"You think I'm responsible for it being there?" Dey- morin asked.

"Who else?"

"And I suppose I'm the one who sent Nikki to the closet tonight," Deymorin said, from behind that blank spot his mind had become. And this time, though Mikhyel con- sciously sought a deeper explanation, the fickle link had closed Deymorin's thoughts to him.

"What do you mean?" he asked finally.

"You don't know?"

"If I did, I wouldn't ask!"

"I found him in a bolt hole, Khy." Deymorin's voice was low, with that internal augmentation they'd discovered.

"Your voice was in his head, demanding he stay there. In the closet."

"Then that's . . . That's why he was so angry. 'Go to the closet, Nikki, get out of the way, Nikki, let big brother take care of everything, Nikki.' " Mikhyel rubbed a hand across his eyes. "Rings, who can blame him? I was forcing him right back into childhood."

"And you, Khy? What forced you back?" It was a tenta- tive probe, silent as well as verbal, seeking the truth about Mheric. Mikhyel evaded, "What doesn't any more? The dark. The fear . . ." An image of Ganfrion, sharp and clear.

Those imaginings about Mheric superimposed. Questions.

Confusions.

Mikhyel choked on something between laughter and a curse. "Nothing so dramatic, I assure you. One of them threatened to break my wrist, that's all. I panicked. Your brother's an abject coward, JD, you'd better learn to live with it."

"Coward?" Deymorin repeated slowly, and in his mind was a kaleidoscope of truth and supposition about Mikhy- el's life, ancient history and recent. "You're possibly the bravest man I've ever met."

"You're coddling again," Mikhyel said.

"Hell if I am," Deymorin retorted. "I know coddling."

"So do 1. You coddle me."

"Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. Maybe I just want an excuse to coddle someone."

"Then try coddling Nikki. He'd love it."

"Nikki doesn't need coddling."

"Neither do I!" The words exploded out of him. Irrita- tion at this newest twist in Deymorin's misconceptions, re- action to the increasing pressure to supply Deymorin with information he damn well didn't want Deymorin to have.

"So, what you're saying is, I should have left you to keep us awake with your shivering, rattling bones."

"It would have spared us the rest of what Nikki's 'throw- ing around.' "

"I've got news for both of you. Even if Kiyrstin needed coddling, sex would be the farthest thing from my mind.

You . . . I don't know how to break this to you. Barrister, but you're just not quite my style."

It was an honest enough attempt at humor, but Mikhyel's attempt at laughter choked on his bitterness.

On the other hand, it was a natural enough speculation, considering what else Nikki had learned about him tonight.

"What do you mean?" Deymorin asked, and Mikhyel realized he'd spoken aloud . . . or thought too clearly.

"There's nothing natural about it!"

He shrugged.

"Had to learn somewhere, didn't I?"

"Learn?" Deymorin repeated. "Learn what? You've left me behind in the swamp."

"Ringssex, JD. Men with men. You're his source for all such information." Mikhyel drew a steadying breath.

"Nikki has some quite amazing notions regarding what did or did not happen between myself and Ganfrion tonight. If I were Nikki, with Nikki's overly romantic, rather confused notions about sex and love, I'd probably prefer to think that my brother had had some . . . pleasant experience before facing a pack of Sparingate wolves."

"Experience," Deymorin repeated flatly. "Sex." A pause for a response that Mikhyel didn't make. "With me."

"Far more palatable than the available options, isn't it?"

"We were children."'

"We aren't now."

"We haven't spoken to each other in years without fighting."

"We have in the last month."

"Butthere was never anything of that nature between us. Not even the thought - . . Or at least . . . Rings, Khyel, was there? Did you . . . ?"

Surprise came through to Mikhyel, along with an image of himself, asexual, almost androgynous. And on its heels, another image, as he'd appeared this evening, hair down, challengingshockingly (to Deymorin) sultry. But he sensed nothing of loathing. Nothing of revulsion.

Curiosity . . . that, perhaps.

