“This is a new taste for you,” she whispered. “They grow only in our dream country. And only a Great One like you is allowed to eat it. I can taste it only when I taste it on your mouth.” With sticky fingers, she hooked my face, pulled it closer, and lapped her tongue lightly across my lips. A man can only bear so much. My dreams of true love and the fulfilment of a life shared dissolved beneath a wave of simple lust. I caught her up and pulled her close. She let the basket of food fall. I tasted the skin of her neck, breathed in the scent of her hair.

She laughed softly. “Remember, I do not love you as your sister does, nor as your cousin does. I do not love you as a plain-skin woman would love her man. So this—” and she touched me teasingly “—is not enough for you.

Is it? You don’t want this from me, do you?”

“I want it,” I told her fiercely, imprisoning her in my arms. “I want it, but I want more than just this. Can’t you understand that, Olikea? Are our peoples truly so different?”

“Our peoples? I tell you and tell you. You have only one people. There is only one people, the People. They are our people. All others are strangers.

All others threaten our ways.”

“I don’t want to talk right now,” I decided. I stooped and picked her up in my arms. She gave a whoop of surprise and flung her arms around my neck. I liked the feeling that I could startle her, that I could move her with my strength. It fueled my lust.

I carried her deeper into the forest. Magic surged in me with the heat of desire. I made a gesture, and moss and fallen leaves gathered themselves into a couch for us. Another motion of my hand, and a tree branch drooped to become a support for a vine that suddenly draped itself into a bower around us. Fragrant flowers opened to perfume the night. I banished the small stinging insects that had come to investigate us, and invited instead the little glowing moths, that I might better see what I touched. I lavished magic with a free hand. It was as simple and natural as the way Olikea opened herself to me, and as mutually pleasing. This night I led and she followed in that most ancient dance. In our previous times together, she had always taken the role of aggressor, and I had been astonished to find how much pleasure I could take in that. This night, I think she was equally surprised to find that a male could command her pleasure so completely. Discovering that I could render her near-mindless with bliss bolstered my sense of myself as nothing else had in the previous year. It spurred me to greater efforts, and when at last she lay beside me, slack in my arms, I felt I had proven something to her, though I could not have said exactly what.