Kushiel's Chosen

Serenissima-and regularly sought the services of her lady's astrologer, although the man had been disgraced and no longer served the Stregazza.
    "Good," I said to him. "Find out how I might make an appointment with the man." I gazed at Joscelin. "Do you have aught to report?"
    He gave an awkward shrug. "I found out the Yeshuite quarter. 'Tis much the same here as at home; they argue among themselves, and speak of a northern destination. Worse, though. Yeshuites here are confined to their own quarter, yet forbidden to own property. The men may have no congress with Serenissiman women, and those hats, they must wear at all times to identify themselves."
    What he did there, I did not ask. I was sorry for the plight of the Yeshuites, but I could not afford to worry over whether or not Joscelin Verreuil had become a part of their grand prophecy. I related instead my own day's adventure.
    Predictably, Joscelin was irate. "You should not have gone out without an escort! Bad enough it's soldiers and sailors, and not respectable women, like the Serenissimans have-to venture out on your own, without a single companion! Phèdre, it's folly."
    "Well, and I would not have," I retorted coolly, "if you'd not left in a temper. But I did, and no harm done."
    "It's stupid." TiPhilippe scratched his healing nose. "The prophecy, I mean. You always find what you're looking for in the last place you look, don't you? Why keep looking after you find it?"
    "I know," I said patiently. "The thing of it is, I never asked the question aloud, which makes me believe the answer worth considering. If I might guess, I think the meaning is more subtle. I think we will find Melisande in the place we least expect her."
    "Selling fish at the market," Remy offered in jest.
    "Or wiping gruel from the Doge's chin," TiPhilippe added.
    "Changing the swaddling clothes of Prince Benedicte's infant son," suggested Fortun with a trace of a smile.
    I could not stop them, once they were off and running-driving mules along the salt-pans, blowing glass on Isla Vitrari, tanning hides, teaching archery. With each new proposed location, it grew more and more absurd, until I begged them, laughing, to desist.
    It was Joscelin, oddly enough, who took the prophecy most seriously; though not so odd, when I thought on it. After all, he had been a priest himself, and would be still, were it not for me. "What you seek, you will find," he murmured, glancing at me. "Blessed Elua grant it is so, since you're damnably single-minded about it. I never thought you'd desist, no matter what I argued." Propped his chin in his hands, he gazed at the lamp in the center of the table, its flickering light casting his face into shadow and making a mask of it. "Prophecy is a dangerous thing. But I'll say naught to dissuade you, for now."
    "Thank you," I said simply.
    We left it at that, for the evening. If nothing else, Joscelin's words had lent the prospect of believability to our quest, and I was grateful for that, although I did not know how far I could count on his aid. We had declared a peace by default, and I was glad he had returned, but our harsh words earlier lay like a sword between us, and neither of us willing to take it up or cast it aside.
    In the days that followed, I came to see a great deal of La Serenissima and became accepted into the society of Severio's peers. A season of truce-parties had begun, where young gallants of all the Sestieri's clubs held extravagant fetes, and no quarreling was allowed on the host's estate. Strange affairs, to a D'Angeline mind, where the young men gathered to discuss politics and the women to discuss romance and fashion, under the watchful eyes of a half-dozen chaperones. Married women had some freedom; maidens had little. More often than not, I was bored, except when there was dancing and entertainment. When the fête dwindled to a close, the revelers would straggle homeward in torchlit processions-and there the truce ended. Any gallant escorting his lady's party was reckoned safe from harm, but unaccompanied clubsmen set upon each other in the sort of gleeful skirmishes I'd witnessed in the Square.
    It goes without saying that a great deal of matchmaking went on at these truce-parties.
    For his part, Severio displayed me like a jewel, and his pride in it was nearly enough to offset his impatient desire. The gallant sons of the Hundred Worthy Families, sporting the colors of a host of vividly-named clubs-Perpetui, Ortolani, Fraterni,