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honors.
    With a swirl of his faded cloak, Hyacinthe obliged. His hands gestured, his lips moved, and the wind came in answer like a faithful hound, filling our sails, setting the calm waters to rippling. Hugues, staggering under Imri’s weight, set him down with alacrity. Rousse took the helm, and Elua’s Promise turned her prow toward the egress, then leapt forward on a course as straight and true as a cast javelin.
    We were going home.
    Now, at last, the bright remnants of the day fit the mood, and my spirits rose as the ship shot out of the narrow passage, canting hard to one side as we tacked with the shifting winds, doubling back past the isle of Third Sister to head for shore. Hyacinthe made his way across the deck, unperturbed by the speed of our passage.
    “There is one here I have not met,” he said, inclining his head to Imriel.
    I stood behind Imri, hands on his shoulders. “Hyacinthe, Anasztaizia’s son, Master of the Straits, this is my foster-son and Joscelin’s, Prince Imriel nó Montrève de la Courcel.”
    “ Courcel ?”
    The Master of the Straits’ sea-mirror was blind beyond D’Angeline waters. I had forgotten. “Prince Benedicte’s son,” I said, feeling Imriel stiffen under my hands. “Born in La Serenissima, to Melisande Shahrizai. Oh, Hyas! There’s a lot to tell you.”
    “So it would seem.” He bowed, bemused. “Well met, Prince Imriel.”
    Imri bared his teeth. “Imriel nó Montrève,” he said, then reconsidered. “My lord.”
    A glimmer of his old mirth resurfaced in Hyacinthe’s sea-shifting eyes. “Forgive me, Imriel nó Montrève,” he said, and to me, “I suppose you know what you’re doing?”
    I shrugged and ruffled Imriel’s hair. “Without this one, you’d still be on the isle, and I’d be pounding my hands bloody on the door of a temple of the One God in the farthest reaches of Jebe-Barkal. We owe a good deal to his courage, I daresay.”
    Imriel looked pleased. Hyacinthe looked nonplussed.
    “You do have much to tell me,” he said.
    “More than you know,” I agreed. “Will you at least journey to the City of Elua before taking up a life in Alba? It would give us a little time to relive the last twelve years together.”
    “I fear mine are dull.” Hyacinthe turned out his hands, glancing at them with a wry smile. “You have seen the results; the telling doesn’t bear hearing, unless you would hear of endless hours of study. But yes, I will come to the City. Sibeal will rejoin Drustan, and we will pass the summer there, returning to Alba in the autumn. And I will speak to the Queen and the Cruarch regarding the safekeeping of our boundary waters, and to the baro kumpai of the Tsingani regarding Manoj’s successor. And yes,” he added, “I would hear of your quest to find the Name of God, and all matters that befell on the way, great and small, and every other thing that has passed in your life since I set foot on that forsaken rock.”
    “Good,” I said, “because I plan on telling you.”
    With Hyacinthe’s steady winds filling the sails, our return journey to Pointe des Soeurs passed swiftly, and as well that it did, for once the shores of Third Sister fell behind us, overdue exhaustion claimed me. I took shelter out of the wind, propped undisturbed against the cabin wall on cushions, and spread my skirts in the late afternoon sun to dry, wondering why I had not thought to bring a change of dry clothing. It seemed impossible that less than a day had passed since I had ridden out to the encampment at dawn.
    I felt a different person, almost-empty of the sacred trust I had carried for many months, the Name of God no longer an insistent presence filling my mind, crowding my throat, ever poised on the tip of my tongue. It was written still within me, etched in the deepest layers of memory that we cannot readily summon waking, wrought in bone and sinew and blood. This I knew; and yet I no longer heard it echoing in my skull, drawing me out of myself, immersing me in fearful wonder. In its place, beneath the weariness, beneath the mortal concerns of friends and loved ones, was something that might have been contentment, for I had never known its like.
    It was finished.
    For twelve years, every happiness, every joy, every pleasure I had known-and despite it all, they had been myriad-had been overcast by the shadow of Hyacinthe’s fate. No more. And if he was not as he had been, who among us was? Not I, who had known the lowest depths to