snippet

	Linus scrubbed his sweaty skin down with soap and thought that tidbit over.  It wasn’t bad, to be sure.  “Lumalia?” he asked.

	“Yes?”

	“When you stare into my eyes, the way you do sometimes… what are you seeing in there?” he asked.

	He heard her water turn off.  “Hmm… something big and cozy, I guess,” she said playfully.  Her voice turned more thoughtful as she grabbed a towel and set to drying.  “Not quite sure how to put it into words, I’m afraid.  It’s you, but it’s a part of you that you never think about.  You, specifically, I mean, never think about.  It’s… ahh, I don’t know how to express it.”

	He turned off his own water and glanced back.  She was standing just outside the cone of water from the ceiling with a thoughtful expression and one finger on her chin, with her other arm across her chest.  “Let’s see…”  She thought a moment longer.  “I guess… do you ever wake up with a dream clearly in your mind, then feel it quickly fade as you start moving around?”

	“Sure.”

	“It’s like that.  It’s something inside you that everybody has, but just doesn’t stick in the mind.”  She smiled and planted her hands on her hips.  “But I can see it.  Sorry that I can’t be more explicit.”

	Linus shrugged.  “It’s fine.”  He cocked an eyebrow at her confident stance.  “Did you have some other use for this room in mind?”  He had paid for rather more washcloth bars towel racks in the room than needed, anticipating that she would be as often amorous in her own home as she had been in the Ark.

	She half-shook her head.  “Not now, my love.  Not after watching that poor boy Daniel mangle himself this morning.”

	“Well, I’ll have to kill him later,” Linus said nonchalantly.

	She swatted his stomach.  “Hush your mouth, Linus,” she chided.  “He’s just nervous.”

	“He’s too damn young to be clergy,” Linus opined as he set his wet towel in the hamper.

	“Most of Axiopistos’s male clergy are too young,” Lumalia agreed.  She shook her wings once to dry them, and then tucked them against her back.  She walked out into the greatroom and looked over the clothing she had picked for the day’s lessons.  “But then, most of them are the orphans he rescued as a man, so it makes sense.”

	“I guess.”

	“He idolizes you, you know,” Lumalia called into the bathroom.

	Linus poked his head out of the room, staring at her.  “He does?”

	“He does.  Admires you.  Thinks you’re what he had ought to be some day,” Lumalia informed him.  She selected an appropriate tunic and pulled it over her front, then started trying it around her back to avoid her wings and cover up her scars.  She wasn’t ashamed of her disfigurement, but it did tend to upset the children.

	“Me?  Hah.  I should set him straight some day,” Linus scoffed.  He went back to cleaning as he talked.  The thick stone interior of the house muffled their words to any listeners.

	Lumalia finished pulling on her clothes and set on her shoes.  A sleeveless, halfback tunic with matching trousers, today.  “It is rather hard to discourage people from following in your footsteps when you saved the world twice, love,” she pointed out.

	Linus winced.  “Ugh.”