Moongather by Jo Clayton

eyes wide, wondering what the Noris was going to do, then gasped with surprise and fear as her feet left the stone of the pier.
    They rose smoothly, soaring with the ease of the sea birds lately her companions. After her fright passed away and she was certain she wasn’t going to fall, she laughed with delight and kicked her feet through the flowing air. The Noris ignored her antics. At the top of the cliff he halted the flight and glided smoothly to a landing inside a deep alcove cut into the tower’s outer wall. Facing the tall bronze doors at the back of the cut, he spoke a quiet WORD. The doors sprang apart, crashing against the stone not far from his impassive face. He strode between the age-greened slabs into the thick blackness beyond, pulling Serroi along with him, a draggled kite tail almost forgotten.
    As soon as the Noris stepped over the threshhold, the door clashed shut again, almost nipping Serroi’s cloak between its jaws. She gasped and stumbled, blind and frightened in the sudden darkness. Clinging to the Noris’s cool fingers, she turned and twisted with him through darkness, having to trust him to lead her back to light. He walked as freely as if the dark were light to his eyes, but she felt her terror growing until her breath was near strangled in her throat. When she knew absolutely she couldn’t take another step, he stopped, dropped her hand, spoke a WORD.
    The wall split before them and a cool pearly light flooded into the blackness. The Noris stepped through into the room beyond. To Serroi’s watery eyes, he was a tall black column with opaline fringes. She rubbed at her eyes with fisted hands, then went timidly through after him.
    The room was a domed cylinder that looked as big as the inside of a mountain to her. The light came from all over as if it filled the room like air. There were tall chairs around the walls, some tapestries—images of plants and animals in bright splashes of color, three long narrow ink-paintings—again natural images suggested in splashes of black and white. On the far side, opposite the doorway, a dais jutted from the wall with a massive throne-chair centered on it, the dark wood carved into serpentine twists of vine with animal heads snarling through the leaves. On the floor the rug was a shimmer of brilliant leaf and flower forms. Serroi gave a soft exclamation of delight and stooped to caress the thick silky fibers, to trace one of the twisting vines and stroke a crimson flower the size of her hand. She glanced at the Noris, a question on her lips that died when she saw the look on his face. “All the things I’m denied,” he said. She felt the pain and self-mockery in the soft voice and crouched trembling on that magnificent rug, more frightened than she’d ever been in her short lifetime. Then he was calm again, his face a sparely sculptured mask. He held out his hand. Slowly she straightened, got to her feet, crossed the rest of the rug to him and took the extended hand. He led her to the tapestry that hung behind the throne chair, pulled the edge aside to reveal a barrel-roofed corridor. “Through here, child. Walk ahead of me.”
    Serroi frowned down at her toes, resisting the urging of his hand. All the small rebellions of the long journey came together in her at the sight of that dimly lit wormhole. Knowing she would be punished, having rebelled and been punished for it countless times before, struggling against the torments her older brothers and sisters inflicted on her, rejecting their instinctive attempts to break her spirit and turn her to something less even than the animals they at least tended with some care, she snatched her hand from the Noris, scowled up at him. “My name is Serroi.”

THE WOMAN: III
    Serroi gasped out of her troubled sleep and sat up. “Maiden bless,” she groaned, clutching at her throbbing head. When the pain steadied to a dull ache, she flung the quilt aside and