"Only a woman," said Phryne. "Eodan, think, if you are able. She
believed you dead, did she not? I heard the gossip in this household
last winter. And Flavius was a man, and there was life in this woman,
enough life to draw you here into the she-wolf's throat to get her
back! What would you have her do?"
Phryne brought down her foot so the floor thudded. Beneath the
boy-cropped dark bangs she regarded Eodan with eyes that crackled. Her
scorn flayed him: "She feels she has betrayed you because, for a while,
she kissed Flavius willingly. She will send you off and remain here,
caged, waiting for him to tire of her and sell her to a brothel and so
at last to destruction and a corpse rotting in the Tiber. She will damn
herself to that, for no other reason than that she remained a living
woman! And you, you rutting, bawling, preening man-thing, you think you
might actually go from her as she asks?"
Phryne snatched up a vase and hurled it shattering at his feet. "Well,
go then," she said. "Go, and the Erinyes have you, for I am done with
you!"
Eodan stared, from one to another of them, for very long. Finally he
said, "What thanks I owed you before, Phryne, can be forgotten beside
this."
He went to Hwicca, stood behind her, pulled her head back against him
and stroked her hair. "Forgive me," he said. "There is much I do not
understand. But you shall come with me, for I have always loved you."
"No," she whispered. "I will not. There is no luck in me. I _will_ not!"
He wondered, with a deep harsh wound in the thought, how wide of the
mark Phryne, too, might have been. But if they lived beyond this
night--if his weird should carry him back to Jutland horizons--he would
have their lifetimes to learn, and to heal.
But first it was to escape.
Boierik's son said calmly, "You are going with us, Hwicca. Let me hear
no more about that."