“What?” he asked. “Should have known what?” When she turned to face him he realized in bewilderment that she was furious at herself, this odd, sly, squat woman, as intensely and unforgivingly as though Pierce/Harlow were her personal responsibility, the holdup all her own absentminded doing. The gray eyes had darkened to the color of asphalt, and the airy morning kitchen smelled like a distant storm. She said, “It is my house. I should have known.”

“Known what?” he demanded again. “That I’d shove my arm onto some preppy bandit’s knife? I didn’t know it myself, how could you?” But she stood shaking her head, looking down at Briseis, who crouched and whined. “Not outside,” she said to the dog. “No more, that is gone. But this is my house.” The first words had fallen as softly as leaves; the last hissed like sleet. “This is my house,” she said.

Farrell said, “We were talking about Ben. About his really being older than you. We were just talking about that.” It seemed to him that he could feel her anger crowding the silence, see it piling up around them both in great drifts and ranges of static electricity. She stared at him, squinting as though he were drawing steadily away from her, and finally showed small white teeth in a cold sigh of laughter.

“He likes me to be old and wicked and clever,” she said. “He likes that. But I feel sometimes like a—what?—like a witch, like a troll queen, one who has enchanted a young knight to be her lover, but he must never hear a certain word spoken. It is nothing magic, just a word out of the kitchen or the stables—but if he hears it, it is all up, he will leave her. Think how she would guard him, not from magicians, but from horseboys, not from beautiful princesses, but from cooks. And what could she do? And whatever she did, how long could it be? Someone would come along and say straw or dishrag to him sooner or later. And what could she do?”