"Be still about that or I will forget my word!" roared Eodan in the Cimbric. Hwicca huddled back and lifted an arm, as though to ward off a blow.
"As you wish," said Flavius, unruffled. "To continue—" A crash outside, and the sound of swearing and a whip, interrupted him—"I myself do not believe in any Power except chance. There are blind moieties of matter, obeying blind laws; only the idiot hand of chance keeps each cycle of centuries from being the same. Now it is very possible, by chance, to throw the same number at dice several times sequentially. It is not possible forever, my friend. I think you have thrown about as many good numbers as any man in the world ever did. Soon your luck must turn. You shall be found out through some happenstance. You will then try to kill me. One way or another, we shall all die. You and Phryne and Hwicca and myself, all dead—mold in our mouths and our eye sockets empty." Flavius tossed off his wine and poured another cup. "It is inevitable."
Eodan snarled, out of a chill, dreary foreboding, "If you say more such unlucky words, I will—no, not kill you—each such word will cost you a tooth. Now hold your mouth!"
Flavius shrugged gracefully. Phryne closed her eyes. Beneath the booming and the voices on deck, there was silence.
Finally Eodan turned to his wife. She would not meet his look. When he took her hand, it lay slack on his palm.
"Hwicca," he said, burred Cimbric low and unsure in his throat. "Pay him no heed. We shall be free."
"Yes," she said, so he could scarcely hear it.
"That 'yes' was not meant," he told her. His heart lay a lump in his breast.
She said in a torn voice: "There is no freedom from that which was."
"Little Othrik," said Eodan. He looked at his wife's hand and remembered how his son's baby fingers had curled about his thumb. He shook his head and smiled. "No—him we shall always mourn.... But it would be worse if we sailed off leaving him to grow up a Roman's beaten beast. You could not have done otherwise. There will come more children to us, and some of them will die of this or that; so it has ever been. But some will live, Hwicca."