The boy leaned his head back against the wall. “It’s a feeling,” he said. “I feel . . . unhappy.”

Sympathetic, she touched his forehead. He reached up and brought her wrist down to his mouth to kiss it. “How long have I been here?” he asked. “I don’t know why I came.”

“To kill me.”

He frowned. “I forgot everything you said. Explain it to me once more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your soldiers.”

“I have no soldiers.”

His grip tightened on her wrist, and there was some tired danger in his voice when he said, “That’s not true. They lit fires at the entrance of the tunnel, until the air was full of smoke.”

“God has given us many laws. Some are cruel.”

“Is it against the law for me to be here?”

“The laws aren’t my concern,” she said. “They don’t apply to me.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I’ve been so poor.

I mean in my mind. My fathers and my mothers didn’t need to think to fill their world. It was full already—horses, dogs, freedom, snow, things to do, feelings. I never had those things. So instead I want to learn to think. But I don’t want to learn something and have it not be true.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the bishop. “I am not allowed to lie.”

The boy stroked the cat and looked unhappy.

“There’s no reason for me to be humble,” she said. “I am the bishop of Charn.”

“Yes. There is a part of you I don’t like so well. But there is another part.” He put the cat aside, and then he reached to pull her down beside him and comb the hair out of her face. He combed his fingers through her hair and ran his thumb along the underside of her ear, admiring the softness of the skin, the delicacy of the black hairs that grew along her cheek. “You’re so different from my sisters,” he said.

She made a face, but he couldn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to him if he had. He couldn’t read the language of expressions. He couldn’t understand it. She lay down beside him and bent to take one of his testicles into her mouth, while he wrapped his hand around her tail, stroking the hair at the base of her spine. She licked carefully along his underside, using a technique described in Angkhdt 710, while he leaned back happily. “So different,” he said.

She laughed, releasing him. “I hope so. I’ve heard about your sisters. Muscles like steel and monstrous teeth . . .” She dragged her incisors along his inner thigh.

He grabbed her by the neck, pushing her face into his leg. She tried to twist away, but he held tight.

“Stop hurting me!” she cried. “Can’t you tell you’re hurting me?”

“I can’t feel it.”

“Let go!”

Outside, night was falling, and spring rain. Lightning licked the hills around the city. It never really stopped; the silk-lined room was never absolutely dark.