“So you come to me at last!” Kundalimon cried, with a tremor of joy in his voice. “Good. Very good. At last you come. I miss you, Nialli Apuilana. I miss you very much. I wait the hours all the time.”

Slipping his hand around her wrist, he drew her gently into the room and closed the door. He took the tray of food from her, and the flask of wine, and knelt to set them on the floor. When he rose, he stood in silence a moment, his eyes trained steadily on hers. Once again he put his hand on her wrist.

There’s something different about him today, she thought. Something new, something strange.

Hesitantly he said, “I am thinking. How I feel, you know? I am so much alone. Nest is — so far away. Nest-thinker. Queen. So far. Flesh-folk everywhere about me.”

Compassion for his loneliness overflowed in her. Impulsively she told him, “You mustn’t worry, Kundalimon. You’ll be going back soon.”

“I will? I will?”

He seemed thunderstruck by her words. She was surprised by them herself. Was there any plan to release him? She had no idea. Thu-Kimnibol had talked of sending him back to the Nest carrying a rejection of the treaty, true, but Taniane had given no indication that she’d go along with that. More likely she had it in mind that Kundalimon, his captivity ended, would now simply set about living a normal life in the city of his birth, as though he had been absent only a matter of weeks or months.

But he seemed so needy today. The consoling words had just popped from her mouth. Might as well follow through, Nialli Apuilana thought. Tell him the things he wants to hear.

“Of course you’ll go back. You’ll be carrying a message to the Queen, from our chieftain. They’ll be sending you in just a little while. I’m sure of that.”

Kundalimon’s hand tightened on her wrist.

“You come with me, then?”

She hadn’t been expecting that.

“I?”

“We go together. This no place for you. You have Nest-truth in you! I know this. You have felt Queen-love!” He was trembling. His sensing-organ was moving in slow arcs from side to side behind him, and his tongue flicked out again and again to moisten his lips. “You and I — you and I, Nialli Apuilana — we — we are of the Nest — oh, come close, come close—”

Mueri guide me, she thought desperately. Does he want to twine with me?

Perhaps so. Over the past weeks, as his command of the language had grown, they had begun to enter some new phase of rapport, which today suddenly seemed to be approaching a kind of culmination. Certainly he was far more outgoing than he had ever been with her before; certainly there was an imperative need in him today, an urgency, that was new. Everything about him, the way he stood, the expression of his eyes, the movements of his sensing-organ, even the sharp bitter scent that was rising from him, argued that.

But — twining?

She wondered, It had aroused such fear and even horror in him, that other time early in their friendship when she had touched her sensing-organ to his and begun to lead him into the first stage of the communion. As though he couldn’t bear even the idea of the oneness that she was offering; as though the thought of such union with one who was not of the Nest was repugnant beyond any hope of acceptance.

On the other hand, they knew each other much better now. Apparently Kundalimon had come to realize that she was indeed of the Nest: not to the same degree that he was, but Nest-touched all the same, a Nest-soul within a flesh-body, just as he. And therefore no longer saw her as alien, a member of the enemy. And in that case—

He looked at her imploringly. She smiled and raised her sensing-organ, and brought it into the most grazing of contacts with his.

“No,” he said at once, quickly whipping his sensing-organ beyond her reach. “Not — twine. No. Please — no.”

“No?”

“Frightens. Still. It is too much, the twining.” He shook his head. A deep quiver ran through him. He seemed to brood. But then his face grew sunny again. “You and I — you and I — oh, come close! Will you come close?”

“What do you want?” she asked, baffled.

He made an inarticulate sound, a hjjk-noise, not even a word: simply a noise, like that of a rusty gate resisting the pressure of a hand. A rush of emotions, nearly all of them unreadable, fluttered across his features in wild succession. Nialli Apuilana imagined that she saw sheer terror there, and embarrassment, and something that might have been Nest-love, and a kind of desperate yearning, and also something else, far more familiar, that she had seen only a little while before in the dull lust-ridden Beng-red eyes of Eluthayn Bangkea.

His hands went to her shoulders, her forearms, her breasts. He stroked her with frantic eagerness and pressed himself against her. His mating-rod was stiff.

Mueri and Dawinno and Yissou! she thought, in amazement and dismay. It’s coupling that he wants!

No question of it. His breath was hot against her cheek. He was muttering to her, still inarticulately, in a muzzy mixture of hjjk-clicks and People-grunts. He seemed dazed, lost in a swelter of desire.

It was almost funny. But it was alarming, too. Nialli Apuilana had never coupled with anyone. She was as frightened of coupling as Kundalimon seemed to be of twining. To her it had always meant the breaching of a mysterious barrier that she dared not surrender.

Others, she knew, did it at the snap of a finger, some of them beginning when they were no older than nine or ten. They casually flung their bodies together for a quick sweaty joining and thought nothing of it. But Nialli Apuilana had held herself fastidiously aloof from all that when she was younger, and now that she was well on her way into womanhood she had begun to think that she had held back too long, that she had by her very denial raised coupling to an act of such significance that she would need the most overwhelming imaginable reason ever to do it at all. That reason had never presented itself: certainly she hadn’t seen it in the sniggering eye-rollings of an Eluthayn Bangkea, nor the subtler hungry stares of a Husathirn Mueri.

But now — now—

Kundalimon was all over her, pawing, snorting, just the way she had always thought men did. He could barely control himself. And yet she felt no revulsion, only compassion. Penned up here alone day after day in this little single-windowed cell, he must have been overwhelmed by his solitude, his separation from the Nest, until the anguish had reached flood level in his spirit, and now it was flowing over. Nialli Apuilana saw no way of holding him back.

“Wait,” she said. “Please.”

“I — want—”

“But — please, Kundalimon, please—” He paused, just a moment, as if he really understood what she was trying to say. Or perhaps he simply felt the fearful agitation of her unwilling body. But he was still eager to proceed. How to stop him? In sudden wild inspiration she said, “I must not. Coupling is forbidden to me.” And in the hjjk language she told him, “I have yet to undergo Queen-touch.”

There was a chance, just a chance, he might yield to that argument. In the Nest, there was no mating until the Queen had brought you to maturity and fertility, in a rite the nature of which Nialli Apuilana didn’t know, but which marked the transition into adulthood for every hjjk.

Kundalimon, in the full grip of his own undeniable and no longer denied fleshhood, might not understand why a woman of the flesh-folk would not want to give herself up gladly to the powerful craving that now was sweeping through him. Shouldn’t she feel the same desires that he did, since she too was of the flesh? Well, yes: but he wasn’t able to comprehend her fears. Not even she could. But perhaps he might respond to that other argument for virginity that was unique to the Nest.

His fleshly aspect, though, was in the ascendant. No argument was going to sway him.