“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t stop me if I were you.” I said it quite quietly. Suddenly I commanded all the attention in the room. I felt myself grow upon it. I pitched my voice softly, though my tone was clear-edged. “I have been used often enough by you. Take that as you wish, madam, it is true of him. I have been frustrated too often. I loathe you, monster, as much as anything has ever been loathed.” His face became mocking. He didn’t believe me. He poured some wine for himself. Suddenly his grin became incredibly twisted. I realized his face had slid before my tears. “You think I am a despicable little foreign-court-slut, honey-tongued and vicious.” The tears scalded down my cheeks. “I hate you,” I cried. My own voice sounded strange in my ears, not the cry of feminine rage it would normally have been but a cry as full of truth and desolation as if I had known what that night would bring me. “I hate you.” I sobbed and ran from the room. My knees felt not as running flesh and bone but as running liquid, and my sobs filled the night. My head was light, it was at a different perspective to my body. The shadows swung away across the marble and hangings and were replaced by the new ones. A strange creature ran across the stairs and then down them before me. As we neared the courtyard and the starlight pushing a silver air-veil down through its open roof the thing’s shadow stretched up, up the steps to catch my feet as itself fled away down before me. My ears were ringing, “The truth!” “The truth!” “The truth!” in clarion echoes swinging far and back again. In the courtyard a score of dark shapes similar to the one before me detached themselves from the shadows around the sleeping multi-fruit tree and the alive white-blue splashing fountain and darted away, scattering the perfume dreaming heavily on the air and pulsing it in waves against me. In panic I ran out, my muscles contracting and dilating as I had known they would, for I believed the shadows pursued me. My third eye saw a stream of them, behind me, all the shadows I had passed, the hanging shadows, the corner shadows, the marble shadows, the long shadows of the steps. But he was still up there, alive and drinking. Indestructible, the strongest nightmare. I dashed across the outer courtyard, full of shadows and starlight covering the paving, so that by the time I reached the gate I had skeins and tangles of shadow and starlight all clinging and tangled round my feet and ankles. Ooldra! Ooldra! (“The truth!” “The truth!”) I must find Ooldra and I would be safe. “Ooldra!” I cried for her arms, the tears were warm on my cheeks for her warmth. “Ooldra.”