Distressing. But he was used to it; in fact he enjoyed it—enjoyed, really, her.

“Morning,” Lurine said to him, then saw the Dominus McComas, whom she did not like; she wrinkled her nose and her freckles writhed: all the pale red, that of her hair, her skin, her lips, all twisted in aversion, and she, too, bared her teeth, back at him. Only her teeth were tiny and regular, and made not to grind—as for instance the prehistoric uncooked seeds—but to neatly sever.

Lurine had biting teeth. Not the massive chewing kind.

She, he knew, nipped. Knew? Guessed, rather. Because he had not really ever come near her; he kept a distance between them.

The ideology of the Servants of Wrath connected with the Augustinian view of women; there was fear involved, and then of course the dogma got entangled with the old cult of Mani, the Albigensian Heresy of Provincal France, the Catharists. To them, flesh and the world had been evil; they had abstained. But their poets and knights had worshiped women, had deified them; the domina, so enticing, so vital… even the mad ones, the dominae of Carcassonne who had carried their dead lovers’ hearts in small jeweled boxes. And the—was it merely insane, or rather more perverted?—Catharist knights who had actually carried in enameled boxes their mistresses’ dried dung… it had been a cult ruthlessly wiped out by Innocent III, and perhaps rightly so. But—

For all its excesses, the Albigensian knight-poets had known the worth of women; she was not man’s servant and not even merely his “weak rib,” the side of him who had been so readily tempted. She was—well, a good question; as he got a chair for Lurine and poured her coffee, he thought: Some supreme value lies in this slight, freckled, pale, red-haired, horse-riding girl of twenty.