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Chance with such fury that blood burst from the boy’s mouth and nose; he would have fallen if it were not that the lord’s hard hand held him up. His eyes, blinded by pain and tears, could no longer seek Roddarc’s.
    â€œLash all you like,” he heard the young lord coldly say. “Chance is a commoner and a bastard. He deserves whipping.”
    â€œAaaa!” Chance panted suddenly aloud in a new experience of pain. He could not have said which hurt him more, Riol’s rage with the whip or Roddarc’s betrayal. Though of course Rod could not mean it—
    â€œIs that so?” the lord queried in a soft voice, far too soft for comfort. “Chance deserves punishment?”
    â€œCertainly. He is a commoner, and we of the blood do with commoners what we like. Do we not?”
    â€œTruly? You flog him, then.” Riol stilled his whip long enough to offer it to Rod. Not an offer, but a command.… Knuckling his eyes so that he could see, Chance looked at his friend. With an angry, arrogant smile, Rod was shaking his head.
    â€œBut I choose not to. And what will you do to me, my father? Turn the lash on me?”
    With a wordless roar of fury Riol struck Chance across the face. Only the boy’s raised hands saved his eyes from the rod.
    â€œGo ahead. Kill him,” said Roddarc. “And who will you beat then?”
    Riol spun the whipping boy around and struck him with the rod featly across his cock, bending him double with agony. His head swaying above the floor, Chance felt that his world had spun upside down. Rod, condemning him?
    â€œCut it off,” Roddarc said. “I don’t care.”
    Riol straightened Chance with a blow of his heavy fist, then struck again with the rod.
    â€œYou are a filthy tyrant,” said Roddarc with something of heat, more of disgust, and nothing, nothing at all, of heart.
    Even in his agony Chance felt the lord’s shock, the sudden silence, the rod hovering, stilled. “What did you say?” Riol inquired through clenched teeth.
    â€œYou heard me,” said Roddarc with a weird calm. “A filthy, bloody tyrant. All goodly folk hate you.”
    Riol flung Chance to the floor and started to laugh, yell after yell of comfortless laughter. “Very truth, very truth!” he shouted amidst his laughter. “And someday you will be another.”
    It was over. No thanks to Roddarc, and not because the lord was merciful, either. Merely because he was amused. Lying half drowning in his own blood, slipping away into a swoon, Chance heard the yells of laughter, the lord’s tipsy shouts. “Tyrant, is it? And someday you will be one, just like me.”
    Servants carried him away after the lord’s back was turned, tended to him hastily and heaved him into his bed. He knew nothing until he awoke groaning in the dark of night.
    â€œStop your whimpering.” Roddarc’s voice sounded irritably across the chamber they shared. “Let me sleep.”
    â€œYou swine,” Chance breathed. “Every part of me is on fire. Do you not care—”
    â€œHold your tongue,” Roddarc commanded more coldly, “or I will thrash you myself.”
    From mere pride Chance kept silence. He would not have Roddarc hear him weeping.
    Later he understood, in a dim way, how Roddarc had needed to free himself from the trap formed by his own noble birth and the happenstance of his loving Chance. But at the time, the pain of the flogging had seemed as nothing compared to his heartache.
    He lay in his bed for days, past the time when he could have been up and about, for all parts of him were healing cleanly. No one troubled him. Let the lad sulk; there were events afoot. Lord Riol was going off to war.
    The war from which he never returned, all good powers be praised. And after he was gone, Chance and Roddarc had drifted gradually back into their former, brotherly ways. No lasting harm had come to Chance from the