The horse was still, also. He stood there, breathing and shaking his head softly, as if embarrassed by his wildness before. He picked up his hooves as though to examine them or the sensation of their being on solid ground.

He had voided the muck they had given him all along the flats; the dung was greenish and had an acid smell. Maybe it was after all that this voiding had cured him, not any mage-craft of mine.

I was shaking as if I needed food or a woman. Then the shaking went off and I looked around about me.

Erran’s courtiers were at a loss. Some had been cheering me, I vaguely recalled, for my berserk dash at the stallion’s head, but this was beyond their scope.

The golden bear had wandered a little to the front of them, trying to puzzle it out, doubtless.

I slid off the stallion and shouted for one of the gawking grooms to come and cover him up, for his sweat was still steaming in the icy wind.

I walked straight to Demizdor’s gold bear. I was no longer angry or bemused. I was precise, knowing what came next.

I did not carry a sword out in the park, just a knife for cutting rope or hard earth from the horses’ hooves. I stuck the knife to its hilt in the bear’s belly, and watched him wriggle and stagger and try to pull it free, and finally roll down in the broken snow, and die.

In the cities, a bronze-mask does not kill one of his lord’s gold men.

That is the way of it, with no going around.

I suppose I had turned crazy, having endured the cage when I should have refused it, now refusing when I should have endured. Like many a man before me, I acted at the wrong moment and in the wrong way, because I ought to have acted sooner and had not.

My wrath was finished. I was only adamant, aware I had lost everything, life, too, most likely, and had no more to cast away.

I was taken back to Erran’s palace and flung down head first into my room of apricot windows. Any weapon here was removed, the ring-key appropriated; I was locked in.

Presently Erran visited me with three silver captains.

“I am disappointed in you,” he said. “You are a fool.”

I said, “I have upset your plans because you made me a toy for idiots. You should have judged me better. You are the fool, my lord.”

“We shall see,” he said.

He walked about before me, relaxed and easy, as if he need watch for nothing. Obviously, it would not serve me to kill him; there were too many who could step into his boots.

He picked up one of the books that lay on the table. He said, “You have acquired quite a taste for city things—literature, music, love. . . . Some while ago, when I got you from Kortis’ servile clutches, I think I told you how your healing process fascinated and intrigued me. Because you have transgressed, because you must be punished for it, I have decided to learn thereby the answer to my question. You can be of no other use to me.”