"Did I want to be with you?" Mikhyel asked. "Sexually?

I don't think so, but I don't really know. I'm not certain I know what it means to want . . . Certainly I've never de- sired you the way you desire Kiyrstin."

"Kiyrstin?"

Mikhyel acknowledged silently. "In the past month, your feelings for her have provided me with a . . . a benchmark for feelings I don't believe I've ever understood. When I spoke of Nikki's notions about sex and love, it was in philo- sophical abstracts. What Nikki expects out of life, what you feel with Kiyrstin . . . frankly, Deymorin, makes no sense whatsoever to me."

"And Ganfrion? Did that make sense, Mikhyel?"

Sharp. Direct. That question had been brewing for an hour and more. Unnecessary concern on Deymorin's part; it had been humiliating to capitulate to the wolves of Spar- ingate, but nothing more.

"Only in economic terms, Deymorin. And in that sense . . . in that sense there were times ..." His voice grew hoarse with humiliation. "There were times that . . .

Darius forgive me, I'd have filled your bed in an instant, if that would have kept you in Rhomatum."

"For the love of Darius, whyV'

"I don't" He realized too late the memories he tapped, tried to stop the mental images, but he was too tired, and too slow. Memories of being a child with Deymorin, of swimming in the mountain lakes, and of playing in the snow. Of a warm body to huddle close to at night.

He'd been nine when Nikki was born. Deymorin had been twelve. Nothing had been the same since. But in the years since, even after Mheric's death, that desire to have Deymorin near, the resentment every time he left Rhoma- tum, had never faded.

"In Rhomatum," Deymorin repeated out of those thoughts. "But not for yourself? Your own desire?"

"Desire, no. Friendship . . . that very possibly. Alliance.

Advicedefinitely. But not desire. I've no appetite for it, man or woman. Never have had."

"No appetite . . ." And Deymorin's thoughts were on the woman Deymorin himself had placed in Mikhyel's bed on Mikhyel's seventeenth birthday. "Man . . . or woman." And of the sight he'd seen when Anheliaa threw open Mikhyel's bedroom door. "Don't lie to me, Khyel." And of a three-way sharing on Nikki's wedding night. "Not now."

"I'm human, Deymorin. Cut me, and I bleed."

A long pause.

"It's a strange metaphor you choose."

"Is it? Perhaps. And perhaps it's just one more bodily function I'd rather live without."

A longer pause, during which Mikhyel fought the in- stinct to invade Deymorin's mind to find out exactly what his brother was thinking and feeling. Fought until the blood pounded in his head, and the bile rose in his throat.

How could he expect Deymorin to understand? Dey- morin, for whom women and sex and children were the essence of being alive.

Then, suddenly, Deymorin sighed exaggeratedly.

"Thank the ley. Kiyrstin would not, I fear, be inclined to share."

Out of the pain, out of the embarrassment, the fear of consequence, came laughter, full and heartfelt, his own or Deymorin's, it didn't matter. Mikhyel released his internal control; and as Deymorin's arm fell around his shoulders, heavy, strong, and natural, he found Deymorin's thoughts, and his own, quiet at last.

8 9 9.

"And this one?" A long fingernail bearing a hoarded vestige of chipped enamel pointed to a word in the last tightly penned paragraph.

"Beguiling," Kiyrstin read the word aloud.

"Beguiling," Beauvina echoed. "Is that good?"

"Very."

The girl smiled, then repeated the word. Once aloud, twice more to herself, while looking at the word, then read the entire sentence silently, though her polished lips moved.

It was quite a letter Nikki had sent the young woman.

A letter written shortly after Nikki's seventeenth birthday, the day after Nikki had promised to wed Lidye dunTarim.

And quite a young woman he'd sent it to. The letter had arrived in an envelope marked private, and Beauvina had respected that request. In the months since she'd received it, she had taught herself to read just so she could make sense of that so-intimate letter. And no one else knew she had it. Except her employer, of whom Beauvina seemed to think very highly.

