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he said, taking it out and pressing the cold, nubbed iron against my cheek. “This is what you crave.” It smelled like death and desire. “No,” I whispered. “Not crave.”
    “You will.” He took it away and put it back in the cupboard. I concentrated on my own vast relief and ignored the sickened twinge of disappointment. The Mahrkagir smiled and caressed my hair. “It is easy enough to destroy your body. It is harder to consume your soul. I will wait. And in time, you will ask for it. Is it not so?”
    “No,” I whispered again, and this time I knew it for a lie.
    It did not matter; Angra Mainyu delights in lies. I felt the encompassing darkness of Daršanga revel in my unwilling desire; a god’s amusement, boundless and incomprehensible. The Mahrkagir laughed, something ancient and untamed looking out of his black, black eyes, and only sodomized me quickly and brutally, sending me back to the zenana to curl on my bed in my private chamber, throbbing with unwanted, unfulfilled desire.
    And cursing Kushiel’s name.

Forty-Eight
    IMRIEL DE la Courcel would not speak to me.
    I tried approaching him on a number of occasions. Drucilla had tried, so she told me-speaking to him in Caerdicci, endeavoring to convince him to see me. Alas, she dared not reveal why , and Imri only made her a rude reply in zenyan and avoided her thereafter.
    It is, I will say, a near-impossible task to corner an agile ten-year-old boy in a large, crowded space. I took some glum comfort in the fact that despite what he had endured, Imriel was hale enough to evade me. I daresay none of the others were; there were only two, now, and the Ephesian was lost in secondhand opium dreams.
    I did not know, yet, how severely Imriel had been abused, nor what purpose the Mahrkagir had in mind for him; or had had in mind. I gleaned some hope from the fact that Gashtaham was unwilling to let him lend the boy. Mayhap ... mayhap he had been spared the worst. Still, I could not know until I spoke to Imriel-and that, he refused to do.
    How many efforts did I make? A dozen, at least, much to the amusement of the women of the zenana . In the end, I was always forced to give up the task. We were the only two D’Angelines and I was a pariah; to an extent, no one questioned my desire to speak with the boy. Only to an extent. If I had scrambled panting after him to the point of humiliation, they would have begun to wonder.
    And my position was already precarious.
    There had been no further incidents since the despoiling of my coat-which had scrubbed clean, more or less-but it was always a possibility. There was no logic to it. However bad matters grew in the festal hall, I had freed them from the Mahrkagir’s attentions, which were more deadly; one might suppose they would be grateful for it. They were not.
    “It is always so,” Drucilla told me. “The favorite is always despised, and you doubly so.”
    And Imriel de la Courcel despised me most of all.
    I did not blame him for it; I never have. Whether he knew it or not, the blood of two noble Houses ran in his veins, in all its attendant pride. Horse-breeders will say that qualities are transmuted in the blood. I believe it. Throughout his solitary travail, Imriel’s pride and anger had kept him alive. And now, at last, to have a countrywoman appear only to prove the most craven and self-abasing of slaves-Death’s Whore, the abject offering of weak gods, for so they believed me, in the zenana -no, I did not blame him.
    I sought to woo him with kindness, instead, and when that failed, to catch him unawares. None of it worked, of course. If it hadn’t been for the Skaldi, like as not I’d still be chasing him.
    I’d caught him out as I returned from a trip to the privy closet, finding him engaged in an effort to pry a board from the door that led onto the barren garden. “Imriel,” I said, blocking the foot of the low stair leading to the garden entrance. “I want only to speak to you.”
    Startling, he rose from a crouch to show me a feral snarl and leapt sideways from the low stair, sidling along the wall, eyes darting, seeking an opportunity for flight.
    “Imriel.” I followed him, watching warily. Listen to me-”
    Nearing the place where the Skaldi lad Erich slouched despondent along the wall, Imriel made his bid for freedom, lunging to hurdle the Skaldi’s legs as if he were no more than a piece of furniture.
    Without a word, Erich reached out a single, brawny hand, catching the back