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can," he said, doing his best not to let his impatience show. "It's vitally important I keep up to date, if I'm ever going to get out of this mess. And then," he added awkwardly, "we can finally be together."
    She nodded. It was a curious gesture in the circumstances, like a servant accepting orders without forming any judgement of whether they were good or bad.
    "I need another coat," he said. "This one's useless."
    "I'll see what I can do," she said.
    He took a moment to look at her, something he hadn't done properly in a while. The changes were only very slight, almost too slight to notice or describe: a little thinner around the face, tighter around the mouth and eyes. She looked dried, like stored fruit; the sap drained out in the interests of endurance. But she'd put on a little weight, just enough to spoil the curves and radii of her figure. Her waist had thickened up, her arms were starting to turn podgy where once they'd been rounded and soft. He realised, with the sense of someone noticing he'd forgotten something that used to be important, that they hadn't had sex for—how long was it now, six months? Since Psellus went to Civitas Vadanis—now how could those two facts be at all connected, though clearly they were, somehow. He thought about that. They'd had the opportunity, all these clandestine meetings in dark, secret places, and he had no doubt that she'd have agreed to it if he'd suggested it, because she'd never refused him anything. Did he want to? Not, he decided, in the slightest. Even if he'd still wanted her, found her even remotely attractive, it would be frivolous, a ridiculous indulgence for someone in his position, like a starving man spending his last three quarters on candy floss.
    He looked away, feeling disgusted and betrayed. For her sake, he'd risked and lost everything. In that sense, she was to blame; the astonishingly fierce desire he'd felt for her at first, which had made everything else seem trivial, couldn't reasonably be called his fault, since he'd had no control over it, none whatsoever. Now it had gone, evaporated as the heat of the consequences burned through his life, and here they were, stuck with each other, like an old couple resentfully celebrating sixty years of an arranged marriage. It was hard to believe that either of them were the same people they'd been then, of course. But at least she still had enough to eat, and slept in a bed, under a roof that didn't leak. And as for the scale of losses incurred, there was no possible comparison. What had she lost? Nothing at all. She'd traded one unsatisfactory husband for another, but the two men were practically interchangeable in any event, they even did the same job, so that couldn't possibly count as a loss. He, on the other hand—well, that didn't bear thinking about.
    "I'd better go," she said awkwardly. "I'll try and come tomorrow."
    "You've got to find me somewhere better than this," he said angrily. "I can't live here. At least find me somewhere I can have a fire. I've been wet through to the skin for days now."
    "I'll try."
    But that was always her answer: she'd try, she'd do her best. "I'm sure you will," he replied, knowing that she wouldn't hear the irony—because naturally she did try, she did do her best, but it wasn't enough . "Maybe it's time I got out of the City for a while," he said.
    "No." She almost barked the word at him, and he could see panic in her face.
    "No, you mustn't do that. How am I supposed to bring you food and stuff if you're…?"
    "You wouldn't have to," he replied reasonably. "If you bring me some things I can sell—just ordinary household junk, they'll buy anything City-made in the villages. It'd be better than sleeping in a godawful hole like this, and I wouldn't be scared to death every time a watchman looked at me."
    "But what about the savages?" she said, and he knew that what she really meant was what about me ? At least she had the instinctive good sense to realise what a poor