“She’s dead,” I said quietly. “ ‘Would she had died hereafter…when there might have been time to mourn for her.’ ” My voice was no fair reflection of what I really felt, this pain for which there is no remedy, not even the passage of time. This ache that will never go away. This grief for all the mistakes I’d made and all those I’d lost.

“I knew they were dead last year,” I said in a small voice, “when we gathered at Trinity Gate and they hadn’t come, because they would have come, had they been living. I knew. I thought it was in Maharet’s compound that they died, when Khayman was first driven by the Voice to burn the archive in which they’d been studying. I had letters from them. They had loved studying with Maharet. They wondered that I wasn’t there, studying with them, talking to Maharet….”

What was I saying? What did it matter? Maharet and Mona and Quinn gone.

“I am so sorry,” said Arion.

He spoke so low no mortal spying on us could have heard him. He talked of his grief, his pain, of those he’d loved, loved for so long, now gone, of his paradisal palace being destroyed, and of all the things within those walls he’d collected over the years, destroyed, and how he’d gone off to Roland, Roland who had been his old friend from times when Pompeii had been a thriving city, and of how Roland had taken pity on him and how, thanks to Roland, the blood of the strange non-human Derek had restored him.

“Very well,” I said. “You’re here with us now.”

“Yes, and I mean to stay,” he said. “That is, if you will have me.”

“This is your Court and I am your Prince, and of course you may stay,” I said.

I closed my eyes. I was remembering Mona’s voice, Mona’s laugh, Mona the witch who had become Mona the blood drinker, naïve, brash, courageous, and in love with the Dark Gift and with all the gifts of the world of day and the world of night.

“Come,” said Arion. “Let’s go back up the hill. Your friend Louis is outside, and he’s waiting for you.”

I followed him down the aisle. Before we left I looked up at the narrow stained-glass windows. The five joyful mysteries of the Rosary were depicted down one side of the nave; and the five sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary depicted down the other side. Very much more beautiful than in my time. But strange, wasn’t it, that the scent of wax was the same, and the scent of wood. And the flicker of the vigil lights before the Virgin’s statue exactly the same as it had been over two centuries ago.

I stopped to light two candles, one for each of them.