His heavy mobile brows rose slightly. “Am I to understand the young gentleman attacked you—and you weren’t willing?” My rage and shame made me gulp a little before I could sweeten my plaintive expression again and go on. Each hour this morning had deepened my humiliation to degradation. They are not sentences I should have to listen to, and if only I could be myself and not the creature of my roles they would not be spoken to me.

“No,” I said, “Smahil did nothing. All this—” I raised my arms a little to display their scratches more dramatically and realized I was still wearing Smahil’s cloak. That was a mistake, when I had walked out stating that I would never have anything else to do with him, but Narra could take it back—“All this was done to me by Iren.”

I began to cry, which was a very good touch and came more or less naturally, I was so wrought up.

“Iren? Your thin friend?”

“Yes—the girl who told you the rigmarole,” I had to interrupt my sobbing to say crossly.

“Don’t cry,” he said soothingly but rather automatically. That’s the trouble with a man like that, who’s already known so many women that feminine tears are no longer touching. “Here, take this broach and stab your dress together. Why did she do it?”

“She hates me,” I snuffled.

“Couldn’t you have retaliated? You let her come to me so very neat and tidy.”

I looked suspiciously up at him, but by “you let her come” he didn’t mean what I meant. “It was so sudden,” I said. I wept again and chattered my teeth. Nothing was so important as being allowed to stay with him. As I fastened my dress with the pin of his huge copper and malachite broach, more like a dagger than a broach, I let the edges fall back enough to let him see a glimpse of my white flesh—my pale tan left me long ago—curving firmly up and out, and hoped he was looking.

As soon as I’d finished pinning, I found a large slab of bread

and meat being pushed at me. I took it, more to defend my face from it than because I wanted it, and began manoeuvering my jaw round it.

I ate as slowly as I could.

He ate too—the food had been in a pouch slung by the bottle—I had thought generals could afford richer food—and stared ahead at the stupid trees.

“What a magnificent bird yours is,” I said, anything to keep his attention.

“Thoroughbred. Yours isn’t?”