“Have you, warrior?” Kotta said. “I have dressed the wound, but she has fever, your slave. If you take her to your tent and lie with her, you kill her. The city women are for the most part not strong, and she will not bear it.”

“Then I will not lie with her,” I said. “She shall stay here.”

Kotta’s eyes, seeing nothing, seeming to see everything, unnerved me.

“This is a new sickness,” she said. But, as I ducked inside the tent, she added, “I am thinking Tathra has not met her son this night.”

“Her husband will be with Tathra,” I answered. “I will go tomorrow.”

It was dull in the healer’s tent, a tan smoky light. Demizdor lay on the rugs, and her head was turned from me. I saw she was unmasked; only a foam of her bright hair had washed across her face to hide it. My pulses ran so fast the tent leaped before my eyes, but I went to her quietly.

“Demizdor,” I said, “when you are well, you shall come to my hearth, but you need fear nothing.”

She did not look at me, but the blanket over her breasts moved more swiftly than it had before I drew near.

“Demizdor,” I said, “I have taken the woman back to her father. My other two wives will not trouble you. I tell you now, when the fighting is done and we are in the summer camping, I will wed you. You shall be my first wife in Chula’s stead.”

Very softly she asked, “How shall I support this matchless honor?”

The adder was still under the flower, I saw. I did not reply. I lifted the swathe of blond silk from her cheeks, and turned her face gently with my hand. Her eyelids flickered as if she were sleepy; she would not look at me.

“You shall have a city mask to wear,” I said. “Not the silver deer, the other has had that. I have a better one, a silver lynx with amber ornaments for the hair. And I will get you fine weave from the Moi. You will find it kinder on your skin.”

“So,” she murmured, “why do you bother to woo me, warrior? I am your property. You may use me at any time you wish.”

Then I knew somehow—maybe from her eyes and from her talk, which was not like the cold, harsh talk I had had from her before—that she was in the same net with me.

I leaned and kissed her. For all she was ill, her mouth was cool and sweet. She caught my arms and held me to her. I had never dreamed that such a thing could make me glad.

Yet when I let her go, she turned from me and hid her face again, muttering in her own tongue, the language of the cities, which now I could not understand. Her liking for me must have been seething in her some while, fermenting against her will into the wine I had just tasted. It did not occur to me then that it could shame her to love me, shame her blood and her pride, make her doubt her reason almost, that she should hunger for one on whom her kind spit.