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withdrew his hand with a querulous sound. Hyacinthe merely watched, colors shifting in his dark eyes. Tilian, the younger, bowed to him.
    “Willst thou require the basin refilled ere sundown, my lord?” he asked.
    “You heard her,” Hyacinthe replied. “Soon it will be ended here, one way or another. I require nothing further.”
    They remained behind, watching with consternation as Hyacinthe led the way down a second set of steps to the lonely tower that had been his home for so long. It rose, grey and stony, from the rocks of Third Sister, the oriel windows glinting in the sun-rose-red, amber, emerald, a cobalt like the color of Imriel’s eyes. I gaped at it now as I had not, then. Hyacinthe paid it no heed. It was his prison, as familiar to him by now as his own skin.
    I had forgotten how many of the isle-folk attended upon the Master of the Straits. They bowed low as he entered, watching with curious eyes as we mounted the curving stair, circling to the top of the tower. His attendants, his gaolers. They had been kind to us, long ago. They treated him now with a mixture of awe and fear.
    We climbed to the very top of the tower, a level unseen from below. And there, the chamber was set about not with colored oriels, but windows open onto the skies, looking out over the seas in every direction. It held uncountable treasures gathered from the deep-a gilded helmet encrusted with coral, a mottled egg the size of a newborn baby, a marble sphinx, an unstrung harp made from the jawbone of a whale, all things strange and wondrous, salt-pitted and ancient. Hyacinthe stood in the middle of the room and looked about him.
    “Here is where he taught me,” he said softly. “What I became, I learned in this place. He was not bad, you know; only desperate, and bound by strictures not of his making.”
    “I know,” I whispered.
    “It’s funny.” Hyacinthe turned to a massive bookstand, riffling through the pages that lay spread open upon it, pages of incalculable power. “I never had a father, not really. For a little while, in the Hippochamp, I thought Manoj might acknowledge me. But...” He shrugged. “There was the dromonde , after all. And in the end, it was this, instead. And he is the nearest thing I have known to it. To a father.”
    I watched him wrap the pages in oilskins and place them in an ancient leather case, bound with straps of bronze. “Are you sorry to leave it?”
    “No.” He closed the case, and looked at me, swallowing hard. “Yes.” He sat down on a low ivory stool that dated to the Tiberian Empire. “It’s been a long time, Phèdre. I thought, at first, mayhap I could change this role, this place ... bring a touch of light, of mirth, cast it in my image instead of his .” He shook his head. “I was wrong. It was too hard, too long, too lonely. And the power ... it isolates. It changed me instead. And now?” He gave a bitter laugh. “I’ve become like him . All the servants I thought to befriend bow and fear to meet my eyes. Me, Hyacinthe, who ran a livery stable and told fortunes in Night’s Doorstep to drunken lordlings! Who would have believed it? But I have become the Master of the Straits, and I do not know how to be anything else.”
    “Emile still has the stable,” I said, kneeling beside him and taking his hands. “And your mother’s lodging-house, and a good deal more. He’s made quite a business of it.”
    “I know.” His fingers moved in mine. “I saw it in the sea-mirror. You know I can’t go back to that, Phèdre.”
    “The Tsingani have named you-”
    “ Tsingan kralis .” Hyacinthe’s mouth twisted. “A Didikani half-breed, outcast for wielding the dromonde . They let Manoj banish me, and they let my mother live and die as vrajna , tainted for her loss of honor, though it was through no fault of her own. Do you think they would name me king if they did not covet the power I bear?”
    “Mayhap not,” I said steadily. “Do you blame them? For a thousand years, they have been outcast themselves, lest you forget. Even in Terre d’Ange, they are merely tolerated, sometimes despised, left to wander, to fend for themselves. And they are willing to change, for you. Even now, the Didikani enjoy greater stature than before. Under your leadership, the laws that condemned your mother, that rendered you outcast, might change.”
    Hyacinthe withdrew his hands from mine and covered his face. “It’s too much,” he said, muffled. “You do not know the