He tried once more to swallow. "I would have thought the honour of your family, if nothing else, would preclude torturing a man who never did or meant you harm." I sound like a lawyer making a plea, he thought sourly. "If you must kill me, for your own reasons or your husband's, then have done with it, Lucianna." He closed his eyes again.

"You really aren't in a position to make requests, are you, Blaise?" Her tone had sharpened. "Or to comment unpleasantly on either my father's or my husband's courses of action." He felt the knife point in his thigh. He refused to react. He kept his eyes closed; it seemed to be his only option of denial. That, and silence. Once, in Mignano, she had known he was displeased about something she had said at a banquet. Her woman had come to lead him to her chambers much later than usual that night. When they arrived, he had seen why. There had been easily a hundred candles of different shapes and sizes burning around the bed where Lucianna had lain, naked in the flicker and dance of all that light like an offering in some temple of dead and forgotten gods. She had been bound, wrist and ankle, as he was now. She had waited for the woman to leave that night and had said, "You are unhappy. You have no cause to be. Do with me as you will." It had not been, he remembered noting even at the time, an apology. She was not a woman who apologized. Her body had glistened and shimmered with oil as she twisted slowly to left and right in the blaze of the candles, not smiling, her eyes enormous. Blaise had stood above the bed, looking down upon her for a long time. Slowly he had removed his own clothing as she lay bound beneath him in a dazzle of light, watching… and then he had untied all the knots that bound her before lowering himself to the bed.

Lucianna had laughed, he remembered. He had thought then it might be from a certain kind of relief. Now, living the moment again, he heard that laughter differently, as genuine amusement at his innocence: a war-trained Gorhaut coran in decadent Portezza, coupling with the least innocent woman in the world. Young as she was, Lucianna seemed never to have been young. The bitterness was in him again; there might always be that bitterness. Bertran de Talair, he thought suddenly, had never managed to move past what had happened to him in love when he was young.

She was silent still. Blaise kept his head averted, his eyes closed. He felt the knife blade withdraw and a moment later heard Lucianna say, "I thought, back then… I remember thinking towards the end of that summer, before Engarro was killed… that I had met you too late." An odd note in her voice. But that was not what finally caused Blaise to open his eyes. He had heard another sound, from the far end of the room, and felt the faintest thread of a draft across his skin.

When he looked up, Lucianna was turned away from him towards the door, and following her glance Blaise saw Quzman of Arimonda standing there, white teeth bared in a luxurious smile, a blade in his hand, long as a small sword.

Lucianna glanced over and down at Blaise for an instant, her eyes wide and black with the drug; then she turned her back on him entirely and moved towards the fire, leaving only empty space between Blaise and the Arimondan who had come to end his life. It had indeed been corans of Miraval who had brought him here; the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

"Staked out like a horse thief," said Quzman with relish. "Were this Arimonda I would have him in the desert beside a hive of blood ants, and I would pour honey myself over his private parts and eyes and leave him there." Lucianna said nothing. She was gazing into the depths of the fire.

"How fortunate for me that this is not Arimonda," said Blaise stonily. He was not going to give this man any more satisfaction than the fact of his death would offer. "Land of cowards and incestuous catamites."

The Arimondan's smile never altered. "You are foolish," he said. "You should not be goading me. Not with your sex easy to my blade. Your life ends here. My brother's ghost is hungry for your shade in the afterworld and it is in my hands whether your passage to the god is easy or very hard."

"No it isn't," said Lucianna quietly, her back to both of them. "Do what you came to do, but quickly."

"What I came to do? I came for an execution," said the Arimondan, the smile deepening. "And perhaps for some pleasure upon his body when he is dead."

"You presume too greatly," said Lucianna, still not turning from the fire. Her voice was toneless, very low. The Arimondan laughed and moved towards the bed.

"A severe penalty it does seem," said Blaise to Lucianna, dragging his eyes away from the man with the blade towards the woman who had taught him all he knew about certain dimensions of joy and pain, "for having met you too late. I do hope this pleases your new husband, and perhaps even the next one."

She made a small sound; he thought it might be a kind of laugh. He didn't have time to decide, though, because just then, as he turned back to face his death the way a man does, with dignity and an acceptance of the infinite, eternal power of the god, the door opened again and, with utter stupefaction, Blaise saw his brother's wife step into the room behind the Arimondan.

"If you use that blade," he heard Rosala announce in her crispest voice, "I swear by holy Corannos I will have you brought into the presence of the countess of Arbonne before this night is over, and I will not rest until you are both dealt with for breaching a truce with murder."

And then, with that spoken, as her own fierce inner momentum seemed to slow, all three of them staring at her, she registered for the first time—he actually saw it happen—who was lying on the bed, and she said, in a voice so completely different it could almost have made one laugh:

"Blaise?"

It was Lucianna who laughed. "How touching. A reunion," she murmured, turning from the fire. She was still holding her own jewelled blade. "The wandering children of Garsenc in the den of the dark lady. Someone will surely make a ballad of this."

"I think not," said Quzman of Arimonda. "Since both of them must now be slain."

His smile had gone. He took another step towards Blaise. "Now," said Lucianna Delonghi loudly, very clearly. The inner doors on either side of the bed burst open. Through them, swords drawn, rushed half a dozen corans in the countess's colours, followed quickly by Roban, the chancellor or Arbonne, and then more slowly by a black-haired, sumptuously dressed, darkly handsome man. Last of all, moving with extreme caution, a compress held to one side of his head, came Rudel Correze.

The corans surrounded the Arimondan. One of them seized the dagger from him. Quzman's gaze, bleak and malevolent, did not move from Lucianna's face now. Returning a brief, glacially patrician glance, she said, "You made an error and you are a crude, unpleasant man. The one might have been forgivable were the other not also the case. And both things, I might add, are equally true of the duke of Miraval, whom you serve in this matter."

She said that last very clearly as well. Blaise saw the handsome man who was her father smile thinly as Roban the chancellor winced. It was becoming slowly clear to Blaise that he was not, for the moment at least, about to die. That Lucianna had set this whole thing up as a trap for… whom? Quzman? Urté? Both? He looked to his left and saw Rudel leaning against a bedpost for support, gazing down on him with an expression that might have managed to be amused if his face had not been quite so green.

"If you do not stop standing there uselessly and cut these cords," Blaise snarled through clenched teeth, "I will not be responsible for what I do to you later."

"To me?" his friend replied with feeling. "What can you possibly do beyond what has been done already? I have just been half killed by corans of Miraval in the interests of a ploy by my cursed cousin Lucianna that had nothing at all to do with me." But he did begin, moving gingerly, to cut Blaise's bonds.