Rain rattled against some window I could not see, perhaps behind one of the wall hangings. Smahil laughed softly. My belt fell, but there were his arms instead. He ripped off my soaked tights, tearing them. My skin appeared lavender in the dimness of the room. I shivered.

With a large, coarse towel he scrubbed a warmth glowing into me.

“Cija, my Cija—”

He lifted me, caressing me, and carried me over to a kind of broad cupboard door which he opened with his foot. There were several around the room. Inside the cupboard was a wide, soft bed covered with a pelt of some kind on which he laid me. He shut the door and we were alone in the cupboard bed, its privacy freshened by a breeze bearing raindrops through the little window in the wall-side. Smahil flung aside his shirt, belt and trousers and gripped me violently against him.

Three other young officers share this room with Smahil. I met them when they came off duty that evening. I was wearing some clothes which Smahil happened to have here, a plungenecked jacket shimmering with gold threads and buttoning with gold dragons, a stiff, short, gold skirt over transparent trousers.

“I’m sure Terez would prefer your other mistresses not to wear them.”

“Nonsense, you look so beautiful! Oh, Gods, how tired I am of gold in gold, eternally conscious in every fibre of nothing but its own hard flamboyance, like the mythical coin-floor of the Northern king—You point the difference—You have always pointed every difference. Damn you^Cija, you are mine now.”

I reminded him that he is harbouring the murderess.

“You are never going back to that monster’s headquarters,” he said.

“You’re very melodramatic—”

“Because you’re no longer the child whose body drives me insane, from whom I want never to be separated, and who behaves as if I were an interesting rock she passed one day and thought about never again except when it made her—because I know something about our Mighty General which it would be more than my life’s worth even to think of too often—because I know if he ever remembered his hostage Cija he’d have her at once—”

“Do you think I—” I cried.

“Yes, I do think you—” he mimicked. He kissed me hungrily. He is never particularly gentle. He really dislikes me, I’m sure.