“I don’t want to hear this.”

“And he was there, and he was… he listened to me. And he couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t…” Cyrene looked up, a spasm of angst passing across her face. “It might… it might have been rape.”

Dion stood up so quickly she almost upset the table. “Then it will have to be destroyed. We’ll take our chances without it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

The priestess stared at her for a long while before understanding found her. “Oh.”

“Because… I can’t remember exactly how it all happened, how we got to… but I wasn’t thinking that… I wasn’t thinking that he couldn’t say no.”

“Oh,” Dion repeated. She found she was gripping the table edge. “Oh, but…”

“But what? Or are you going to take Harathes’s line now, Dion? That it’s a monster. It has no rights? I can rape the fucker as much as I like, command it to do all those things that so offend you? And it’s still to blame, for somehow… what, leading me on? And I’m a creature of the Light, so I’m innocent no matter what?”

“That’s not… what I’m saying. That’s not necessarily doctrine.”

Cyrene gave her a hard, strained grin. “So what I’m saying is, you don’t have to decide what to do with Enth, you have to decide what to do with me.”

“No, you know I’d…”

“What? You wouldn’t? No matter what? Because I thought that wasn’t ‘necessarily doctrine.’ Or are you special? You get to say, do you?”

“Cyrene, please.” To her embarrassment, Dion felt that she was about to lose control and start to cry.

“Enth lives. Enth goes with us, unbound and free. And when we’re done, he gets his shape back and we take him home.”

Dion sagged, but at the same time a weight seemed to lift from her. It was a treacherous feeling, though. It was just that she had shirked her responsibilities yet again. She had taken the easy route, avoided confrontation.

How can we ever succeed, when we are so mired in wrong? But she nodded, abominably weary though the morning was still young. “No needling Harathes.”

“I won’t need to. He does that all on his own.”

After a tense day cooped up in Cad Nereg, during which they mostly avoided each other, one of the scouts came to inform Dion that they would be heading out at nightfall. It fell to Cyrene to fetch Enth from his imprisonment.

She approached the locked door with trepidation, turning over her fragmented memories of the previous night. How much had she forced on him? How much had he become her victim? She could not pry apart right and wrong: they were entwined like lovers.