Innkeeper's Song

NYATENERI

In the end, it was my hair that betrayed me, as I really might have expected. Rosseth’s hair is all tight curls— mine is as coarse and shaggy as his, but fatally straight beyond any deception. Once Lal’s fingers clenched in my hair, it would have been all over even if, by some chance, the magic had held together.

Which it did not. It is a most curious sensation to feel even the smallest enchantment leaving you. I do not mean to be insulting when I say that it is not like anything you can imagine. It is like nothing I can imagine, even now, and I have known it three times in my life. Poets and hedge-wizards mutter of the passing of great wings, of a sense of being abandoned by a god after having been used and exalted almost beyond bearing. This is nonsense. The way it is… do you know how it is when a bubble bursts on your wrist, leaving nothing behind but a little cold gasp, already gone out of the skin’s memory by the time the slogging mind even begins to realize—yes? So. Nothing more.

Perhaps, then, you also understand that the person under a spell can only know it by the way it affects other people. For all the nine years that I was Nyateneri, daughter of Lomadis, daughter of Tyrrin, it was never once a woman who looked back at me from any shiny helmet or any muddy stock-pond. The breasts that tormented and emboldened Rosseth; the soft skin, the curved, supple mouth, the rounded grace of carriage—all that was always a trick, the only one I knew that might gull for a while those who meant to kill me. I was disguised—disguised well enough to travel and live with real women on terms of daily intimacy without arousing the slightest suspicion—but I was not transformed, neither in fact nor in my own sense of myself. There was never a moment in those eleven years when I believed that I was truly Nyateneri.

And even so. Even so, in that overburdened bed, with Lal all around me, with Lukassa’s hand prowling between us and my hand at last finding Rosseth, with the greedy, glorious astonishment of their three bodies answering itself in mine—whose name was real, whose gender was forever? It was Rosseth’s innocent desire that had brought mine growling out of a long, long winter sleep; who was it, then, who wanted his mouth no less because of Lal’s rich mouth, his hands no less because of once-dead Lukassa’s tremulous caresses? Was it I—a man, as we say—or Nyateneri, the woman who never existed? All I know is that I kissed them all, woke to their kisses, no more or less as Nyateneri than as the man who was not Rosseth when Lal cried out and buried her hands in his hair. There were no census-takers in that bed that night, no border patrols.