[It is her sob that clears the billowing smoke of his rage to reach him at last, like rain that makes clean the earth where a wildfire has ravaged and scorched. He looks at her then as if seeing her for the first time, there where she kneels but yields not: her features, upon which he has grown used to finding concern gently perched, are wild instead with defiance. Where he has grown used to feeling the warmth of her constancy, he feels now the friction of her stubbornness. He tries to reconcile this woman with the one who had taken his knee in suppliance and begged for forgiveness for fear that she had wronged him, the one to whose knee he had clung there in the mud and moss of the riverbank to demand that she not go, the one who had then wiped the tears from his cheek.

In the end it is the tears shining now upon her eyelashes that bring Achilles back to his wife. For him she cries, and he cannot help but remember how Deidamia's countenance had buckled when he told her of his intent to fight in Troy, how she had banged her delicate fists against him as one might pound upon a door hoping that it shall budge. Even then, allured as he was by the call of his glory, he had suspected he never would return to her arms, and this she must have known better than he. He remembers too how the tears had streamed down Patroclus' cheeks the day the hollow ships burned and the Achaeans bled for the pitiless bronze of Trojan spears, and for these tears at last his heart moved.]

Olivia...

[He holds his hand out to her and there in the space between them it waits.]

Will you walk with me back to our bed chamber? Such talk upsets you, this I can plainly see, and thus I shall speak of this matter no further. My body tires, as does my heart - I wish only to bathe and to rest. Will you stand then and join me, as I have pledged to be your husband and you my wife?

[Still the embers of his ire crackle within his heart, but the lengthening shadows of his fatigue begin to overcome even this.]