“It’ll be chillier soon.” He wrapped a fur rug round me, folding it under my chin. Then he set a leather bottle of wine to my lips, and then made me eat meat and two apples. It was a narrow, high-slung chariot, a racing chariot and very draughty, drawn by a brace of birds unusually trained as a team, but I think he would have preferred to ride and was grateful to him for staying with me.

“Is your wife the princess in another chariot?”

“No—My wife is no longer of use to me.”

I shivered beside him.

“You’re colder?”

“Depressed—” I didn’t say horrified, and thought I was being tactful; then realized that Lara’s disappearance was something I’d often willed.

“Depressed? Because my wife has been left behind at the Court? There’s no need to be depressed, I should think she’ll come to neither harm nor good.” He started to pick his teeth with a dagger. The chariot jolted high and I hoped he’d cut his tongue. At once I cheered up. The wish showed me I was throwing off the old, muzzy weakness of irrational gratitude.

Then I realized he was looking at me. “When I said she was no longer of use to me—and she isn’t, one doesn’t need a decorative, high-born wife to be mistress of one’s household and hostess at one’s parties when the whole situation’s about to dissolve with a burst into war—you thought I meant I’d got rid of her?”

I could only stare at him.

He said, watching me and the quirk at his mouth-corner deepening, “That chase when you thought you’d found out something I would kill you for knowing—You found out something of a similar danger—You saw a dying woman, blue with poison, and heard her blame me. You remembered the illness of your friend, the hostage Smahil, on the hot plains?”

Indeed, I had been picturing the pink princess Lara, blue as 394

Smahil and that discarded mistress had been.

“I saw no connection,” I began to say, but it came out in a whisper. “You may have poisoned her—But the surgeon said Smahil’s illness came from a bite, like a snake’s—”

“Then let it rest,” he said, continuing to pick his teeth. “No, I did not poison Smahil. But it is strange that you did not think so.”

I realized that a real threat had passed over me. This only confirmed all that I’ve guessed. With a bite or scratch, accidental or vicious, he can loose his own deadly poison through the system of the other and higher form of human being.