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felt him smile against my hair. “Not for any of it. Not for a minute.”
    Neither was I.

One Hundred
    WORD TRAVELLED before us.
    There was celebrating all that night upon our return to Pointe des Soeurs, in the fortress and the encampment alike. By the time we mustered for the journey to the City of Elua, the countryside was alive with the news, word of mouth travelling nearly as swiftly as the royal couriers Quintilius Rousse dispatched to alert Ysandre.
    An eight-hundred-year legend had come to earth.
    Hyacinthe bore it with dignity, as crowds turned out at every village and hamlet we passed, gaping and whispering to see him ... a young man of Tsingano descent, quiet and collected, clad in faded velvet attire, only the aura that surrounded him and the sea-deep colors swirling in his dark eyes giving evidence to the tremendous power he wielded.
    Once, he would have reveled in the attention; Hyacinthe, my Prince of Travellers, who wore gaudier clothes than half the nobles in the City, whose silver-tongued predictions coaxed coin from their purses and blushes to their cheeks. Now, he merely endured it. I remembered how it had been when we had last travelled together, Joscelin and Hyacinthe and I, and Hyacinthe had played the timbales and flirted with unwed Tsingani women along the road, spending hours teaching a reticent Cassiline Brother how to mimic a Mendacant’s flair.
    No longer.
    Our lodgings were free at every inn, and the inn-keepers vied to serve the most extravagant meals, carrying out the last stores of winter and the first fruits of the earliest harvest. Even the Tsingani who trailed our company were made welcome on the outskirts of town, and villagers who would have hidden their valuables instead brought them gifts of food. The common-rooms were crowded with poets stretching their ears to hear the stories, and Rousse’s sailors told them with relish.
    From this, I was not exempt; the anguissette who banished an angel. Such a thing had never happened in the history of Terre d’Ange. People murmured among themselves and glanced sidelong at me, seeking some stamp of great magic such as Hyacinthe bore and finding none, only the scarlet prick of Kushiel’s Dart, a sign grown well-known enough in my lifetime that it held no novelty. And they spoke softly in wonder and doubt.
    It made me smile. There had been no magic in my deed save that which the One God had given me to hold in trust. No, Eleazar was right; it was stubbornness as much as anything else, an odd legacy of Kushiel’s dubious gift, that taught me to yield without surrendering. Endurance, and love-those things were all the power I’d ever possessed.
    Day by day, our journey grew shorter, and never have I known weather so fair, the skies blue and cloudless, the clime temperate. How not, when we travelled with the Master of the Straits? On land or sea, wind and water answered his command, further than the eye could see in any direction. A fearful power indeed, I thought as we passed fields growing ripe with the green and gold of late spring, and more dangerous at loose than it had ever been confined to the isles of the Three Sisters. He could blight the earth itself, did he so choose. It had been folly to imagine Hyacinthe could ever resume his former life.
    The pages of the Book of Raziel were never far from his regard, and Sibeal’s Alban honor guard was increasingly conscious of the might of what they warded, the Cruithne warriors taking turns among themselves with the case and carrying it as if it might singe their fingers.
    “What would happen if someone stole it?” I asked Hyacinthe one day.
    “Who would dare?” His smile was bleak, and a small breeze rifled our horses’ manes as if in warning. “No, but it would do them no good, Phèdre. No one could read the script who had not been taught, and that was the longest part of my apprenticeship. I spent seven years learning it, for there are characters in it such as I have never beheld and sounds contained in no mortal tongue yet spoken.”
    My pulse quickened. “So it was with the Name of God.”
    “Yes.” He gazed at me with his sea-shifting eyes. “But that word, I think, was not one ever written, save once. And of a surety, it was never heard on that cursed isle until you spoke it. How you learned it, I will never fathom.”
    “I was told it by a man with no tongue,” I said. Hyacinthe laughed softly, not disbelieving. “Hyacinthe, what will you do with the pages? Will