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Amílcar?”
    He didn’t answer immediately. “It is not for me to judge.”
    “Nor I. But I think ... I think there is no one in the world who despises Melisande Shahrizai with the same purity of emotion as you.” My voice was shaking, a little. “And I think that when she learns that Kushiel has chosen to punish her by exacting payment for her sins from her son ... I think that even Melisande deserves to hear it alone.”
    Joscelin’s voice was harsh. “Do you think she would offer you the same compassion?”
    To impart suffering without compassion ...
    “It doesn’t matter.” I swallowed, hard. “Joscelin, I am not easy in my heart with this. I have served Kushiel all my life, and never questioned his will. I question it now. I do not see that the end justifies the means. And I am made to endure pain, to revel in it, not to inflict it. To deliver this news with you glowering over my shoulder ... I don’t think I can do it.”
    “I wouldn’t glower,” he said automatically, then sighed, pressing the heels of his hands against his eye-sockets. “All right. All right, all right. Do as you must, and I will wait in the Temple proper.” Dropping his hands, he looked at me with slightly bloodshot eyes. “Will it suffice?”
    “Yes,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
    “Don’t.” He shook his head. “I think your compassion is wasted on Melisande.”
    Thence the need for an anguissette to balance the scales .
    “I know,” I said miserably. “And mayhap you are right. But I can only act according to the dictates of my nature, not hers.”
    “Love as thou wilt,” said Joscelin, and sighed again.
    In the morning we went to the Temple of Asherat-of-the-Sea.
    Poets and philosophers alike have written of the sense of strangeness that one encounters from time to time of a moment lived before; a place, a person, a chance word, that triggers something in one’s memory that says, yes, I remember, that is how it was, that is exactly how it was. So I have read, but I have never encountered such a thing save that there was reason for it. I felt it that day. I had been here before, in this city built on water, beneath the great golden domes of the Temple. Full many a time had I met the blank stare of the great effigy of Asherat, towering vast and stony above the altar, carved waves surging at her feet.
    I brought honeycakes, the first time. The second, I usurped her voice.
    It was a bargain we had struck, the goddess and I.
    And I had come with Ysandre, who had the right to order me because she was my Queen; and I had come, last of all, with Joscelin, as I came now, amid the priestesses of the Elect, with their whispering blue robes and the veils of silver net that hid their faces, glass beads shimmering like wire-strung tears, bare feet moving soundlessly over the floor.
    “I will wait,” Joscelin said to me, making a formal Cassiline bow, his hands clenched into fists beneath the steel mesh gauntlets of his vambraces. Amid the murmurous presence of the priestesses, the fierce soft pride of the Temple eunuchs with their ceremonial spears, he seemed an alien thing, hard-edged and masculine.
    “I will return,” I promised. He thought me a fool; I know he thought me a fool for my compassion. Was I? I didn’t know. I followed the Elect priestess down the winding corridors, wondering. What do you owe Melisande, that you must deliver this news yourself ? So Ysandre had asked me, and rightfully so. She was my liege and my sovereign, Ysandre de la Courcel; she had believed, when any other would have doubted. She had raised me up and given me every honor, given me the Companion’s Star to wear at my breast, called me her near-cousin. When I thought of courage, when I thought of loyalty, it wore Ysandre’s face as I had seen it on our return from La Serenissima, when she had parted the troops of Percy de Somerville’s army and ridden without faltering to the very walls of the City of Elua.
    And when I thought of love, it wore Joscelin’s face.
    Phèdre !
    But there was Melisande’s voice in my memory too, unstrung with shock, her beautiful eyes wide with fear after I had cracked open my skull against my cell in La Dolorosa. I had seen it, as I slumped to the floor.
    A kiss, one kiss. It took all that I had to resist it.
    She had only touched me once, since. And that with the point of a dagger. Joscelin’s dagger. I’d have let her kill me, if she could. She couldn’t.
    It was the same, all the same. The