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bond.”
    “This is goodbye, then? To you and me?” I asked him.
    “To the Queen of Courtesans and the Prince of Travellers.” Hyacinthe traced a line along the curve of my left eye, the dart-stricken one. “It’s what you became after all, isn’t it? And I ... I will have to acknowledge the claim of the Tsingani. If I cannot rule them as Tsingan kralis , still, I shall have a say in the succession, and what we become as a people. That much is owed.”
    “Then it is goodbye.”
    “Mayhap.” Something moved in the depths of his sea-dark eyes, containing something of Hyacinthe’s merriment and something of the Master of the Straits’ power. “If it came to pass, on the odd year or three, that the night breezes called your name in my voice, Phèdre nó Delaunay, would you answer?”
    I put both arms around his neck and kissed him hard in reply.
    It was at once familiar and strange, that kiss, and I tasted in it my own lost childhood, the legacy of a whore’s unwanted get, raised by a reluctant Night Court, finding friendship for the first time. All of our history was in it, scrapes and mishaps, confidences shared, and the darker shadows of adulthood; the losses of the battle of Bryn Gorrydum, where I had learned there is healing in the sharing of Naamah’s arts, and the terrible sacrifice Hyacinthe had made here upon this isle. And I tasted too the strangeness his life had become, the alien knowledge of elemental forces, the salt-surge of seawater, the tidal depths, the roiling clouds and the forked violence of lightning, the pure music of the unstrung winds.
    “I was wrong.” Hyacinthe laughed aloud, unfettered and joyous. His black eyes danced. “You have changed. Is that what it does, to hold the Name of God within you?”
    “Yes,” I said, and kissed him again.
    His grin was pure wickedness when I stopped, and pure Hyacinthe. “And what did Melisande Shahrizai make of it?”
    It may be he guessed because he was the Master of the Straits, and privy to arcane knowledge; it may be because he was Anasztaizia’s son, and had the gift of the dromonde . But like as not, it was because he was Hyacinthe, and had known me longer than anyone else alive. “Oh, shut up.” I laughed, sinking both hands into his black ringlets and tugging his head back down to mine. “I’m trying to say farewell, if not goodbye.”
    That time, he heeded me.
    It went no further than a kiss, an unspoken promise, a bittersweet farewell. I would not have repented it if it had. Mayhap, when we were younger, it would have; but there were too many considerations, and we were too conscious of them. I let him go, and watched the solemn mantle of power settle back upon him as he gathered up the case that bore the pages from the Lost Book of Raziel.
    “There is nothing else you want from this place?” I asked, glancing around.
    “No.” Hyacinthe shook his head. “Let it go to the folk of the isles, if they wish it. Those who were born to the Three Sisters have suffered as long as he or I, under this curse.” He hesitated. “Is there aught you desire, Phèdre? There is treasure aplenty, and you welcome to it.”
    “Only the library,” I said, remembering how I had passed many hours in this tower reading the works of a Hellene poetess long believed vanished to the world. “There are lost stories in it. I would see them restored.”
    “Lost stories.” He smiled. “They are yours, if we survive this. I will order it so. Well, then, that’s it. Are you ready?”
    “Are you?” I studied his face.
    “Yes.” He took my hand, gripping it hard, the colors in his eyes shifting like the changing hues of the night sea when a cloud passes over the moon. “I won’t falter if you won’t.”
    He had the power to command the waves to rise and the winds to blow.
    The Master of the Straits was afraid.
    “I won’t,” I vowed, and prayed it was true.

Ninety-Seven
    HYACINTHE CALLED the isle-folk who attended him into the reception chamber in the tower. They crowded around, cooks, scullery-maids, foot-servants, laundresses, servants of all ilk, whose lives for countless generations had been spent doing the bidding of the Master of the Straits, maintaining the tower, purveying food, cleaning and restoring treasures brought forth from the bottom of the sea.
    They murmured among themselves in an archaic dialect of D’Angeline, forgotten on the mainland for eight hundred years, stealing fearful glances at Hyacinthe as he stood on the