Sia had vanished unnoticed, as she could always do when she chose. Farrell said, “You should have told me.”

Ben sat down again, his anger exhausted as abruptly and frighteningly as it had flowered. “No, I shouldn’t have. I should not have.”

“The way you’ve been ducking and sliding and softshoeing around here, you know what I’ve been imagining? What the hell would have been wrong with telling me?”

Ben was silent, rubbing so hard at the base of his throat that Farrell could see the fingermarks flushing. He said finally, “Joe, this university doesn’t yet know how to deal with women asking for equal pay. They tolerate Blacks and Chicanos out of fear—and expect to be praised for it—they flat-out hate gays, and they practically cross themselves every time they pass the one admitted diabetic on the faculty. Try imagining what would happen if they found out I had fall-down fits. I’ve never told anyone but Sia. I really wish to God you didn’t know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Farrell said. He dug into his flan with the vigorous relief of renewed self-assurance. “Did I tell when you wrote that poem to Lidia Mirabal? Her boyfriend, Paco, he practiced a little after-school acupuncture on me every day for a week, but my lips were sealed. Mostly with East Twenty-ninth Street, but anyway.” Ben was staring down at the table. Farrell said, “It never happens in class? When you’re working?” He took a twitch of the hunched shoulders for affirmation. “Well, there you are, what can they do to you? You’re a star, you’re a hotshot, next year you’ll have tenure and then you won’t even have to show up on campus. Come on, if that’s all you’re worried about.”

Ben touched his wrist, so lightly that it made Farrell shiver once, all over. Then he went out of the dining room, and Farrell sat still for a long while, watching the lamplight puddle and run up and down the pepper mill. When he felt the timorous nudge of Briseis’s cold nose on his ankle, he looked up to find Sia placidly watering house plants. Her gray-black hair lay loose on the shoulders of the faded Mongolian robe that she liked to wear in the evenings, and from Farrell’s angle she appeared strangely youthful, almost childlike, as she moved around the room. Even when he said, “So you knew all the time,” and she turned, heavily as ever, to peer at him shortsightedly, he was still as startled and chilled as if the twining dragons on her robe had all lifted their barbed golden heads to seek him.

She said, “I knew what had happened to him, yes, and I knew exactly where he was. But there was nothing I could do.”

“I could have done something,” Farrell said. “I could have brought him home. In a considerable damn sight better shape than they did.”

“You would never have found him. And if you had, there is not a chance in the world that you would have known what to do with him.” She never interrupted her work on the plants. “In a way, it was the best thing that those two found him. But the waiting was hard.”

“Oh, must have been,” Farrell agreed heartily. “Especially knowing exactly where he was and all.” Sour as a thirteenyear-old, he added, “If you think I’m going to ask how you came by that bit of specialized information…”

The swift mischief that had stopped his breath at their first meeting sauntered through Sia’s eyes and was gone. “From her,” she said, nodding at Briseis, who was sitting asleep on Farrell’s foot.

Farrell washed the dishes and went to his room. His practicing went badly that night, and he kept dreaming about falling out of boats. Aiffe and Ben were always in them with him, and Aiffe usually wanted to rescue him, but Ben never let her.

From then on, it was most often Farrell who missed dinner, occasionally breakfast, and once or twice an entire weekend. His absences were legitimate enough—rehearsing with Basilisk demanded much more than one night a week, even when no performances were scheduled. As a practical matter, all of the group’s arrangements had to be adapted to include a lute; on a more elusive level, there was the whole question of Basilisk itself adapting to Farrell’s particular sound and style, and he to the consort’s. Farrell expected this, having been through similar rituals before. What he had not quite bargained for were the picnics, nor the impromptu potlucks, beach barbecues, volleyball games, and backpacking excursions, to all of which he was constantly being invited. He complained mildly to Hamid at one point. “Don’t they ever stop being family? I like the music fine, but the hugging is wearing me out.”

“Village thinking,” Hamid said. “The League tends to foster that stuff, what with all the baronies and the guilds and the fellowships and such. You encourage people to be thinking in terms of small groups, tribes, that gets real natural real easy, you don’t just turn it off.” He smiled his long, disquieting smile that showed only the tips of his teeth, and added, “The Middle Ages were like that, of course. You could live out your whole life inside a few square miles.”

Farrell said, “They really are good. I have to push to keep up with them. It’s learning on the job, too, I’m already playing gigs. We did a private party for Duke Claudio and his wife last week. That was strange, I don’t know if I liked it or not. Nobody broke character for a minute, not even when the phone rang or a fuse blew, and they even fed us in the kitchen, the way you did with musicians. Good thing they didn’t have stables.”

Hamid’s grin sharpened. “You wait till you play someplace like Dol Amroth or Storisende.” Farrell recognized the names from Tolkien and Cabell. Hamid shook his head with great deliberateness, blowing daintily on his fingertips. He said, “Places like that, you truly get to wondering when in the world you are.”

He walked away from any further questions and Julie was only a bit more forthcoming when Farrell went to her. “Households,” she said. “There are four or five real ones—four, I guess, Rivendell keeps breaking up and starting over. They’re like communes, not even that organized. People sharing the rent, taking turns cooking, shopping, working in the garden, arguing over who changes the cat box this week. We’ve both lived in a dozen places like that.”

“Except that we weren’t all playing the same game all the time.”

Julie simply laughed at him. “Weren’t we? Come on, where you and I lived everybody was conspiring to bomb the Pentagon, or anyway jam up their plumbing. Or it was the great quest for the perfect plural marriage, the permanently correct position on Cuba, the all-time guru, the ultimate compost heap. It was just the same, Joe, just as uniform. And you fit in or you moved on to some other group.”

“Did Prester John move on?” Farrell had lately taken to using the name like a depth charge, maliciously toppling it into placid conversation with League members and waiting to feel the water rupture and convulse far below the twinkling surface.

But Julie said only, “I guess,” and went on fitting a new cartridge into one of her drawing pens. When Farrell pushed further, her voice abruptly became high and monotonous, whining with tension like an electric fence. “He freaked out, Joe, let it alone. He moved on, right. He overdosed on everything, one more Parnell burnout, all right? Let it alone.” There were tears swelling her eyes, shivering on the lower lids, and Farrell went to make tea.

Since the dance, she had not accompanied him to any of the League functions, brusquely pleading either work or weariness. The Lady Criseyde had invited him to play for her weekly dance classes; and once he went alone to a crafts fair sponsored by the artisans’ and armorers’ guilds, and spent the day talking with pony-tailed boys who knew South German plate armor from Milanese, and Peffenhauser’s work from Colman’s, and with a former chemistry professor whose suits of armor weighed eighty pounds and sold for three thousand dollars. There were two swordsmiths and a specialist in the manufacture of mauls and flails, and there was one who only made the great padded gauntlets that most of the fighters used. Farrell learned that chopsticks were by far the best tools for packing the stuffing down in the glove, and that a one-pound lead sinker made the most successful pommel weight for a tournament mace.