“You see, warrior,” she said, “I have obeyed your customs.”

If I had walked in there, tipsy with desire, perhaps I should not have questioned it. Yet now I recognized it was too saccharine a fruit, the web too certain to catch me.

My knife rested against my side. Now we shall see, I thought, my lust gone to black night in me. But I went to her, hot-eyed and eager as she had meant me to.

I did not swallow anything of what was in the cup, but made believe I took some. It had a strange smell, very faint. I should never have noticed it if I had had no warning.

“Your city wine is bitter,” I said to her. “I have never found it so before.”

Her eyes in the mask were steady. She had schooled herself for just such a scene.

“Then drink no more,” she said.

“And waste good liquor?” I pretended again to quaff it down. Then I reached and drew the mask from her face.

She was very white, that she could not conceal, and her mouth flinched. Her eyes had become wide, expectant.

“Demizdor—” I said, as if something had surprised me. Then I let the cup fall, so the doctored wine ran out onto the rugs.

She drew herself into a knot and shrank from me.

I had watched men die enough times to be able to mime it. If she had been calmer, she would have recalled that the hearts of dead men do not pound as mine was doing, that you can see a man breathe, however shallowly. Yet she was so certain she had killed me, she looked for nothing else.

I gazed at her beneath my lids, wondering with a crawling cold what she would do now, and my hand lay dead but ready, next to my knife.

She did not move at first. When she did, the light disturbed a flash of white on her cheeks. She was weeping; I had never witnessed her tears before, even when her lover slew himself, even when I took her as a slave, or Chula raked her with the comb.

She came creeping to me, slowly, on her knees.

Women had told me, once or twice, my lashes were thicker than a girl’s. Certainly the thickness did me a service then, for I could watch Demizdor through them with no great effort, and she not guessing it.

She began to speak in her own tongue, yet my name was mingled in it. She rocked herself to and fro, as the shireens did above their dead men, the lamp catching her, so beautiful that another part of me would have betrayed to her presently that life still lingered in the corpse. But suddenly she leaned and snatched my knife, too quick for me to stop her.

For a moment I supposed she had reasoned out my deceit, and meant to kill me again and be sure of it. But in a splinter of a second so brief that I had barely come up with myself, I saw the direction the knife was going.