“But which way did they go? From what point did they leave the Meet? Something—surely you know something?” She clasped her cut palms together, and I saw a slight flinching at the pain they gave her. She cast it off impatiently as though it were an interruption to her understanding.
“Tell me first what you are to him, that you should ask?”
“His wife!”
“You—so young——”
I had an instant vision of Ravenutzi’s white hair, and then as I had first seen him washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay. At the recollection, and perhaps a slight flicker of amusement in her face, the two things leaped together in my mind.
“Was that also a pretence?”
“There are herbs which will bleach the color from the hair and draw the skin in wrinkles,” she said. “He had more years than I, but we were young.”
“And the hostage, too, was it all a pretence from the beginning?”
“What else?” impatiently. “The King’s Desire was ours, and we schemed to get it back as we had first won it. I was as willing as the rest when we began. If I was not to see him again for three years, that was my part of the service, and I was proud to pay it. But I never thought of this. Oh no, never this!”
She crept up to me and eased the strained position of her limbs.