Kushiel's Chosen

so many.
    "It will pass." She pressed her hand briefly to her chest. "Go on and open it."
    The box sat on the low table before us. I pried the lid loose and peered inside, pulling out wads of cotton batting to find it concealed a small marble bust. Lifting it out, my hands trembled. I held the bust aloft and gazed at it.
    It was Anafiel Delaunay.
    The sculptor had caught him in the prime of his thirties, in all his austere beauty; the proud features, a faint wryness to his beautiful mouth, irony and tenderness mingled in his eyes and the thick cable of his braid coiling forward over one shoulder. Not the same, of course, in its marble starkness; Delaunay's eyes had been hazel, shot with topaz, his hair a rich auburn. But the face, ah, Elua! It was him.
    "Thank you," I murmured, my voice shaking; grief, unexpected, hit me like a blow to the stomach. "Thank you, oh, Thelesis, Blessed Elua, I miss him, I miss him so much!" She looked at me with concern, and I tried to shake my head, waving it off. "Don't worry, it's not... I love this, truly, it's beautiful, and you are the kindest friend, it's only that I miss him, and I thought I was done with grieving, but seeing this ... and Alcuin, and Hyacinthe, and now Joscelin ..." I tried to laugh. It caught in my throat, thick with tears. "Now Joscelin wants to leave me to follow his own path, and thinks even of becoming a Yeshuite, oh, Elua, I just..."
    "Phèdre." Thelesis took the bust gently, setting it on the table and waited quietly throughout the sudden onslaught of sobs that wracked me. "It's all right. It's all right to mourn. I miss him too, and he was only my friend, not my lord and mentor." It didn't matter what she said; she might have said anything in that soothing voice of hers.
    "I'm so sorry." I had buried my face in my hands. I lifted it, blinking at her through tears. "Truly, this is the most wonderful thing anyone has ever given me, and I repay you like this." I said it politely, though I couldn't help sniffling.
    "I'm glad you like it. I commissioned it from a sculptor who knew him well, once." She touched the bust, stroking it with a rueful touch. "He had an effect on people, Anafiel Delaunay did."
    I nodded, scrubbing at my tear-stained face. "He did that."
    "Yes." Thelesis regarded me with her quiet gaze. "Phèdre." One word, naming me. It is a poet's gift, to go to the heart of things in a word. "Why?"
    With anyone else, I might have dissembled; I had done it already with Cecilie, and indeed, with Ysandre de la Courcel herself. But Thelesis was a poet, and those dark eyes saw through to the bone. If not for illness, she would have gone to Alba in my stead. I owed her truth, at least.
    "Wait," I said, and went to fetch my sangoire cloak. Returning, I gave it to her, a bundle of velvet folds the color of blood at midnight. "Do you remember this?"
    "Your cloak." Her head bowed over it. "I remember."
    "It saved my life, in a way." I found I was pacing, and made myself sit. "Ysandre's man-at-arms remembered it too, the day Delaunay was killed; an anguissette in a sangoire cloak and a member of the Cassiline Brotherhood, seeking an audience with the Princess. It proved our story. But I never saw it, after that day. I took it off in Melisande Shahrizai's quarters, where she poured me a glass of cordial." Remembering my own, I picked up my glass and drank, grimacing. "I woke up in a canvas-covered wagon, halfway to the Skaldi border, wrapped in woolen blankets and no cloak in sight." There had been considerable more between, but Thelesis had no need to know it. It involved Melisande, and the razor-sharp blades they call flechettes, and a good deal of me screaming. Everything but my signale and Quintilius Rousse's message for Delaunay. I have dreams about it still, and Elua help me, some of them are exquisite. "I got it back this autumn."
    "How?" Thelesis asked carefully.
    "Gonzago de Escabares." I rested my chin on my hands and gazed at the bust of Delaunay. "A friend of his met a woman in La Serenissima; a beautiful woman. She gave him a parcel to carry for his friend, who was going to meet the Comtesse de Montrève." I gestured at the cloak. "That was the whole of it."
    "Melisande." She breathed the word. "Phèdre, have you told the Queen?"
    I shook my head. "No one, except Joscelin and my boys. They know. I asked Ysandre when she received me, if she'd
    heard of Melisande's doings. She has sent word to every major city from Aragonia to Caerdicca Unitas, and