“Have I treated you worse than you have treated me?”
(He fought back an impulse to a retort that would bring angers.) “I do not know that I follow all you mean.”
(There was only night-shine from the window, she emboldened at knowing he could not learn her fullest thought.) “Will you still say you did not cheat me? Now that I know you were always one of the Sons of the New Day. Tuolén had an accident—and the doorman at your house—and how many more? I used to believe in some things before you trapped me.”
“No trap,” said he, jerking back so violently he struck a beam and gave an exclamation. “No trap. You cannot make a new world without destroying some of the old, and some suffer unjustly for every gain.”
In a small voice she said; “I feel—used.”
“Lalette,” he said gravely, and not taking offense. “Listen to me. We of the Sons of the New Day are truly striving for a better world, one in which there are such things as honesty and justice for everyone. But this much I have learned, and not from Dr. Remigorius, that any such effort is a swimming against the world’s stream, and must be paid for. You feel used? Myself no less. But I like to think of myself as used for the betterment of men—perhaps by God.”
His voice was a little unsteady at the end, and now it was her turn to be silent for a moment. At last she said; “And how do you know the use is for betterment—not someone’s personal pleasure in ordering others? What you say is not too different from the teaching I heard at the couvertine. Only there they would say that God uses no earthly vessels.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Ah, I do not know. I only know that I am tired, and alone, alone . . .” The words tailed off, he heard her shift in the darkness of the bed, and then the intake of a sob.
“Lalette, don’t cry.” He bent over, wiping a tear from her face, then as it was followed by more, fell to kissing her eyes. “I love you” (for the first time since that night on the roofs). “Lalette, Lalette.” More and more he kissed, from eyes to lips, and she gripped her arms around him (because he was the nearest anchor in a shifting world), and his kissing turned to passion (as she had known it would, and what did it matter?) (But she was only a recipient, and to Rodvard it was a relief and an agony. In that moment he wished it had been Leece.)