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it and I turned unthinking toward comfort, curling my body against Joscelin’s sleeping warmth and pillowing my tear-stained cheek on his shoulder-for that was the last and greatest of my gifts, and the one I treasured most: Love. For ten years, Joscelin Verreuil has been my consort, and if we have bickered and quarreled and wounded each other to the quick a thousand times over, there is not a day of it I would relinquish. Let the realm laugh-and they do-to think of the union betwixt a courtesan and a Cassiline; we know what we are to one another.
    Joscelin did not wake, but merely stirred in his sleep, accommodating his body to mine. Moonlight spilled through the window of our bedchamber overlooking the garden; moonlight and the faint scent of herbs and roses, rendering his fair hair silver as it spread across the pillows and making the air sweet. It is a pleasant place to sleep and make love. I pressed my lips silently to Joscelin’s shoulder, resting quiet beside him. It might have been Hyacinthe, if matters had fallen out otherwise. We had dreamed of it, he and I.
    No one is given to know what might have been.
    So I mused, and in time I slept and dreamed that I mused still until I awoke to find sunlight lying in a bright swathe across the bed-linens and Joscelin already awake in the garden. His daggers flashed steel as he moved through the seamless series of exercises he had performed every day of his life since he was ten years old, the training-forms of a Cassiline Brother. But it was not until I had risen and bathed and was breaking my fast that he came in to greet me, and when he did, his blue eyes were somber.
    “There is news,” he said, “from Azzalle.”
    I stopped with a piece of honey-smeared bread halfway to my mouth and set it down carefully on my plate, remembering my dream. “What news?”
    Joscelin sat down opposite me, propping his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his hands. “I don’t know. It has to do with the Straits. Ysandre’s courier would say no more.”
    “Hyacinthe,” I said, feeling myself grow pale.
    “Mayhap.” His voice was grave. “We’re wanted at court as soon as you’re ready.”
    He knew, as well as I did; Joscelin had been there, when Hyacinthe took on the doom that should have been mine, using the dromonde to trump the offering of my wits and consecrate himself to eternal exile. A fine fate for the Prince of Travellers, condemned to an endless existence on a narrow isle amid the deep waters that divided Terre d’Ange and Alba, bound to serve as heir to the Master of the Straits.
    Such had been the nature of his bargain. The Master of the Straits would never be free of his curse until someone took his place. One of us had to stay. I had known it was necessary; I would have done it. And it would have been a worthwhile sacrifice, for had it not been made, the Alban ships would never have crossed the Straits, and Terre d’Ange would have fallen to the conquering army of Skaldi.
    I had answered the riddle and my words were true: the Master of the Straits drew his power from the Lost Book of Raziel. But the dromonde looks backward as well as forward, and Hyacinthe’s answer went deeper. He had seen the very genesis of the geis itself, how the angel Rahab had loved a mortal woman who loved him not, and held her captive. How he had gotten a son upon her, and how she had sought to flee him nonetheless, and perished in the effort, along with her beloved. How Rahab had been punished by the One God for his disobedience, and how he had wreaked the vengeance of an angry heart upon his son, who would one day be named Master of the Straits. How Rahab brought up pages of the Lost Book of Raziel, salvaged from the deep. How Rahab gave them to his son, gave him mastery of the waters and bound him there, on a lonely isle of the Three Sisters, condemning him to separate Terre d’Ange and Alba, for so long as Rahab’s own punishment endured.
    This was the fate Hyacinthe had inherited.
    For ten years and more, I had sought a way to break the curse that bound him there, immersing myself in the study of Yeshuite lore in the hope of finding a key to free him. If a key existed, it could be found in the teachings of those who followed Yeshua ben Yosef, the One God’s acknowledged scion. But if it did, I had not found it.
    It was one of the few things at which I had failed utterly.
    “Let’s go.” I pushed my plate away, appetite gone. “If something’s happened, I