Lorya said nothing, but her hands were shaking slightly and she kept her head carefully turned away from Blade. He did not feel particularly good about having to leave Lorya behind, to wait in an agony of suspense while he faced the Wizard, but there was nothing to justify taking her any farther into danger.

He could see now that he'd made a mistake in taking Lorya with him this far. Yet it would have been death to leave her in Dodini, and he hadn't realized she might come to care for him the way she obviously had. Damn! He'd been remarkably slow in a matter where he was usually alert. Now he'd contrived to drag another innocent person deep into danger, after swearing a mighty oath he'd do everything he could to avoid this happening again!

He urged his heuda forward. «Come on, Lorya. Let's see what the inns have in the way of wine. They've got to have something better than the purple vinegar we drank last night!»

Blade came up the winding stairs, hearing the wood creak under his weight and ducking his head to get under the low beams. The stairs were swept clean of dust, but still smelled of old wine, unwashed human bodies, and the oil from the dim, guttering lamps that shed a faint orange light.

Blade reached the top of the stairs and turned right, down the hall leading to the inn's half-dozen private rooms. To the left were the three large communal chambers, each with beds for a dozen people. Blade thought of sticking his head inside one, to see what kind of people were snoring away there, then decided against it. In this village people were very careful to keep to themselves, not asking others' business or even meeting others' eyes.

Blade decided he would not ask Lorya to wait for him here. A few hours in the grim atmosphere of this village was already making him edgy. Two weeks of it would make the poor woman a nervous wreck. He'd send her ten miles back up the road to the village of Peloff and the Inn of the Blue Swan. She could wait more safely and much more comfortably there.

Blade reached his room, turned the huge iron key in the lock, pushed the door open, then stopped abruptly. The sleeping pallet beside the bed where Lorya had been lying was empty. He scanned the room quickly. The candle still burned in the candlestick by the head of the bed; and everything else was as it had been when he left. But the room was as completely empty as if Lorya had been spirited away by magic.

Blade's hand went to the hilt of his sword and he took a step forward, surprise and the beginnings of fear rising in him. The fear was not for himself, but for Lorya. Had the Wizard's powers reached out and struck at her, or had human agents come after her? He drew his dagger and took another step forward, trying to look in all directions at once. Possibly-

Then Blade heard the unmistakable sound of a deep breath from behind the door, the only part of the room his eyes couldn't reach. He froze in mid-stride, then started to turn. A moment later came an unmistakable, uncontrollable giggle. Blade whirled around and slammed the door behind him. Lorya stood there, shaking with laughter that she was vainly trying to keep silent. She was shaking so hard that she had to brace herself against the wall to keep from collapsing on the floor.

She was also entirely nude.

Blade's breath went out of him in a whistle of pleased surprise. Then he wanted to laugh at himself. A fine spectacle he must have been, entering the room as though a hungry tigher waited to leap out at him. No wonder Lorya finally broke into giggles! Of course it was a dangerous joke to play on a man with his training, who became a deadly fighting machine the moment his suspicions were aroused. But he didn't have to tell her this and spoil her fun, not on this evening, the last time they might ever see each other.

So he said nothing. Instead he stepped forward, bent, and swept her up into his arms. She let her head drop back, arching her neck and exposing her throat to Blade's lips. He noticed that her breath was coming fast, and a tendon in the slim neck was vibrating like a plucked harpstring.

This didn't surprise Blade at all. When he raised his lips from her throat, his own breath was coming in gasps, as if he'd just run a couple of miles at top speed. His strength seemed to have doubled so that he was holding Lorya, not a small woman in spite of her slenderness, as easily as if she'd been a child.

He held her for a moment longer, then turned, carried her over to the bed, and laid her down on the quilt. She lay on her back, her arms at her side and her breasts rising and falling with her quick breathing. She kept her eyes fixed on Blade as he pulled off his clothes. In the dim light those eyes seemed to be twice their normal size and Blade could have sworn they were glowing like a cat's.

Lorya suddenly wriggled and laughed softly. «I wonder what anyone would say if he could spy on us-the Wizard's man and his 'servant'. Of course, some of the Wizard's men are said to have a liking for boys.»

«They might wonder at first,» Blade said, smiling. «But not for long. No one who got a good look at you could think for a moment you're a boy.»

That was nothing less than the truth. Lorya was fine-boned and slender, almost lean. She'd had little spare flesh to begin with and the long journey across Rentoro had taken off much of that: Yet she was still beautiful, her breasts shallow but exquisite cones with dark nipples now risen into points, her belly extraordinarily taut and flat for a woman who'd borne a child, her legs simply breathtaking long for her height, strongly muscled, exquisitely molded. Those legs drew Blade's attention until he had to sit down on the bed beside Lorya and run his hands up and down them, from the feet up to the inner thighs and back down again. Under his hands her skin was firm, and seemed to be cool and warm at the same time.

Gradually his hands spent more time on her inner thighs, occasionally brushing lightly over the triangle of fine dark hair nestling between them. As Blade's hands worked, so did his lips, kissing Lorya's eyes, ears, and lips, again caressing her throat, working down to her breasts and across the skin of her belly until she shivered and moaned.

Lorya, did not lie quietly under Blade's hands and lips. Far from it. Her own hands were making their own thorough exploration of his body, and her lips pressed against his as if she wanted to weld the two of them together. In the brief moments when her arms went around him, he could feel her wiry strength, feel her trembling, feel her nails digging into his skin.

At last there was no part of each other's bodies they hadn't explored with lips and hands. Lorya was quivering from head to foot, her eyes were closed, and from her open mouth came a steady whimpering. Blade's own breath rasped in his throat like sand, and his groin seemed to be glowing white hot. His lips returned to Lorya's throat again. She caught him with both arms, hands gripping his hair. He wanted to slip gently into her, but instead her legs seemed to fly apart and her hands tightened, dragging him down, dragging him deep within her' n a single fierce moment.

Now her legs rose and locked around Blade's waist, while her hands slipped down onto his back. Her nails dug in deeper than before, but Blade felt no pain. He couldn't have felt pain if he and Lorya had been hurled into a boiling cauldron. He could feel nothing but Lorya, swamping all his senses, enveloping him, surrounding his mind as she'd already surrounded part of his body.

He was slow to feel anything else. He was dimly aware that Lorya was moving under him as he moved within her, that her legs were clamping tighter and her hands were once again in his hair. He heard her moans rise and he heard his own breath coming faster and faster. Yet he was less aware than usual of the slow equisite climb toward the final release, the quickening, the twisting, his desperate efforts to hold back and the woman's desperate efforts to push on to the end.