t from Daoud Simon's destination when he left
Orvieto.

She felt a pounding pain inside her skull, and she pressed her hands
against her bound-up hair. She shut her eyes so tight that she forced
tears from them, and a little groan escaped her.

She was sure of one thing: If she had much more to do with Simon de
Gobignon, the confusion she felt would probably drive her mad.

She fumbled through her chest and found a rose-colored winter cloak
lined with red squirrel fur. She threw it over her shoulders and clasped
it around her neck, the fur collar gently brushing her chin.

Simon was waiting where she had left him. He had allowed his bright blue
cloak to fall closed around his lanky frame, so that he looked like a
pillar. She wrapped her own cloak around herself, and side by side they
walked to the stairs at the end of the corridor.

They said nothing to each other until they were out on the loggia under
a gray sky. A chill wind stung Sophia's cheeks. She looked down at the
rows of fruit trees in the atrium below. Their bare branches reached up
at her like long, slender fingers.

"I cannot understand you," he said. "Why have you been so cruel to me?"

That sounded like typical courtly lover's talk, but she knew he meant
the words literally. She looked at his face and saw the whiteness, the
strain around his mouth, the slight tremor of his lips. He looked like a
mortally wounded man.

"I, cruel to you? Did I not beg you to stay away from my uncle? Look
what you have done today. He will send me to Siracusa for certain."

But she felt something break inside her at the sight of his pain. She
had done this to him. She had hoped to give him something by letting him
possess her one time, to make up for all that she could never give him.
Instead, with the gift of her body she had bound him to her more tightly
than ever. And then, haunted by her own feelings and the memory of what
they had done together, she had simply tried to have nothing further to
do with him. And now her effort to break with him was hurting both of
them far more than if she had refused him that day.

"You drove me to this," he said, his eyes wide with anger. "You did not
answer my letters or acknowledge my poems. When I tried to speak to you
in the street and in church, you avoided me. I sent you gifts, and you
sent them back."

She really would have to get out of Perugia. Back to Daoud. This would
tear her to pieces.

_But what about Rachel?_