Bastion

like that!”
    “Huh. Well, well. As the saying goes, ‘Two virgins in a bed is one virgin too many,’ I suppose. This is certainly nothing I expected to hear from you.” Jakyr got even redder. “I’m at a loss—there goes my planned speech about the proper precautions and all of that.”
    “Lena tol’ Amily all them things and give her th’ herbs. She’s been takin’ ’em all along,” said Mags, now blushing painfully himself. From feeling as if he were a little’un who’d been caught doing something wrong, he had gone to feeling like someone who should have been doing something but didn’t know how. Which, of course, was the point. All the other Trainees who were . . . keeping company with girls never seemed to have any difficulty keeping everybody pleased. “Bear wanted her t’ do it anyway, on account of I guess it was gonna help her heal faster. I jest . . . I dunno how t’ make things good for a girl . . .”
    He just could not go on. He just sat there, feeling hot and hideously embarrassed. Why couldn’t they have lessons in these things? Why couldn’t Dallen at least have helped? It’s not as if he would dare to make himself look stupid in front of the rest of the fellows for not knowing something so basic!
    “It’s not the sort of thing you could talk about to your friends, is it?” Jakyr said sympathetically, echoing his thoughts. He crossed his legs and leaned back against the hay-stuffed cushion. “Or Dean Caelen. He’s not supposed to know that you Trainees have that sort of interest in each other. It keeps things simpler.”
    “Or anybody at the Collegium,” Mags pointed out. “I mean, Amily’s Nikolas’s daughter, and people were already watchin’ us like . . . I dunno, it’s just that everybody was always watchin’ us, and anybody I mighta been able to talk to was one of the ones watchin’!” He stared at Jakyr in something like despair. “No matter who I talked to, it was gonna get back to Nikolas, an’ then what?”
    “Bear?” Jakyr ventured. “Bear is not just your friend, he’s a Healer, and he’s a married fellow. Couldn’t he help?”
    Mags shuddered. “Even worse. Either he’d go over all Healer, and that’d not be a lotta help because he’d just talk about how this part fits inta that part and not give me any good idea about how to make her happy, or he’d get more embarrassed than me. And that’d take a lot, t’get more embarrassed than me, but he’d do it.”
    As if he couldn’t help himself, Jakyr started chuckling. “Oh, poor Mags. I don’t know how your situation could be made more difficult. I really don’t. On the whole, coming out here like this is probably the best thing that could have happened for you two. You are at least out from under the eyes of all but three of those would-be guardians of Amily’s virtue. Unless Dallen is also on your side, which would make it two would-be guardians.”
    “An’ now you’re gonna—” Mags began, feeling sure now that Jakyr was going to tell him that he and Amily had to separate their sleeping arrangements and start behaving in a chaste manner.
    But Jakyr interrupted him. “No, in fact, I am not, and I just told Jermayan to shut his hay-hole about it.” His chuckle deepened. “He was very offended for as long as it took him to read me a lecture on responsibility. So the last two dragons of virtue have been vanquished.”
    “Uh—so—” Mags began.
    “The upshot is that despite the fact that I have been trying to squirm out of acting like a parent to you, I am going to have to act—hmm. Come to think of it, this probably isn’t going to be acting like a parent to you.” Jakyr’s face turned thoughtful, as the fire crackled and hissed cheerily, and a gentle warmth crept over Mags, making him relax a little. “Only a very careless father would be inclined to tell you what I am going to tell you. I suppose I am about to act like the disreputable uncle who everyone fears to leave the boys with because he encourages them to drink distilled spirits, stay up late, and do more than merely kiss girls.”
    “Uh . . . what?” Mags replied, utterly bewildered now.
    “I am going,” Jakyr said, leaning toward Mags, his eyes dancing with laughter, “to tell you how to please a woman.”
    Mags thought for a moment his face had caught fire, because surely it couldn’t burn like that without some outside help.
    •   •   •
    When Mags got over the worst attack