I CLIMBED SWIFTLY UP the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had so exhausted me when I was a boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fir trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I’d first returned in the twentieth century.

It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Château with her glorious lighted windows.

Oh, the cold winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that he ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter.

“We are alone now, you and I,” I said, speaking aloud to Amel. “At least it seems so.”

“We are,” he said. His usual tone, distinct and clear.

“You have to tell me all you know of this now.”

“That’s just it, I have so little to tell you,” he responded. “I know that this Garekyn knows me and speaks to me as if he knows me and spoke to me through Eleni when I was in her, and I saw him up close, and I tell you, he is the positive replica of a human male.”

“And in the blood, what did you see?”

“I wasn’t there when Armand drained him. I was there when he fought with Eleni. I gave her every assistance I could, but it came to nothing. I can’t move limbs or stop them from moving. I can’t increase or decrease the power of a blood drinker. I gave her courage, but it wasn’t enough.”

“That doesn’t stop you from trying to move my limbs,” I said.

“I admit that. Wouldn’t you want to move limbs if you were me? Wouldn’t you want to pilot the ship? Look, I don’t know what the city is or what it means. But I do know this. I did once know all about it.”

“How do you mean?”

“It has to do with me. I knew that the first night we dreamed of it. I thought the dream was coming from someone in the Blood, of course. But now I’m not so sure. I think the images came from deep inside me, and the images are from my past, and the images want me to remember that past.”