"Not exactly." I took his hand in both of mine. The bones felt bird- hollow, sheathed in skin like parchment. "I have come to break the curse, my lord Gildas. Your long service here is done."

He withdrew his hand with a querulous sound. Hyacinthe merely watched, colors shifting in his dark eyes. Tilian, the younger, bowed to him.

"Wilst thou require the basin refilled ere sundown, my lord?" he asked.

"You heard her," Hyacinthe replied. "Soon it will be ended here, one way or another. I require nothing further."

They remained behind, watching with consternation as Hyacinthe led the way down a second set of steps to the lonely tower that had been his home for so long. It rose, grey and stony, from the rocks of Third Sister, the oriel windows glinting in the sun—rose-red, amber, emerald, a cobalt like the color of Imriel’s eyes. I gaped at it now as I had not, then. Hyacinthe paid it no heed. It was his prison, as familiar to him by now as his own skin.

I had forgotten how many of the isle-folk attended upon the Master of the Straits. They bowed low as he entered, watching with curious eyes as we mounted the curving stair, circling to the top of the tower. His attendants, his gaolers. They had been kind to us, long ago. They treated him now with a mixture of awe and fear.

We climbed to the very top of the tower, a level unseen from below. And there, the chamber was set about not with colored oriels, but windows open onto the skies, looking out over the seas in every direction. It held uncountable treasures gathered from the deep—a gilded helmet encrusted with coral, a mottled egg the size of a newborn baby, a marble sphinx, an unstrung harp made from the jawbone of a whale, all things strange and wondrous, salt-pitted and ancient. Hyacinthe stood in the middle of the room and looked about him.

"Here is where he taught me," he said softly. "What I became, I learned in this place. He was not bad, you know; only desperate, and bound by strictures not of his making."

"I know," I whispered.

"It's funny." Hyacinthe turned to a massive bookstand, riffling through the pages that lay spread open upon it, pages of incalculable power. "I never had a father, not really. For a little while, in the Hippochamp, I thought Manoj might acknowledge me. But..." He shrugged. "There was the dromonde, after all. And in the end, it was this, instead. And he is the nearest thing I have known to it. To a father."

I watched him wrap the pages in oilskins and place them in an ancient leather case, bound with straps of bronze. "Are you sorry to leave it?"

"No." He closed the case, and looked at me, swallowing hard. "Yes." He sat down on a low ivory stool that dated to the Tiberian Empire. "It's been a long time, Phèdre. I thought, at first, mayhap I could change this role, this place . . . bring a touch of light, of mirth, cast it in my image instead of his." He shook his head. "I was wrong. It was too hard, too long, too lonely. And the power ... it isolates. It changed me instead. And now?" He gave a bitter laugh. "I've become like him. All the servants I thought to befriend bow and fear to meet my eyes. Me, Hyacinthe, who ran a livery stable and told fortunes in Night's Doorstep to drunken lordlings! Who would have believed it? But I have become the Master of the Straits, and I do not know how to be anything else."

"Emile still has the stable," I said, kneeling beside him and taking his hands. "And your mother's lodging-house, and a good deal more. He's made quite a business of it."

"I know." His fingers moved in mine. "I saw it in the sea-mirror. You know I can't go back to that, Phèdre."

"Tsingan kralis." Hyacinthe's mouth twisted. "A Didikani half- breed, outcast for wielding the dromonde. They let Manoj banish me, and they let my mother live and die as vrajna, tainted for her loss of honor, though it was through no fault of her own. Do you think they would name me king if they did not covet the power I bear?"

"Mayhap not," I said steadily. "Do you blame them? For a thousand years, they have been outcast themselves, lest you forget. Even in Terre d'Ange, they are merely tolerated, sometimes despised, left to wander, to fend for themselves. And they are willing to change, for you. Even now, the Didikani enjoy greater stature than before. Under your lead ership, the laws that condemned your mother, that rendered you outcast, might change."

Hyacinthe withdrew his hands from mine and covered his face. "It's too much," he said, muffled. "You do not know the responsibilities of the Master of the Straits. For eight hundred years, we have protected Alba and Terre d'Ange. Yes." He raised his head at my silence, glaring with unearthly eyes. "Protected! For all that the separation was maintained, we protected you! Even now, I keep the bans. No Skaldi ship may sail from the north but I permit it, no Aragonian or Carthaginian from the south. Do you think my responsibilities will end if the curse is broken? They won't, Phèdre. While I live, it is mine to ensure, because it is necessary. Do you suppose I can do that and serve to lead the Tsingani?"

"No." I wanted to quail under his glare; I steeled myself instead. "Is that why you're afraid to leave the isle?"

He looked away. "Who says that I am?"

