loved him.
She loved him that way. Supported him. Helped him. Never contested with him for
credit for this or credit for that, handed it all into his lap with a whispered:
But I don’t want that, Strat. You’re the mind behind it, you tell me what you
need. I do it for your sake. No other in all the world. Yours is the only
judgment in the world I trust more than my own. You’re the only man I’ve ever
trusted. The only one, ever.
She was quiet, was safety, she understood what he needed and when he needed it.
She was the only woman who knew him the way Crit had known him; knew what he
did, knew he was the Stepsons’ interrogator, unraveled his own pretense that
cruelty gave him no sexual thrill at all: took the body-knowledge which was his
skill at interrogation and at lovcmaking and bent him round again till he could
see the torment he inflicted on himself, inner war against his own
sensibilities. She took all these things and knit them up and let him turn
gentle and sentimental with her, which was his deepest, darkest secret- it was
this fragile, inner self she got to, which Crit rarely had. That he could
deliver himself to her inside and out, and sleep in her arms in a way he never
slept with his lovers-not without an eye and an ear alert, somehow-alert in the
way a cynic never sleeps, never trusts, never hopes. Ischade’s embrace was a
drug, the gaze of her eyes a well in which Straton the Stepson became Strat the
man, the young man, Strat the wise and the brave-
Strat the fool to Crit. Strat the traitor to Tempus. Strat the butcher to