"Well?" said the Grecian girl. "What is the trouble?" Her tone was unexpectedly stinging, almost contemptuous; it jerked him like a whip.
He bridled with an anger at her that drained off some of the hurt Hwicca had given. "She yielded herself to Flavius."
"Did you expect otherwise?" asked Phryne, winter-cold. "It is one thing to fall on your own sword in battle's heat—another to be a captive alone, and get the first soft word spoken in weeks! Romans have long known how to harness a soul."
"Oh ... well—" Eodan shook his head, stunned. "It is not that. I looked for nothing else, I have seen too many women taken ... But she will not come with me now, Phryne!"
The Hellene stared across the room at Hwicca, who sat with her face hidden in her hair. Then she glanced about at clothes and jewels and whatever else a man was blind to. She nodded.
"Your wife told you she did not merely obey," she said to Eodan. "She tried to please Flavius. She wanted to."
He started. "Are you a witch?"
"Only a woman," said Phryne. "Eodan, think, if you are able. She believed you dead, did she not? I heard the gossip in this household last winter. And Flavius was a man, and there was life in this woman, enough life to draw you here into the she-wolf's throat to get her back! What would you have her do?"
Phryne brought down her foot so the floor thudded. Beneath the boy-cropped dark bangs she regarded Eodan with eyes that crackled. Her scorn flayed him: "She feels she has betrayed you because, for a while, she kissed Flavius willingly. She will send you off and remain here, caged, waiting for him to tire of her and sell her to a brothel and so at last to destruction and a corpse rotting in the Tiber. She will damn herself to that, for no other reason than that she remained a living woman! And you, you rutting, bawling, preening man-thing, you think you might actually go from her as she asks?"
Phryne snatched up a vase and hurled it shattering at his feet. "Well, go then," she said. "Go, and the Erinyes have you, for I am done with you!"