I answered him with a question. "Is it Rahab you fear, or leaving?"

Outside the tower windows, gulls circled, riding the winds. Hyacinthe watched them. "Both," he said at length. "Oh, Phèdre! I want it, I want it so badly I taste it, dream of it. I see my face in the mirror, aging, and I think of nothing else. But it scares me to death." He looked back at me. "I faltered. I was afraid. Would the summoning have worked, if I hadn't?"

"I don't know." I sat on my heels and regarded him. "It will work this time. The geis is bound to me, now."

"What happens if you falter?"

I tried to laugh, but it caught in my throat. "I suppose I become your apprentice."

"And I get to die, while you wither into eternity." There were tears, mortal tears, in Hyacinthe's black eyes. "I should never have let you ashore."

I folded my hands to hide their trembling. "I won't falter."

He smiled sadly. "Can you be so sure?"

"No." I forced my tone to remain calm. "But everything I love best in the world, aside from you, is on that ship you bound mid-harbor. And I haven't had twelve years to forget it. What's the cost, Hyacinthe, of pressing forward until Rahab manifests in his entirety? Pain? Fear? I'm an anguissette. These are things I was born to endure."

Hyacinthe shook his head. "You never give up, do you?"

"Not yet, anyway." I rose to my feet and extended my hand to him. "Come on, Master of the Straits. There's a ship full of anxious people awaiting us, eager to learn if we're all going to live or die. Let's go find out. You can worry later what to do about the Tsingani." I helped him to his feet, then caught sight of myself in a bronze mirror as I turned to go, stopping me in my tracks. The winds that had born me up had blown my hair into serpentine tangles, wild and disheveled. I raised my hands in dismay, feeling at the gnarled locks, trying ineffectually to unknot them with my fingers. "Name of Elua! Hyacinthe, look what you did to my hair!"

"You think it will matter to Rahab?" Hyacinthe asked. I glanced sharply at him, and found him grinning; unexpected, as welcome as light in a dark place, his old grin, irrepressible, white and merry against his brown skin. He laughed at my ire, dodging a well-aimed blow and catching me in his arms. "Ah, Phèdre! You've not changed."

"Neither have you," I whispered, laying my head on his chest. "Not really, not underneath. I still know you, Hyacinthe."

We stood like that for a long time.

"You gave me a gift," he said eventually, his breath warm against my tangled hair. "That last night, on the isle, before you left me here alone . . ." His mouth curved in a smile. "It gave me something beautiful to remember. Sometimes, it was the only thing that kept me going."

"It wasn't a gift," I murmured. "I remember it, too."

"Phèdre." Hyacinthe cupped my face in his hands. "I'm going to miss you."

I met his dark, sea-changing gaze and could not pretend he was wholly unaltered. "You'll go with Sibeal."

He nodded. "She has seen, in dreams, something of what I've be come. And I have watched her, too, in the sea-mirror. We understood one another from the beginning, Phèdre, Necthana's daughters and I. Sibeal isn't you. But she's someone I could love. And you . . . I've watched you, too."

"Joscelin," I said.

"Joscelin." His smile was rueful. "That damned Cassiline, yes. Even on Alba, I saw it in both of you. I told you as much. Elua must have laughed when he bound your hearts together. Whatever power I have, it's naught to that. I'll not challenge that bond."

"This is good-bye, then? To you and I?" I asked him.

"To the Queen of Courtesans and the Prince of Travellers." Hyacinthe traced a line along the curve of my left eye, the dart-stricken one. "It's what you became after all, isn't it? And I ... I will have to acknowledge the claim of the Tsingani. If I cannot rule them as Tsingan kralis, still, I shall have a say in the succession, and what we become as a people. That much is owed."

"Then it is good-bye."

"Mayhap." Something moved in the depths of his sea-dark eyes, containing something of Hyacinthe's merriment and something of the Master of the Straits' power. "If it came to pass, on the odd year or three, that the night breezes called your name in my voice, Phèdre nó Delaunay, would you answer?"

I put both arms around his neck and kissed him hard in reply.

It was at once familiar and strange, that kiss, and I tasted in it my own lost childhood, the legacy of a whore's unwanted get, raised by a reluctant Night Court, finding friendship for the first time. All of our history was in it, scrapes and mishaps, confidences shared, and the darker shadows of adulthood; the losses of the battle of Bryn Gorrydum, where I had learned there is healing in the sharing of Naamah's arts, and the terrible sacrifice Hyacinthe had made here upon this isle. And I tasted too the strangeness his life had become, the alien knowledge of elemental forces, the salt-surge of seawater, the tidal depths, the roiling clouds and the forked violence of lightning, the pure music of the un strung winds.