"I must tell you, Simon, that it was I who first fell in love with Daoud. There were moments when I hated him--when he killed your friend, for instance--but as I got to know him better and better I could not help loving him. I had been loved by an emperor and a king, but I had never met a man like Daoud. He had begun as a slave, and he became warrior, philosopher, poet, even a kind of priest, all in one magnificent person. You probably have no idea what I am talking about. You knew him only as the merchant David of Trebizond." "I knew you only as Sophia Orfali." "You may despise me now that you have learned so much about me, but the more you knew of him, the more you would have had to admire him." "How insignificant I must have seemed to you beside such grandeur." She could hear him breathing heavily in the darkness, sounding like a man struggling under a weight he could not bear. "I did love you, Simon. That was why I cried when you said you wanted to marry me. The word love has many meanings. And your French troubadours may call it blasphemy, but it _is_ possible for a woman to love more than one man." "Not blasphemy. Trahison. Treachery." "As you wish. But in that moment you and I shared by the lake near Perugia, I was altogether yours. That, too, is why I fled from you. I could not stand being torn in two." "Why torn in two, if you find you can love more than one man?" The hate in his voice made her want to throw herself from the balcony, but she told herself it would ease his suffering for him to feel that way. "I said it was possible. I did not say it was easy. Especially when the two men are at war with each other." "And did Daoud know about me? Did you tell him what you and I did that day?" "No," she said, finding it almost impossible to force the words through her constricted throat. "I could never tell him." "So you could not admit to this _magnificent_ man, this philosopher, this priest, that you had betrayed him with me." "No," she whispered. "He was jealous, as you are. At first he wanted me to seduce you. But as he came to love me--I saw it happening and I saw him fighting it--he came to hate the idea of letting you make love to me. He came to hate you, because of that, and because he envied you." "Envied me?" "Yes. He saw you as one who had all that he never had--a home, a family." Simon stepped forward and brought his face close to hers. "Did you tell him about my parentage?" "No, never." "Why not?" His voice was bitter. "Was that not the sort of thing you were expected to find out? Could he not have found a way to use it? Were you not betraying your war against us--what do you Byzantines call us, Franks?--by withholding it?" "I told you that loving you both was tearing me apart," she said helplessly. "But you loved him more--that is clear."