ud, and he would never know it.

Very well, then. Let _that_, and not his wrath at the revelation, be her
punishment for having let herself go that day with Simon by the lake.
That would be the mutilation she would always bear. Perfect union with
Daoud would be a promised land she would never enter. By suffering that,
she would silently make restitution to Daoud for the wrong she had done
him.

All the while she had been thinking, he had been gazing at her. Just as
she reached her final decision, his eyes closed and his breathing
deepened. She reached out and touched the sparse blond hairs in the
center of his chest, lightly so as not to wake him.

_I lost everything too. He and I are so alike._

Mother and Father. Alexis, whom she had loved in the simple way that
Simon loved her. All lost in one night of fire and steel. And after
that, the life she led had been so little like that of other women. A
life so strange and venturesome she did not know what to think of
herself. And yet a life she had loved much of the time.

If Simon reminded Daoud of what he had lost, almost any woman she met
did the same for Sophia.

Why, she wondered, had a man's seed never quickened within her? She was
twenty-four years old, and she had never been with child. Not once since
girlhood had her monthly flow of blood failed.

_I am barren_, she thought sadly, as she had countless times before.
_Barren and alone._ Just as well. Even one baby would have been an
impossible burden in the years since she fled to Michael.

But now, if Daoud were to get her with child, what joy that would be. At
this moment, it seemed, she had nothing to do except be a companion to
Daoud. There had never been a better time in her life for having a
child. And even if she could never be wholly one with Daoud, she could
be one with their child.

There were remedies for barrenness, she thought, and sometimes they
worked. Wise old women knew them. She might seek out such a woman. Tilia
must know a great deal about preventing conception, perhaps she knew
something about how to make it happen.

There would be no more work of the sort she had done for Michael and
then for Manfred. She was known in the north. She could not go back
there. And once Manfred defeated the French and drove them out of Italy,
he would want _men_ to help him govern. A woman had no place in
governing, unless she were married to a man of power or had inherited a
title of her own.

A chil