"I think I know them," he murmured to Rudel. I'm afraid this is bad."

"I didn't think it was particularly good," Rudel replied tartly. "You cut left, I go right?" They had swords, useless against archers. Blaise could think of no better plan. The streets were empty here. They were a long way from the market. They would have to hope uncertain light might make the bowmen miss.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You were better off being angry with me."

"Not really. Bad for the heart and liver, anger. That's what my father's doctor says. Live a placid life, he advises. I think I might try that next."

Poised, preparing to spring as soon as Rudel moved, Blaise briefly wondered why none of the archers had spoken a word or even made a gesture of command.

Then, when four more men strode quickly out from the alley and came up behind them, he understood. Why give commands when all you want to do is freeze your victims long enough for their executioners to slaughter them? He recognized one of these men, too. It was his last clear thought.

"A placid life, that's the thing," he heard Rudel repeat dreamily. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his slender, aristocratic friend crumple to his knees, just before the swinging blow from a wooden staff knocked him senseless too.

When he came to, it was with a headache so brutal the room lurched sickeningly as soon as he opened his eyes. He closed them quickly. What remained, as consciousness lingered tenuously, was an awareness that he was lying on something unexpectedly soft and there was a scent surrounding him. He knew that scent, it had associations for him, a great many. And an instant later, as full awareness returned, Blaise realized where he must be. His eyes snapped open with the shock and he twisted his head around to see. The movement made him immediately nauseated and he gasped with pain.

"I do regret that," a woman's voice said, "but I had to advise them you might not come willingly."

"Why bother?" Blaise gasped. He couldn't see her. She was behind him. It was only when he tried, with another painful effort, to turn his body that he realized that his limbs were bound. He was on her bed, which explained the softness, and his hands and feet were tied to the four bedposts. The never-forgotten scent of her perfume was all around him. "Why didn't you just have me killed in the street?"

"What?" said Lucianna Delonghi, moving at last into his field of vision. "And deprive myself of this pleasure?"

He had not seen her for more than a year. She was clad in silk so diaphanous she might as well have been naked to his sight. The glitter of jewellery was all about her: a diadem in her hair, sapphires at each ear, diamonds and sea pearls around her throat. There were rings on her long fingers, gold and silver or ivory at each wrist and one spectacular, memorable pendant suspended between her breasts, red like the fire crackling on the hearth. She liked jewellery, he remembered, she liked fires in her rooms even when it wasn't cold, she liked cords and knots and toys in her bed.

His clothing and boots had been taken away; he was clad only in an undergarment that shielded his sex. He tried again, without success, to move his hands and realized, with a kind of despair, that what he was feeling, as much as fury and the several layers of pain, was the returning of desire, inexorable as the tides of the sea.

She was so beautiful it caused a kind of constriction around his heart. She was an incarnated vision from the legend of the paradise that waited for corans who died in battle. His mouth was dry. He looked at her, in her shining, long-limbed near-nakedness, and the memory of their love-making two summers ago, her body intertwined with his, legs wrapped high around him or straddling his waist as she rode above, her fingernails scoring his shoulders and arms, the eloquent, striving, backwards arch of her throat when she came to her culmination—it was with him again as if happening now, enveloping as the scent in the room. He became aware, helplessly, that his excitement would be visible. Lucianna, glancing downward, noted that. She had never been slow to observe such things. She looked away briefly, a small, satisfied smile curling about her lips.

"How sweet," she murmured, in the nuanced, husky voice. She moved out of his sight for a moment and then came back. "And all along I thought you left because you were angry, because you had lost your desire for me." She looked down upon him from the side of the bed. "I don't like it when men leave me, Blaise. Did I never tell you that?" There was a knife in her fingers now, taken from the bedside table. It too had gems in the hilt, rubies the colour of blood. She began to play with it, moving towards the foot of the bed, biting her lower lip as if thinking of something, chasing a memory, and then idly stroking the blade, as if unaware that she was doing so, along the sole of his foot. She twisted it suddenly and Blaise felt the point break the skin, drawing blood. He had been waiting for that.

"I left because you wanted me to, Lucianna. Do not pretend anything else." It was difficult to be coherent amid both the aftermath of the blow and the increasingly intense reality of desire. Her scent was all around him, pushing clear thought even further away. She continued to move about the bed, the curves and planes of her body lit by the fire's glow. He said, "Had you wanted to hold me you know you could have done so. I would not have been able to refuse, even after Engarro."

"Ah," she said, stopping now to look directly at him. Her skin was pale, flawless; it was still a shock sometimes to realize how young she was. "But you would have wanted to refuse, wouldn't you, my dear? You would have stayed only against your better judgment, tangled in my dark toils… is that not how it would have been, Blaise?"

He swallowed with difficulty. She was her father's daughter; the subtlest woman he had ever known. She was also dancing the knife upwards now, along the inside of his thigh. "I need a drink, Lucianna," he said.

"I know what you need. Answer my question."

Blaise turned his head away, and then back, to look her full in the eyes. "As it happens, you are wrong. I was even more innocent than you knew. Rudel tried to warn me—I didn't want to listen. I thought, if you can believe it, that you were only the way you were because your father had forced you to be his tool, an instrument of policy. I thought you could still love truly if you made a free choice, and I thought you might actually give that love to me." He felt the bitterness beginning to come back, step by step, mingled, as ever, with desire. "I was even more a fool than I might have appeared."

It occurred to him, incongruously, even as he was speaking, that Ariane de Carenzu had said something very like this to him in a different bed in summer, about choices and the paths of love. It also occurred to him, belatedly, that there was something more than a little absurd about this exchange; he had been brought here to die. He wondered where her husband was. Borsiard d'Andoria was probably waiting for her outside the city walls. It had been the corans of Miraval who had brought him here, though; a strange union this one had turned out to be. When one's enemies take counsel together, the proverb ran in Gorhaut, one wants the wings of a bird to fly, or the strength of lions to fight. He had neither at the moment. He was bound and helpless, head ringing like a temple bell, on Lucianna's bed.

"Do what you want," he said tiredly as she remained motionless, saying nothing. Her dark eyes, shadings carefully applied above and below, were wide but unreadable. The pupils were larger than they should have been. She had taken her drugs, he realized. They heightened her pleasures. He wondered if she used them all the time now. He wondered how any mortal woman could possibly be so beautiful.