"-doubly cursed."

"Depending on who you talk to." I gestured. "Then again, you're also a renegada. A woman renegada."

"Thrice cursed!" She sighed dramatically, then glanced sidelong at me. "I enjoy being-unpredictable."

"I figured you did."

"But that is not why I do what I do, or am what I am."

"I figured it wasn't."

She contemplated me further. "She told me you were, once, everything she detests in a man."

I drank deeply of my cup, then hitched a shoulder. "Depending on who you talk to."

"I talked to her."

"Then I was. If she says so. To her."

"She no longer detests you."

I grunted. "That is something of a relief."

"She told me you still have some rough edges, but she is rubbing them off."

I grinned into the winejar as I tipped it toward my face. "I enjoy having Del rub me off."

"That is disgusting!" Prima Rhannet jabbed a sharp elbow in my short ribs, which succeeded in startling me into a recoil and coughing spasm that slopped wine down my chin and the front of my tunic. "But amusing," she conceded.

I caught my breath, wiped my chin, plucked the wet tunic away from my skin. I reeked of rich red wine.

The captain hiccoughed. Or so I thought initially. Then I realized it was laughter she attempted to suppress. I scowled at her sidelong. "What's so funny?"

"You want to know how, and why," she said. "Every man does, except those who understand what it is to desire in a way others declare is wrong. They wish to know about mechanics, and motivation."

I opened my mouth to respond, shut it. Converted images in my head, and realized with abrupt and unsettling clarity that she was no different than I. I had been, after all, a slave, someone vilified, excoriated, for something I could not help. For being what I was, had no choice in being.

And I recalled so many nights when I cried myself to sleep, or when I hadn't slept at all because the beaten body had hurt so much. And how I had longed for, had dreamed of a world in which I had value beyond doing what others told me. What others expected of me, and punished to enforce it.

"I think," I said slowly, "that it shouldn't matter what others think."

"But it does."

"It does," I agreed bleakly. "But maybe it shouldn't. Maybe… maybe what's important is how we feel about ourselves."

I, of course, had believed I deserved slavery. Because I had been told so. Because I knew nothing else. Thus even the wishes, the dreams, had worsened the guilt.

"And if she thought of you now as she thought of you originally?" Prima asked. "Your Northern bascha?"

I stared into the darkness of the winejar, unable to find an answer. Not one that made any sense, nor could make sense to her.

"It matters," she said. "One can justify that it does not, that the opinions of others are without validity, but if the one person you care for more than yourself believes you are beneath contempt, then your life has no worth."

I stirred then. "I disagree."

"Why?"

"Because true freedom is when the only person whose opinion matters is your own. When you know your own worth."

Prima smiled. "But so often it is difficult to be comfortable in your own skin."

"Well, mine's a little battered," I said, "but on the whole I'm pretty comfortable in it."

Now.

"While hers no longer fits the way it used to."

I looked at Prima sharply. "What do you mean? And how in hoolies do you know anything about it?"

"We spoke," she answered, "as one woman to another. Women who have made a life among men no matter how difficult the task, no matter how vilified we were-and are-for it. As sisters of the soul."

"And?"

"And," the captain echoed, "she admitted to me that she has lost herself."

"Del? "

"Her song is finished," Prima said. "So she told me. She found her brother. Found the man who destroyed her family, her past, the future she expected to have. And she killed that man." Her eyes were smoky in the light. "Her song is finished, and now she hears yours."

It startled me. "Mine?"

"Of course. She came here with you, did she not?"

"You made certain of that, captain."

Prima laughed. "But you were bound here regardless of my actions."

I conceded that yes, we had been.

"But Skandi had nothing to do with her life," she continued. "It played no role."

"I don't know that Skandi plays much of a role in anyone's life," I pointed out, "except to people who live here."

"You are avoiding the truth."

I sighed. "All right. Fine. Yes, Del came with me to Skandi. In fact, it was Del who suggested it." I brightened. "Which means it does too have something to do with her life!"

The captain laughed and lifted her cup in salute. "But my point is that her song now is yours, not her own."

"And are you suggesting she'd be wiser to hear your song?"

The smile fled Prima Rhannet's mouth. "I might wish it," she said softly, "but no. She is a woman for men. For a man," she amended, "since no other man but you has taken her without force."

I was not comfortable with this line of conversation. I knew well enough of Del's past, but saw no need to discuss it with anyone other than Del. Who never did.

At least, with me. Seems she had with the renegada.

Prima saw my expression, interpreted it accurately. "I only mean you to realize what it is to have a woman such as she with you," she said. "A woman who chooses to be with you, because it is what she wants. There is honor in making such a choice, if that choice agrees with your soul. It is no diminishment for a woman to be with a man, to want to be with a man-but neither is it diminishment for a woman to want to be with a woman."

Put that way, well, I guess not. It was the other side of the mirror, the reflection reversed. So long as both sides of the couple were happy, with needs met, honor respected, no one forced or harmed, did it matter if the couple was comprised of two women, or two men?

Maybe not. Probably not. But it was hard to think of it in those terms. It made me uncomfortable. It was too new, too different.

More questions occurred. Should a woman be with a man because she was expected to? Because she was made to? Was it not akin to slavery to be forced to do and be what others insisted you do and be?

I had been what the Salset had made me. Prima Rhannet had apparently tried to be what she was expected to be, and found it slavery of the soul. For Del, raped repeatedly by a man who murdered her family, it might be simpler to avoid men altogether. She hadn't. She'd sought and found me, because she needed my help. But that time was long past, that life concluded.

The captain was right: Del had chosen to be with me. Such choices, freely made, were framed on personal integrity, not on expectations. That satisfaction of the soul was paramount.

With quiet fierceness Prima went on. "Men do not believe women have honor. They are threatened by such things in us, because they fear our strength. Better to discount it, to ridicule it, to diminish it, before we recognize and acknowledge our worth. Because then their lives would change. They would no longer be comfortable in their own hearts, and skins."

I knew that in the South, what she said was true. "And yet here in Skandi, women rule the households, the family business ventures." I paused. "Even the lines of inheritance."

"But such things are expected of women," Prima countered. "I speak of the things women are not believed capable of doing."

I couldn't help it: I was relieved to be back on ground made familiar by discussions with Del. Many discussions with Del. "Such as captaining a ship?"

"Women," she said, "should be permitted to do anything. And accorded honor for it."

I smiled. "Even if they choose to remain in the household doing those very things expected of women."