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away, leaving the three of us in silence by the fire. I shrugged.
    “That was way out of line, Will,” said Orgos, his voice cold, his eyes boring into mine. “You’re lucky she didn’t put a dagger through your lungs.”
    There was another long and awkward pause as he refused to let me out of his gaze.
    “I would have,” said Mithos. His eyes never rose from the fire and his tone was soft, almost thoughtful. But he meant it. Hit with a wave of fear—fear of Renthrette, of Mithos’s words and, even more, fear of the hint of agreement in Orgos’s dark eyes—I struggled to my feet and blundered out into the night air.
    It had been a stupid and mean-spirited thing to do and I was far from clear what I had been trying to achieve: trying to make her look slightly stupid for ridiculing me, I suppose. And I was trying to make myself look shrewd at having put together the half-clues I had been given over the past few months. Maybe I had hoped she would take it all with a half smile and a wink, impressed, even touched that I might give her background so much consideration. Or maybe I was just tryingto claim a little insight because this place made me feel so stupid and lost. I had no idea how close to the mark I had been, but the fact that they all knew what I had been shooting at suggested I hadn’t been far off. Suddenly the cleverness of my story fell away and I glimpsed something of its awful truth. If she had been through something like the picture I painted, Mithos was right: it was a wonder she hadn’t killed me on the spot. To bring it all up to score a cheap point at her expense . . . Standing out in the cold, windy darkness and the silence of the mountain, my motives looked pretty shoddy.
    I had convinced myself that I was no longer really interested in Renthrette. Even when I had been, it had been pure, unmitigated lust, as she had been quick to point out. Hadn’t it? There were times I had begun to wonder, but they had passed quickly enough. I had felt quite sure that given the choice between a lifetime of friendship and one night with her under the sheets followed by no relationship of any sort, I would have taken the latter without hesitation. The patent spitefulness of what I had done made me wonder, with something of a start, what my feelings for her actually were. It was an unnerving thought.
    Me and Renthrette? You must be joking. There might be—in fact, I know there are—some men who jump at the chance to be spurned by a woman, their feelings trampled and their poetry mocked, but not me. Not Will Anything-for-a-quiet-life Hawthorne. The Bill Hawthorne who had patronized the Eagle in Cresdon and who lived for beer and cards, the dashing apprentice actor and minor playwright, had a formula for love which ran as follows: flirtation, seduction, consummation, satisfaction, evasion. Afterward, when one is gathered with one’s mates over a few pints of Old Seymore’s chestnut ale, the cycle is concluded with a little recollection and narration. All that hearts and flowers stuff was merely part of steps one or two, and anyone who thought otherwise was doomed to a life of quite unnecessary pain. That was strictly for the birds.
    And as if on cue, one appeared. It perched on the slab of rock across the cave mouth only ten feet or so from where I stood and looked at me in silence. A moment passed and I realized that it was doing none of that shifting, twitching, head tilting stuff that birds do. It was quite still, its eyes fixed on me.
    The moon was riding high and three quarters full, casting a pale glow on the rocky landscape, which flared softly and then faded as clouds passed overhead. Suddenly, the sky cleared and the night shapesgrew harder edges as the moon brushed the track and the crags around it with a watery silver light. The bird’s distinctive blackish green plumage sparkled metallically and I recognized it: It was a starling.
    While this thought was registering in my head, I caught movement