Coquina looked at him, uncertain whether he were serious. Her eyes were blue. “Come,” he said, unable to explain his mood. “I prefer my slave.”

And so they danced, the girl light on her feet and easy to hold, and for a time the weight upon his mind lightened, retreated half a step. They danced, they swung, they spun, her skirts rising alluringly; but the weight danced with them. The living lines parted and re-formed; men marched to meet their partners in the center, bowed, retreated, marched again, and swung into shuffle-step and grand right-and-left. Right hand to right hand, left to left, meeting each girl with music and a flair of the hip and passing her on to the rear, smiling. Oh, brightening glance! What a miracle such movement makes of the routine figure! What capricious delight, sharpened by irony—for these are smiles and motions only, in the absence of love, intriguing but empty.

Malice, oh Malice, oh Malice, why did you betray me?

•  •  •

It was midnight at the cottage when Aton, subdued, prepared to retire. The vision had grown, and now it pounded in the shell of his head, tearing his mind apart, dominant in his fatigue. It was the face and form of Malice, smiling, devastating, at once more lovely and more terrible than any spectral phantasm. The flame rippled through her hair, and he wanted her.

“Coquina!” he called, and she came, clad in nightgown, demure. “I cannot sleep tonight. Will you talk to me?”

“I understand,” she said.

“I wonder...” He studied her innocence. But the awful vision was fading as he talked. “Have you ever been in love, Coquina?”

“No.”

“People think of love as something romantic, as delight, wonder. It is supposed to uplift a man, make him strong, make him good. Have you seen this LOE text?” She nodded slightly. “But, oh, they’re wrong. Love is the most awful weapon known to the human race. It can twist a man, wring him up into a tight wad until his blood spills out upon the stone reality, until he shrivels, and is a dry husk. If you ever search for evil, begin with love...I shouldn’t talk this way to a woman.”

“I am a slave,” she said.

He studied her once more, speculatively. “You say you are a slave. But how much of a slave? Is there not a little bit of woman in you, too? When you move in the dance, pretty shell...If I were to tell you to strip naked before me here...”

“Idyllia must protect its property,” she said. “I will not strip.”

Aton smiled. “It was only an example, a case in point. You are not so much a slave. But tell me, Coquina, are you for sale? Could I purchase you and carry you away with me wherever I wished to roam?”

“The slaves are not for sale. They are lent to the patrons, to serve within certain limits.”