You look down! Does my language upset you? Are you offended? Have I violated your ears with my intemperate, soldiers" words?"

"Perrund, you must believe that I am sorry for what happened to you…"

"But why should you be sorry? It was not your fault. You were not there. You assure me that you disapprove, so why should you be sorry?"

"I would be bitter in your place."

"In my place? How could that be, DeWar? You are a man. In the same place you would be, if not one of the violators, one of those who looked away, or remonstrated with their comrades afterwards."

"If I was the age you were then, and a pretty youth-"

"Ah, so you can share what happened to me. I see. That is good. I am comforted."

"Perrund, say anything you want to me. Blame me if it will help, but please believe I…"

"Believe you what, DeWar? I believe you feel sorry for me, but your sympathy stings like salty tears in a wound because I am a proud ghost, you see. Oh yes, a proud ghost. I am an enraged shade, and a guilty one, because I have come to admit to myself that I resent what was done to my family because it hurt me, because I was raised to expect everything to be done for me.

"I loved my parents and my sisters in my own way, but it was not a selfless love. I loved them because they loved me and made me feel special. I was their baby, their chosen beloved. Through their devotion and protection I learned none of the lessons that children usually learn, about the way the world really works and the way that children are used within it, until that single day, that one morning when every fond illusion I held was torn from me and the brutal truth forced into me.

"I had come to expect the best of everything, I had come to believe that the world would always treat me as I had been treated in the past and that those I loved would be there to love me in return. My fury at what happened to my family is partly caused by that expectation, that happy assumption, being defiled and obliterated. That is my guilt."

"Perrund, you must know that should not be a cause for guilt. What you feel is what any decent child feels when they realise the selfishness they have felt when they were younger still. A selfishness that is only natural to children, especially those who have been loved so intensely. The realisation occurs, it is felt briefly and then it is rightly set aside. You have not been able to set yours aside because of what those men did to you, but-"

"Oh, stop, stop! Do you think I do not know all this? I know it, but I am a ghost, DeWar! I know, but I cannot feel, I cannot learn, I cannot change. I am stuck, I am pinned to that time by that event. I am condemned."

"There is nothing I can do or say that can alter what happened to you, Perrund. I can only listen, only do what you will let me do."

"Oh, do I persecute you? Do I make you a victim now, DeWar?"

"No, Perrund."

"No, Perrund. No, Perrund. Ah, DeWar, the luxury of being able to say No."

He went, half kneeling, half on his haunches by her then, putting himself very near to her but still not touching her, his knee near hers, his shoulder by her hip, his hands within grasp of hers. He was close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to feel the heat from her body, close enough to feel the hot breath that laboured from her nose and her half-open mouth, close enough for one hot tear to hit her clenched fist and spatter even tinier droplets on to his cheek. He kept his head bowed, and crossed his hands on his raised knee.

The bodyguard DeWar and the court concubine Perrund were in one of the palace's more secret places. It was an old hiding hole in one of the lower levels, a space the size of a cupboard which led off one of the public rooms in the original noble house which had formed the basis of the greater building.

Retained more for sentimental than practical reasons by the first monarch of Tassasen and through a kind of indifference by subsequent rulers, the rooms which had seemed so grand to that first king had long since been judged too small and mean of proportion by future generations and were nowadays used only for storage.

The tiny room had been used to spy on people. It was a listening post. Unlike the alcove DeWar had burst from to attack the Sea Company assassin, it was not built for a guard but for a noble, so that he could sit there, with only a small hole in the stonework between him and the public room — that hole perhaps hidden by a tapestry or painting — and listen to what his guests were saying about him.

Perrund and DeWar had come here after she had asked him to show her some of the parts of the palace he had discovered on the wanderings which she knew he took. Shown this tiny room, it had suddenly reminded her of the secret compartment in their house in which her parents had concealed her when the town was sacked during the war of succession.

"If I knew who those men were, DeWar, would you be my champion? Would you avenge my honour?" she asked him.

He looked up into her eyes. They looked extraordinarily bright in the dim light of the hidden room. "Yes," he said. "If you knew who they were. If you could be sure. Would you ask me to?"

She shook her head angrily. She wiped away her tears with her hand. "No. The ones I could identify are dead now, anyway."

"Who were they?"

"King's men," Perrund said, looking up and away from DeWar, as though telling the small hole where the ancient noble had thought to eavesdrop on his guests. "The old King's men. One of his baron commanders and his friends. They had been in charge of the siege and the taking of the town. Apparently we were favoured. Whoever was their spy had told them my father's house held the town's most comely maidens. They came to us first, and my father tried to offer them money to leave us alone. They took that badly. A merchant offering a noble man money!" She looked down at her lap, where her good hand, still damp with tears, lay beside her wasted hand in its sling. "I knew all their names, eventually. All the noble ones, at any rate. They died during the rest of the course of the war. I tried to tell myself that I felt good when I heard about the first few dying, but I did not. I could not. I felt nothing. That was when I knew I was dead inside. They had planted death in me."

DeWar waited a long time before he said, softly, "And yet you live, and you saved the life of the one who ended the war and brought about a better law. There is no right of-"

"Ah, DeWar, there is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but…"

"And yet," DeWar insisted, "still you are alive. And there are people who have the highest regard for you and feel their lives have been the better for having known you. Did you not say you had found a type of peace and contentment here, in the palace?"

"In the harem of the chief," she said, though with something more like measured disdain than the fury that had been in her voice earlier. "As a cripple kept on out of sympathy in the collection of mates for the foremost male of the pack."

"Oh, come. We may act like animals, men especially. But we are not animals. If we were there would not be the shame in acting so. We act otherwise, too, and set a better marker. Where is love in what you say of where you are now? Do you not feel even slightly loved, Perrund?"