Chapter 9

When I came to again I was lying with my head in Dallisa’s lap, and the reddish color of sunset was in the room. Her thighs were soft under my head, and for an instant I wondered if, in delirium, I had conceded to her. I muttered, “Sun ... not down...”

She bent her face to mine, whispering, “Hush. Hush.”

It was heaven, and I drifted off again. After a moment I felt a cup against my lips.

“Can you swallow this?”

I could and did. I couldn’t taste it yet, but it was cold and wet and felt heavenly trickling down my throat. She bent and looked into my eyes, and I felt as if I were falling into those reddish and stormy depths. She touched my scarred mouth with a light finger. Suddenly my head cleared and I sat upright.

“Is this a trick to force me into calling my bet?”

She recoiled as if I had struck her, then the trace of a smile flitted around her red mouth. Yes, between us it was battle. “You are right to be suspicious, I suppose. But if I tell you what I know of Rakhal, will you trust me then?”

I looked straight at her and said, “No.”

Surprisingly, she threw back her head and laughed. I flexed my freed wrists cautiously. The skin was torn away and chafed, and my arms ached to the bone. When I moved harsh lances of pain drove through my chest.

“Well, until sunset I have no right to ask you to trust me,” said Dallisa when she had done laughing. “And since you are bound by my command until the last ray has fallen, I command that you lay your head upon my knees.”

I blazed, “You are making a game of me!”

“Is that my privilege? Do you refuse?”

“Refuse?” It was not yet sunset. This might be a torture more complex than any which had yet greeted me. From the scarlet glint in her eyes I felt she was playing with me, as the cat-things of the forest play with their helpless victims. My mouth twitched in a grimace of humiliation as I lowered myself obediently until my head rested on her fur-clad knees.

She murmured, smiling, “Is this so unbearable, then?”

I said nothing. Never, never for an instant could I forget that--all human, all woman as she seemed--Dallisa’s race was worn and old when the Terran Empire had not left their home star. The mind of Wolf, which has mingled with the nonhuman since before the beginnings of recorded time, is unfathomable to an outsider. I was better equipped than most Earthmen to keep pace with its surface acts, but I could never pretend to understand its deeper motivations.

It works on complex and irrational logic. Mischief is an integral part of it. Even the deadly blood-feud with Rakhal had begun with an overelaborate practical joke--which had lost the Service, incidentally, several thousand credits worth of spaceship.

And so I could not trust Dallisa for an instant. Yet it was wonderful to lie here with my head resting against the perfumed softness of her body.

Then suddenly her arms were gripping me, frantic and hungry; the subdued thing in her voice, her eyes, flamed out hot and wild. She was pressing the whole length of her body to mine, breasts and thighs and long legs, and her voice was hoarse.

“Is this torture too?”

Beneath the fur robe she was soft and white, and the subtle scent of her hair seemed a deeper entrapment than any. Frail as she seemed, her arms had the strength of steel, and pain blazed down my wrenched shoulders, seared through the twisted wrists. Then I forgot the pain.

Over her shoulder the last dropping redness of the sun vanished and plunged the room into orchid twilight.

I caught her wrists in my hands, prizing them backward, twisting them upward over her head. I said thickly, “The sun’s down.” And then I stopped her wild mouth with mine.

And I knew that the battle between us had reached climax and victory simultaneously, and any question about who had won it was purely academic.

During the night sometime, while her dark head lay motionless on my shoulder, I found myself staring into the darkness, wakeful. The throbbing of my bruises had little to do with my sleeplessness; I was remembering other chained girls from the old days in the Dry-towns, and the honey and poison of them distilled into Dallisa’s kisses. Her head was very light on my shoulders, and she felt curiously insubstantial, like a woman of feathers.

One of the tiny moons was visible through the slitted windows. I thought of my rooms in the Terran Trade City, clean and bright and warm, and all the nights when I had paced the floor, hating, filled to the teeth with bitterness, longing for the windswept stars of the Dry-towns, the salt smell of the winds and the musical clashing of the walk of the chained women.

With a sting of guilt, I realized that I had half forgotten Juli and my pledge to her and her misfortune which had freed me again, for this.

Yet I had won, and what they knew had narrowed my planet-wide search to a pinpoint. Rakhal was in Charin.

I wasn’t altogether surprised. Charin is the only city on Wolf, except the Kharsa, where the Terran Empire has put down deep roots into the planet, built a Trade City, a smaller spaceport. Like the Kharsa, it lies within the circle of Terran law--and a million miles outside it.

A nonhuman town, inhabited largely by chaks, it is the core and center of the resistance movement, a noisy town in a perpetual ferment. It was the logical place for a renegade. I settled myself so that the ache in my racked shoulders was less violent, and muttered, “Why Charin?”

Slight as the movement was, it roused Dallisa. She rolled over and propped herself on her elbows, quoting drowsily, “The prey walks safest at the hunter’s door.”

I stared at the square of violet moonlight, trying to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle, and asked half aloud, “What prey and what hunters?”

Dallisa didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected her to answer. I asked the real question in my mind: “Why does Kyral hate Rakhal Sensar, when he doesn’t even know him by sight?”

“There are reasons,” she said somberly. “One of them is Miellyn, my twin sister. Kyral climbed the steps of the Great House by claiming us both as his consorts. He is our father’s son by another wife.”