“You go too swift to me already,” I said. “I am done with you, and you with me, girl. I’ll put no trust in anything of yours.”

She smiled at that, sneeringly.

“Are you a savage still, Tuvek? Will you throw away your solitary chance because I bring it?”

“Why bring it, then?” I said.

“Why,” she repeated. Something twisted behind her empty eyes and her mouth twisted with it. “Because I can’t be rid of you. Because you have got my soul with child, and even the child is you, and I can never bear it or be free of you.” And she caught my arms and sunk her nails in them and stared into my face.

I said no word to her, having no word to say. What had been in me for her was long silent. Her passion and her anguish confounded me; they were unchanged or had swelled the greater, under the mask of disdain and hate.

“You want me away then,” I said. “Very well. I am ready.”

She let go of me, and turned her head to hide what no longer needed to be hidden, since I had seen it all.

The guard lay at the threshold in his blood. He was the second man she had killed because of me. I took his weapon belt and his mask and donned them, and put on my own cloak and drew up the wolfskin hood to cover my too-recognizable hair. She told me that the way we were to travel was a chilly one, and any seeing us would not marvel that I went hooded. She told me, too, to wrap my uneaten dinner in a packet and store it in my shirt. She said I would be needing food on my journey.

I followed her out into the passage, and along that into one of unpainted stone, dark-lit by far-spaced torches. And all the while I was considering that another turn might bring me onto someone’s sword, that this was a fresh game of the court. Yet I knew, beneath my disquiet, that she had been true to me at last, my city wife, that it was as she had said.

At length we came out on an open rampart of the palace, and I got there my concluding sight of Eshkorek, its craters of blackness and its starry-lighted towers. But then there was a stairway, and we had passed under the angle of it and down, and Eshkorek was gone.

We descended into the cellars, the depths of Erran’s palace.

Twice we met gangs of the Dark Men. The first toiled at a huge arrangement of vats and cisterns, in the dull red luster of the torches; the second group marched out of one dim vista into another, passing us in the gloom as if we were invisible. Only once did we come on bronzes, overseers probably of the slaves. They sat grumbling and dicing by a brazier, nudged each other when they saw us, but offered no challenge. When we had left them behind, I asked Demizdor why this was. She said the underpassages were common night roads to the bedchambers of the princes above.