The silent black hours that walked across his heart were worse than any he had spent in the Luna crypts. * * * * * She came soft-shod, bearing a candle. Beudag, the Dagger-in-the-Sheath. Starke was not sleeping. He rose and stood waiting. She set the candle on the table and came, not quite to him, and stopped. She wore a length of thin white cloth twisted loosely at the waist and dropping to her ankles. Her body rose out of it straight and lovely, touched mystically with shadows in the little wavering light. "Who are you?" she whispered. "What are you?" "A man. Not Conan. Maybe not Hugh Starke any more. Just a man." "I loved the man called Conan, until...." She caught her breath, and moved closer. She put her hand on Starke's arm. The touch went through him like white fire. The warm clean healthy fragrance of her tasted sweet in his throat. Her eyes searched his. "If Rann has such great powers, couldn't it be that Conan was forced to do what he did? Couldn't it be that Rann took his mind and moulded it her way, perhaps without his knowing it?" "It could be." "Conan was hot-tempered and quarrelsome, but he...." Starke said slowly, "I don't think you could have loved him if he hadn't been straight." Her hand lay still on his forearm. She stood looking at him, and then her hand began to tremble, and in a moment she was crying, making no noise about it. Starke drew her gently to him. His eyes blazed yellowly in the candlelight. "Woman's tears," she said impatiently, after a bit. She tried to draw away. "I've been fighting too long, and losing, and I'm tired." He let her step back, not far. "Do all the women of Crom Dhu fight like men?" "If they want to. There have always been shield-maidens. And since Falga, I would have had to fight anyway, to keep from thinking." She touched the collar on Starke's neck. "And from seeing." He thought of Conan in the market square, and Conan shaking his chain and gibbering in Faolan's hall, and Beudag watching it. Starke's fingers tightened. He slid his palms upward along the smooth muscles of her arms, across the straight, broad planes of her shoulders, onto her neck, the proud strength of it pulsing under his hands. Her hair fell loose. He could feel the redness of it burning him. She whispered, "You don't love me." "No." "You're an honest man, Hugh Starke." "You want me to kiss you." "Yes." "You're an honest woman, Beudag." Her lips were hungry, passionate, touched with the bitterness of tears. After a while Starke blew out the candle.... "I could love you, Beudag." "Not the way I mean." "The way you mean. I've never said that to any woman before. But you're not like any woman before. And--I'm a different man." "Strange--so strange. Conan, and yet not Conan." "I could love you, Beudag--if I lived."