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House, first of the Thirteen Houses of the Night Court. As a hedge against fate, I have always invested wisely, aided by good advice from my factor and my connections at court and elsewhere.
    Nor does it hurt to be the foremost courtesan of the realm. Betimes there have been outlandish offers for my favor-and betimes I have taken them. Naamah’s portion I have tithed generously to her temples; the rest, I have kept.
    Evrilac Duré and his men were well rested from their travel and faced the return journey with a better will than they had shown in Ysandre’s council chamber. He raised his eyebrows to see our party assembled, for we numbered only the four of us with necessaries carried on pack-mules.
    “Only four, my lady?” he inquired. “I thought you would bring a maidservant, at the least.”
    “My lord Duré,” I said pleasantly. “We are travelling cross-country to a forsaken outpost to assail the Master of the Straits in his own domain, not paying a social call on the duchy of Trevalion. I have crossed the Skaldic wasteland in the dead of winter on foot, and been storm-blown to Kriti in the company of pirates. Will you not credit me with some measure of competence?”
    He laughed at that, flashing white teeth; the Azzallese love a show of pride. And so we set out across the greening land beneath the auspices of spring. As the marble walls of the City of Elua fell behind us, I filled my lungs with great breaths of fresh air and saw Joscelin do the same. Guillard and Armand stole admiring glances in my direction as we rode, and young Hugues sang for sheer exuberance. He had a prodigious set of lungs in his broad chest, and his voice was sure and true.
    “He reminds me of Remy,” Ti-Philippe said at one point, dropping back to ride alongside me, a shadow of sorrow in his smile. “He begged to come. I couldn’t say no.”
    I nodded, the old grief catching in my throat. Remy had been the first of my chevaliers, the first of Phèdre’s Boys to pledge himself unto my service. I had watched him die. I was never free of the chains of blood-guilt, that awareness forged in the ceremony of the thetalos in a Kritian cavern. Nor did I forget the living, whose numbers are never given to us to know. Would he have sung so freely and joyously, this stalwart lad, in a Terre d’Ange ruled by Melisande Shahrizai? I believed he would not. I could never know for sure.
    “I am glad you brought him,” I said gently to Ti-Philippe, who smiled in full.
    “He writes the most abysmal poetry,” he said. “Much of it dedicated to you, my lady, these two days gone by. ‘O lily-fair, with raven-cloaked hair; O star-drowned eyes, like night’s own skies.’”
    At that I laughed, as he had meant; to be sure, Hugues’ presence lightened the journey and it passed pleasantly enough. We made good speed northward along the Aviline River and into the province of Namarre, thence turning westward toward Pointe des Soeurs. The sun shone brightly on our travels. In the vineyards, pale green tendrils were beginning to curl on the stands of brown, withered grapevines and the silvery leaves rustled in the olive groves. We saw Tsingani on the road from time to time, making their way from the early spring horse-fair at the Hippochamp in Kusheth; there was no mistaking them, white teeth flashing against their brown skin, their women wearing their wealth in gold coins strung in necklaces and earrings, or sewn into bright scarves, chattering in their own tongue mixed with D’Angeline.
    Hyacinthe was a prince of his kind, his mother had always told him; the Prince of Travellers, for so they called themselves, doomed to wander the earth. I had believed it, when I was a child; when I was older, I thought it a mother’s fond lie, for she was an outcast among her people, deemed vrajna , tainted, for having loved a D’Angeline man and lost her honor. As it transpired, it was the love that had been a lie. Hyacinthe’s mother’s honor had been lost in a careless bet, laid by a cousin who must needs then trick his headman’s daughter into a seduction to settle his debt with Bryony House.
    It was true, after all. Hyacinthe’s grandfather Manoj was the Tsingan kralis, King of the Tsingani. And he had welcomed his long-lost grandson with open arms when he met him.
    That, too, Hyacinthe had sacrificed. He had committed an act that was vrajna when he used the dromonde on my behalf, that gift of sight he had from his mother to part the veils of past