"Come, I'll show you to your chamber, and there will be dinner when you're ready, a quiet one, only my family and a few guests from town, no more than twenty at the most, and thirty more of your people—"

"That sounds almost intimate, after the Labyrinth," said Valentine lightly.

He followed Nascimonte through the dark and mysterious windings of the manor-house to a wing set apart on the high eastern arm of the cliff. Here, behind a formidable barricade of Skandar guards that included Zalzan Kavol himself, was the royal suite. Valentine, bidding his host farewell, entered and found Carabella alone within, stretched languidly in a sunken tub of delicate blue and gold Ni-moyan tile, her slender body dimly visible beneath a curious crackling haze at the surface of the water.

"This is astonishing!" she said. "You ought to come in with me, Valentine."

"Most gladly I will, lady!"

He kicked off his boots, peeled away his doublet, tossed his tunic aside, and with a grateful sigh slipped into the tub beside her. The water was effervescent, almost electrical, and now that he was in it he saw a faint glow playing over its surface. Closing his eyes, he stretched back and put his head against the smooth tiled rim, and curled his arm around Carabella to draw her against him. Lightly he kissed her forehead, and then, as she turned toward him, the briefly exposed tip of one small round breast.

"What have they put in the water?" he asked.

"It comes from a natural spring. The chamberlain called it 'radioactivity.'"

"I doubt that," said Valentine. "Radioactivity is something else, something very powerful and dangerous.

I've studied it, so I believe."

"What is it like, if not like this?"

"I can't say. The Divine be blessed, we have none of it on Majipoor, whatever it may be. But if we did, I think we'd not be taking baths in it. This must be some lively kind of mineral water."

"Very likely," Carabella said.

They bathed together in silence awhile. Valentine felt the vitality returning to his spirit. The tingling water? The comforting presence of Carabella close by, and the freedom at last from the press of courtiers and followers and admirers and petitioners and cheering citizens? Yes, and yes, those things could only help to bring him back from his brooding, and also his innate resilience must be manifesting itself at last, drawing him forth from that strange and un-Valentine-like darkness that had oppressed him since entering the Labyrinth. He smiled. Carabella lifted her lips to his; and his hands slipped down the sleekness of her lithe body, to her lean muscular midsection, to the strong supple muscles of her thighs.

"In the bath?" she asked dreamily.

"Why not? This water is magical."

"Yes. Yes."

She floated above him. Her legs straddled him; her eyes, half open, met his for a moment, then closed.

Valentine caught her taut little buttocks and guided her against him. Was it ten years, he wondered, since that first night in Pidruid, in that moonlit glade, under the high gray-green bushes, after the festival for that other Lord Valentine? Hard to imagine: ten years. And the excitement of her had never waned for him. He locked his arms about her, and they moved in rhythms that had grown familiar but never routine, and he ceased to think of that first time or of all the times since, or of anything, indeed, but warmth and love and happiness.