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The gathered women had grown quiet, waiting and watching with knowing eyes in time-worn faces. I began to understand that this was something like the Elders’ Council. “My lady Yevuneh, what passes here?”
    “I said that in a thousand years, there had been no sign that the time had come to make atonement.” Yevuneh gave her gentle smile, a simple widow bearing her share of her people’s thousand-year-old grief. “I spoke wrong. There is you. And that, child, is what we have gathered to discuss.”
    So it was that I told the story a second time that day.
    ’Twas different, this time. It was a pleasant courtyard instead of an audience-room, with verdant trellises shading stone benches and comfortable cushions. Dishes of honeyed sweets and melon and sesame balls were passed around, and the strong drink they call kavah , beans roasted over a brazier and ground into a fine powder, mixed with boiled water and served with ceremony, hot and bitter. Yevuneh had already relayed to them what I had told her earlier of Terre d’Ange, of the Mashiach and the birth of Blessed Elua.
    What they thought of that, I cannot say. The knowledge had dropped like a stone into the depths of their shared story, and what changes it might wreak at that level were beyond my knowing. This much, I know: They wanted to hear more.
    And I told again Hyacinthe’s story, this time beginning it with the Tsingano boy I’d met in the marketplace, my Prince of Travellers with merry eyes and dark curls, who did not disdain the friendship of an unwanted ward of the Night Court. They sighed over his white grin and chuckled knowingly over his exploits, and nodded approval when he used the hard-won monies from his livery service to buy his mother the lodging-house in which she dwelled.
    As for the Tsingani themselves and the fateful folly that had set them on the Lungo Drom , the Long Road-this they understood better than anything.
    All the while I spoke, Imriel mingled among the women of Tisaar, offering sweets, serving nearly as neat-handed as if I’d taught him myself. They’d not neglected the graces in the Sanctuary of Elua. And the women sighed over him, too, marveling at his fair skin and twilit eyes, seeing in his blue-black hair an echo of the boy Hyacinthe I evoked for them.
    Of Skaldia, I told little, save for the threat to our land, and how Hyacinthe embarked with us on a quest to secure the aid of our beleaguered young Queen’s betrothed, the exiled Cruithne prince whom she loved. This, too, they understood; and understood the anguished curse of the Master of the Straits, doomed by his immortal father’s stricken pride.
    “Pride,” Yevuneh murmured. “Pride, and wrath. How else?”
    I told of Hyacinthe’s first sacrifice, how he had surrendered his place among the Tsingani, his rightful role as the heir of the Tsingan kralis, to speak the dromonde on my behalf-although I did not speak Melisande’s name, for fear that Imriel would hear and understand. It did not matter. They understood, the women of Tisaar, that he had done it in honor of his mother, whose heritage he would not repudiate.
    They were mothers, most of them; mothers, grandmothers, wives and widows. I saw the sheen of tears quicken in their eyes as my tale-Hyacinthe’s tale-drew near its close on the shores of that stony isle. A lump rose in my own throat. I had to swallow hard to force my voice past it.
    Don’t you know the dromonde can look backward as well as forward ?
    And I told them, then, how the Prince of Travellers used his gift to take my place, offering himself as sacrifice in my stead, and what had befallen him since.
    I thought I had told the story well, before. I was wrong.
    There was not a dry eye in the courtyard when I finished, and mine own included. If I’d maintained control of my voice, I’d ceded it to my tears, which rolled unheeded down my cheeks. It should have been me. It should always have been me.
    “Oh, my !” Yevuneh shook an embroidered kerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose noisily. “Ah, child, such a tale! And you believe-is it so?-that the Sacred Name may break this curse?”
    “Yes, my lady.” Seated cross-legged on a cushion, I inclined my head. “For ten years and more I have studied the matter. I believe it to be true. The Name of God may force Rahab into relinquishing the long vengeance of his wounded pride. I have found no other way.”
    “Are your own gods so powerless?” another of the women, Ranit, asked