After a second, the Prince Undying sank his head into his hands. A stylus fell out of his pocket and rolled across the sleek black-and-bone tiles. It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow.

Then Augustine said, quite irrelevantly: “I wouldn’t have called it glutinous. She was just lucky that Cythe-re-a Love-day trips off the tongue. Now, mine would alliterate in a way I couldn’t have abided. Abode?”

“I will say this,” said Mercy presently, acting as though Augustine had never said a word. “I never mourned for Loveday Heptane. She did one good thing with her life, and she knew it.”

“Eulogise her,” said the Emperor, through his hands. “For God’s sake, eulogise her anyway. Eulogise them both.”

Augustine reached over and squeezed the shoulder of the man who became God and the God who became man and yet still invoked himself, apparently; the Lyctor got up with a grunt as though it hurt him and went to stand at the foot of the altar. You saw now that he was tall, and not particularly imposing, but—there was something removed from real life in the lineaments of his face, as though he had once looked at something terrible and it had lodged in his cheeks and forehead. He twitched open his First House cloak and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops of his elegant trousers—his white robe floated around his shoulders like an overjacket, filmy and beautiful—and he cleared his throat.

“Cytherea was gorgeous,” he said simply. “Ten thousand years, and I never heard her say an unkind word except when it was very funny. She loved us unguardedly, all of us, which showed both her patience and her enormous capacity … She was a worthy Lyctor and a beloved Hand—and Loveday gave her to us, so I suppose God bless Loveday.”

Mercymorn pressed her hand down close to the small fat blush roses. She had to draw herself together quite tightly. Her voice was light and a trifle strange when she said, “She could be a dreadful little fool. But she was generally an endearing dreadful little fool, and her death was beneath her.”

She slowly turned those dreamy hurricane eyes on the pews, which meant she turned them on you and Ianthe, and she started. She said, “The infants are awake.”