She shot to her feet, her arousal vanished. Her fingers flew as she refastened her clothing. She sought for furious words and couldn’t find any sharp enough to fling at him. Turning away from him, she stared at the wall feeling dizzied, almost ill. It had all changed too swiftly. She had been Amarinda and so infatuated with Tellator. Then she had entered that odd middle ground in which she had felt as if she possessed two lives and had absolutely no qualms about sharing herself with him. Now she didn’t even want to look at him.

I’ll have to hold on to him when I fly back on Heeby. That intrusive thought only intensified her anger. Right now, all she wanted was to walk away from him and never speak to him again. Jerd. He’d gossiped about her with Jerd! Believed that Jerd knew what she was talking about.

“Thymara! It wasn’t like that!” Rapskal stumbled to his feet, stuffing himself back inside his trousers and tying up the ragged drawstring. “I was just there, and Jerd was talking to some of the others. It wasn’t that I asked her advice. Some of us were just sitting around a fire a few nights ago, talking, and someone said something about Greft and missing him despite all he had done. And she agreed, and talked about him a bit, and then she told how sometimes you’d follow them and watch them when they were mating. And she was the one making mock and saying it was probably as much as you’d ever do. Saying you were pretending that you were saving your virginity or didn’t want to get pregnant, but actually you were just afraid of doing it.”

Thymara spun back to stare at him in horror. “She talked like that about me in front of everyone? In front of who? Who was she talking to? Who heard all this?”

“I don’t know . . . some of us. We just get together in the evenings, to sit around a fire like we used to. Um, I was there, but Jerd wasn’t really talking to me. She was talking to Harrikin. Kase and Boxter were there, I think. And maybe Lecter. And I just, I just listened. That was all. I didn’t say anything.”

“So no one defended me? Everyone just sat there and let her talk about me like that?”

Rapskal cocked his head at her. “Then it’s not true that you used to watch them?”