, we wouldn’t need to talk about it. You’d understand, and we’d land in a yurt. I forget, sometimes, how much you don’t know. I had wondered why it was taking so long, but it’s not a thing to rush.”

“What isn’t a thing to rush?”

“A shared skin.” Triloshilai, ve said. About the two of us.

“You think we’re a pair?” I asked.

“You think we’re not?” Halaavi said. Ve said it with humor, like it was a foregone conclusion. Which, perhaps, it was.

“How does this work, exactly?”

“It doesn’t work, it just is. It is a fact. A stability. We just…live together, in rhythm. In balance.” Halaavi felt my confusion. “Pairs usually don’t have sex, Ariah. It’s not done.”

“Why not?”

“Sex is chaos, yes? No balance there. The body wants what it wants, and the heart needs what it needs, and rarely the two come together for long. The unpaired, they bring the chaos, and the paired, they bring the harmony, and together the clan stays in balance.”