Dr. Remigorius’ face cracked into a red-and-black smile. “Pfo, young man, you’ll make a witch of her and she will gain her fortune.”
Mme. Kaja came over to take both his hands as he left. “The heart will follow,” she said.
2
APRIL NIGHT
Lalette looked up through branches to the purpling sky, then down from the little crest and across the long flat fertile fields, reaching out toward the Eastern Sea, where night was rising. “I must go,” she said. “My mother will be back from the service.” Her voice was flat.
“Not yet,” said Rodvard, lifting his head from arms wrapped around his knees. “You said she would stay to talk with the fat priest. . . . In this light, your eyes are green.”
“It is the sign of a bad temper, my mother tells me. She looked in the waters for me once, and says that when I am married, I will be a frightful shrew.” (It was almost too much trouble to move, she was glad even to make a slender line of conversation that would hold her immobile in the calm twilight.)
“Then you must be fated to marry a bad man. I do not see—if you really loved someone, how could you be shrewish with them?”
“Oh, the girls of our heritage cannot marry for love. It is the tradition of the witch-families.” She sat up suddenly. “Now I must absolutely go.”
He placed his hand over hers, where it rested on the long green moss under the cedars. “Absolutely, I will not let you go. I will bind you with hard bonds, till you tell me more about your family. Do you really have a Blue Star?”
“My mother does. . . . I do not know. My father would never use it, that is why we are so poor. He said it was wrong and dangerous. My mother’s father used it though, she says, before she got it from him. It was he who told her to choose my father. He was a Capellan in the army, you know, and was killed in the war at the siege of Sedad Mir. My mother’s father could read through the Star that my father wanted my mother for herself and not for her heritage. It was a love-match, but now there is no one that can use the Star.” (Lalette thought: I really must not tell stories like that that are not true, it only slipped out because I do not wish to go back and hear her talking about Count Cleudi again.)