"He wants me, but...." She hesitated, and then went on, in a tone quite different from before, her voice low and throbbing with a secret pleasure as vast and elemental as the star-shot sky.
"I belong to no one," she said. "I am my own."
Stark knew that for the moment she had forgotten him.
He rode for a time in silence, and then he said slowly, repeating Delgaun's words,
"Perhaps you have forgotten something, Berild. There is nothing for you in me, the creature of an hour."
He saw her start, and for a moment her eyes blazed and her breath was sharply drawn. Then she laughed, and said,
"The wild man is also a parrot. And an hour can be a long time—as long as eternity, if one wills it so."
"Yes," said Stark, "I have often thought so, waiting for death to come at me out of a crevice in the rocks. The great lizard stings, and his bite is fatal."
He leaned over in the saddle, his shoulders looming above hers, naked in the biting wind.
"My hours with women are short ones," he said. "They come after the battle, when there is time for such things. Perhaps then I'll come and see you."