Duncan has become ever more himself. I left him because I couldn’t take any more of his ravings about the gray caps. Everything is focused on the gray caps. Even if he did love me, I’d never be more than ancillary to those damn gray caps. It didn’t help that my parents hated him for, as they saw it, spoiling the innocence of their little girl. And because he was impossible to live with, and because he was like a child—he always wanted to be in love, so when he wasn’t in love with me, he was in love with his studies. He wore me out. He was so intense. How can anyone be so intense all of the time? I couldn’t breathe, or think. And his opinions on my research! Always picking at it, always so sure he was right and I was wrong. I don’t think that I would ever be more than a student in his eyes, so I had to get away from him. Yes, I loved him, but, sometimes, as I am discovering, you need more than love.

(A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness—was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than safeguarding the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.)

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

As Duncan’s romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’s past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.

AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion—and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war—so that the Broadsheet, which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. (Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the Broadsheet, I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.)