Hwicca did not speak again. Having risen, she stood wholly mute. Her hand brushed him, and he felt the palm had changed, had gone soft; she had ground no grain and driven no oxen for nigh to a year. Oh his poor caged darling! He let his own grasp go about her shoulders and then her waist. He raised her chin and kissed her. The lips beneath his were dead. In an overwhelming grief, that she should have been so hurt, he drew her to him and laid her head on his breast. Long afterward Phryne found flint and steel and a lamp. A tiny glow herded immense misshapen shadows into the corners. Eodan looked upon Hwicca. She had not altered greatly to his eyes. Her skin was white now--the sun had touched it seldom, the rain and wind never; but the same dear small freckles dusted across her nose. She had taken on weight; she was fuller about breast and hip. Her hair streamed in a loose mane past a Roman gown and a Roman girdle, thin sheer stuff broidered with gold; she wore a necklace of opals and amber. He did not like the perfume smell, but--"Hwicca, Hwicca!" Her eyes seemed black, wrenched upward to his. They were dry and fever-bright. Her shaking had eased, until he could only feel it as a quiver beneath the skin. "I thought you were killed," she told him, tonelessly. "No. I was sent to a farm south of here. I escaped. Now we shall go home." "Eodan--" The cold, softened hands reached down, pulling his arms away. She went from him to the chair in which she had been seated when he came in. She sat upon it, her weight against one arm, and stared at the floor. The curve of thigh and waist and drooping head was a sharp pain to him. "Eodan," she said at last, wonderingly. She looked up. "I killed Othrik. I killed him myself." "I saw it," he said. "I would have done so, too." "Flavius brought me here," she mumbled. "That was not your wish," he answered, through a wall in his throat he had raised against tears. "There was only one thing that gave me the strength to live," she said. "I thought you had died." Eodan wanted to take her in one arm, lead her out, hold a torch in the other hand; he would kindle the world and dance about its flames. He went to her, instead, and sat down at her feet, so she must look at him. "Hwicca," he said, "it was I who failed. I brought you to this land of sorrow; when we were wedded, I could have turned our wagon northward. I let myself be overcome by the Romans. I even left you my own task, of free--freeing our son. The anger of the gods is on my head, not yours." "Do you think I care for any gods now?" she said. Suddenly she wept, not like a woman but like a man, great coughing gulping sobs that pulled the ribs and stretched the jaws. She lifted her head and howled, the Cimbrian wolf howl when they mourn for their slain. Phryne stepped back, drawing her knife by the door, but no one came. Perhaps, thought Eodan, they were used to hearing Flavius' new concubine yell.