“But I’m not for the likes of you,” she said. She made her voice hard, though it took all her strength. Inside she was shaking like wine held in an unsteady hand. “You are on foreign soil and stirred by unfamiliar sensations. When you’re home again, this madness will pass—you’ll look back on this entire episode as some kind of crazy dream. You’ll want your usual friends and playthings around you then. You’ll be shocked to think you could ever say you loved me.”

“If I thought that was true,” he said, “I would stay on Gold Mountain the rest of my life.”

“You would not be welcome here. You are an outsider, you do not belong. You belong with your own people, your own family, and the girl you have loved your whole life. Go back to them and forget me.”

“I may go back. I won’t forget you.”

“Once we leave this place, you’ll have no reason to see me again.”

“Every reason,” he said. “I love you.”

“Not in Inrhio,” she whispered.

Now he finally moved, three paces toward her, bending forward a little as if to peer at her face from a far height. “And if, once I return to the city, I find you are still in my blood like some kind of shadow heartbeat?” he demanded. “What then? Would you believe me if I came to you then and said I still loved you? Would you trust me, and be willing to try and love me in return?”

“It will not happen,” she said.

One step nearer. She was against the wall, she could retreat no farther, but the stern look in her eyes stopped him where he stood. “And if it does? Can I seek you out? Convince you?”

She had once more folded her arms across her chest, this time to try to control her fevered shaking. “I don’t know—I don’t know—it would be wrong,” she stammered, losing the ability to put her argument in words without telling him everything, without saying the worst—what he would perceive as the worst, anyway. “You will not want to see me, let it go at that. When we’re in the city—”

“When we’re in the city,” he said firmly, “everything will be different. But you’ll see how much things are the same. I have changed for the last time—this is the man I will be till I die. And that man loves you.”

And because she still had no answer for that, she turned and ran from the room. One more time to fling herself on this bed and cry as if the world was ending. She used to think she was a woman who seldom cried. Strange how one trip had changed that, changed her perceptions of herself, of the people around her. Changed everything.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN