“You don’t deserve me. Why should I waste my time on some bratty little whore who only wants someone to beat him until he can get off without guilt, huh? Someone who can’t follow a simple fucking direction. You don’t even want what I’m offering! You don’t want to find yourself; you want to get lost.” Devon stalked to the closet, grabbed Nicky’s coat, and hurled it at him. “So get lost.”

“We? 'Twas me who found the marks, not you, not any of you Aegean fools. And your king is the biggest fool of all, for if he'd deigned to unbind me before he sent us here to die, I could have listened for what we seek and followed it that way. Now I am as impotent as you."If considerably less ugly and stupid.”

“You have never laid your pride down, Freyrík. Not once, for me or anyone. You don't know what it means to give that up, even for a moment. And yet you ask it of me again and again and again! Tell me, Freyrík, what more can you wring from me? Have I not done enough for you to trust me, gods crack you?”

“Fine. You don’t want to be good enough for me, then you will never be. I deserve someone who wants to be what I need.”

“Well, I know better what I don’t want. I don’t want somebody who’s always nagging me to be something I’m not. And I don’t want somebody who thinks she knows what’s best for me and who maneuvers around trying to get me to do things her way.” Kate frowned. “Nobody wants anyone like that. It’s like saying, ‘I don’t want someone who’ll poke me in the eye with a sharp stick.’ Forget what you don’t want. What do you want?”

“Gods cracked, Freyrík, they would have raped me!" He surged forward so suddenly Freyrík flinched and tripped away. "And no, I did not incite or invite their attentions. It is your people who paint me like a harlot and parade me round half-naked, your people who find it amusing to use my brethren like toys, your people who teach their children such high art of disrespect that boys think rape a pleasant way to pass an afternoon!”

“I have friends. I want more from you than that. I’m a selfish guy, Jane. If I can’t be your lover, if I can’t have all of you, then I don’t want anything.”