I tried to understand it, but it made no sense. I thought of Sorcha, and Shayat, and how sex and love with them were all bound up together. In the City, in Rabatha, in Alamadour, desires buffeted me one way or another. Thickets of them, mazes of them, all negotiated or hidden, or displayed like fancy plumage. A constant shifting dance of them. I hadn’t noticed that in the clan there was none of that. Sex happened when it happened, and little importance or attention was paid to it. The way I was troubled by what I saw as Halaavi’s rejection of me was utterly foreign to them. Ve was right: I was not as fluent in Droma as I thought I was. I didn’t understand it, but Halaavi and I set up a yurt together anyway. The clan brought us blankets, a firestone, lanterns—gifts like we’d wedded. We slept together, naked and chaste, on a single pallet. The yurt was nestled in the heart of the camp, and children drifted in and out, sometimes piling into bed with us, and sometimes dragging their own bedrolls into the yurt.

I’d missed the feel of another’s body next to mine in the night. I’d missed the whispered conversations as one drifted off to sleep. I’d missed the patter of children. Ve didn’t want me, and that was all right. There was the unpaired’s yurt for that. It didn’t occur to vim to want me, just to love me, and it did not take much time before I forgot to want vim.

Chapter 35

CHAPTER 35