Enth got the other end of the chair leg, nipping it from the air in mid-swing, and Harathes made the mistake of contesting possession of it. In that moment, with his enemy’s position fixed through their mutual hold on the weapon, Enth dragged the man to him and got his gray strangler’s hands on Harathes’s throat.

Cyrene opened her mouth, although she could not have foretold who she would be addressing nor what she might have said, when Dion arrived.

She entered in an explosion of golden light, disc of Armes upraised. The impact spun Harathes across the floor hard enough to grind through the back of his shirt, and slammed Enth all the way across the room, leaving him an angular bundle shrieking and cringing away from the holy radiance.

Dion’s face was fixed in an expression of horror. She ignored the groaning Harathes and advanced on Enth, the flame of her faith burning him with every step.

“Hold! Dion, enough!” Cyrene told her.

The priestess bared her teeth, and it was plain that the desire to smite Enth to the fullest extent of her faith was very strong in her, if not for justice then as a salve for all the frustrations and disappointments that she had waded through to get this far. But she held: at Cyrene’s call, she held.

“Kill it!” Harathes roared. “It raped Cyrene, for the Light’s sake! Destroy it.”

Dion was not taking her eyes off the crouched form of Enth. “Get Penthos,” she snapped, and then, “Harathes, find Penthos, now.”

The warrior spluttered a little, but then stumbled off to do her bidding.

“Well?” Dion prompted.

There was no real way round the question that would raise Cyrene in the eyes of her companions. “There was no rape.”

Dion let her glance flick from Enth to Cyrene and back, the one stark naked, the other with only a blanket clutched to her for modesty. “Tell me nothing happened. Tell me this is something other than what it seems. Tell me it’s a plot of Darvezian, even,” and then, into the deepening silence, “Tell me something.”

“I…” Cyrene had no lies for her.

Harathes burst back into the room, as though he expected to find some villainy part-performed, and with a rather worn-down-looking Penthos at his back.

“What needs burning?” the wizard demanded. “This joker tells me there’s an emergency.” It was plain that being hauled from his sleep by Harathes had not found favor with him.

“Do your strictures on the creature Enth still hold?” Dion asked him.

Penthos looked around the room blearily, seeing the various states of undress and drawing no conclusions whatsoever. “Of course,” he said, mildly insulted. “And will do for all time, unless I undo ’em. Was that it?”