And since that employer, knowing Beauvina couldn't read, had delivered that envelope marked private still safely sealed with Nikki's Rhomandi stamp, and afterward never pried into that envelope's contents, Kiyrstin was inclined to agree with Beauvina's assessment.

Not that Nikki had revealed anything particularly indis- creet. He'd written to thank Beauvina for making his birth- day special, and to explain why he wouldn't be back to see her as he'd promised, because he was honorbound now to wed Another, and he intended to love his wife as a husband should, and that didn't include falling in love with Beau- vina, so he'd best never see her again.

And then Nikki had simply poured his heart out in terms only a seventeen-year-old whose life had been turned inside out on the most important day of his life could use.

And through a letter intended for someone in whose good opinion Nikki had no stake, Kiyrstin began to see, for the first time, the young man Deymorin and Mikhyel had loved, the young man who had existed before that link among the brothers had exposed so ruthlessly the chaotic inner processes of his young mind to his very worldly brothers.

A young man who had cared so deeply for his older brothers and longed so greatly for their reconciliation, that sometimes, he'd work for weeks just to contrive a single evening together without an argument, fearing every time that something would happen to drive one or the other of them out of his life forever.

To Nikki's mind, on his seventeenth birthday, the very day he'd come of legal age, that long-dreaded eventuality had come to pass. The morning after his party, he'd awak- ened to discover Deymorin gone, and for the next half year, Nikki had been allowed to believe that exile had been of Deymorin's own choosing.

That misrepresentation had been Mikhyel's doing, as much as Anheliaa's. And out of well-meant necessity. But that fact hadn't made the truth any easier to accept, when that truth had come out.

In the letter, Nikki had confessed his belief that Mikhyel and Deymorin had far more in common than they had dif- ferences. And now that fate had proven Nikki correct, Nikki found himself left out, or at least forced to share his brothers in a way he'd never imagined.

This letter left no doubt that prior to his wedding night, Nikki had held out hope that he and his future wife would be everything to one another: romantically, politically, and spiritually.

Hope. And naivete. The letter swam with both. But Kiyr- stin could hardly blame Nikki for that.

Kiyrstin had managed, from the day she'd been married at sixteen, to keep sex and friendship and hatred in what she'd always believed were their proper perspective. She'd married with no thought of romance or love, only family and responsibility and power. At thirty-two, she'd believed herself immune to the insidious influences of that mental enigma called love.

Deymorin had annihilated that self-delusion and warped the perspective, and thanks to his insidious charm, she found herself allied with Garetti's enemies-by-tradition, dodging lightning bolts on a regular basis, and currently in danger of spending the rest of her life in Sparmgate Prison.

Better that than sitting in Garetti's Mauritum villa having babies and making doilies.

Better for her. Better for Deymorin. But for Nikki . . .

Nikki the poet, Nikki the romantic had had to face that perfect love of theirs daily. Probably been forced to share, to some unknown extent, Deymorin's feelings when Dey- morin was with her, possibly as intimately at times as Mi- khyel. She wouldn't know; Nikki didn't talk to her the way Mikhyel did.

In fact, Nikki hadn't talked to any of them much over the past month. It had to hurt, to be seventeen, and to experience that perfect love he'd sought vicariously, know- ing what awaited him in his own marriage bed.

And now he'd arrived in Rhomatum to have that same wife, or her father, have him thrown into Sparingate Crypt.

Not exactly the marriage he'd imagined, back when he'd written that letter.

Beauvina read the letter through again, then dabbed at her eyes with her already damp handkerchief. There'd been a fair number of tears. Beauvina's was a romantic heart, and Nikki's story one to inspire such waterworks. Sometime since, she'd excused herself and come back soft-eyed, washed free of makeup . . . the image of common sense and common understanding.

"I think, he's really a very nice young man," Beauvina said quietly.

"I think, Vina, that you're right."

"I wish I could help him . . . somehow."

"I think you already have, Vina."

"I'm . . . glad."