“There are other things for us to talk about now,” I said. “Gregory, Seth, Teskhamen, and Sevraine have gone to find Rhoshamandes. They left before I even opened my eyes because they wake sooner than I wake. Arion soon followed. So did Allesandra, and Everard de Landen, and Eleni. These are Rhosh’s fledglings, as you know.”

“But you didn’t give your permission for this, did you?” asked Louis. It was asked in such a neutral way that I couldn’t interpret it for or against.

“No,” I said. “Maybe they’ve gone to lay down the law that Rhoshamandes cannot harm the Replimoids any more than he can seek to harm us.”

They seemed to accept this, and I sensed as I had so often in the last six months that everyone, near everyone, expected me to articulate certain things, and when I did articulate them, there was inevitable relief for the moment.

“I see no way out for Rhoshamandes,” said Louis in a soft voice. He wasn’t challenging me, just reflecting.

“Well, there’s at least a chance for peace,” said Rose. She wiped her hair out of her eyes, and stared for a moment at her hand, at her fingernails. Her fingernails were the only real giveaway right now that she was preternatural. They were shining. She couldn’t help but look at them, be fascinated by their sheen. Luracastria.

“A chance, yes,” said Viktor, “but frankly I wish that Rhoshamandes was no more. Don’t we have enough to worry about now without him?”

“It’s time for me to show myself and do what I can to calm the others,” I said. “I have to go out into the ballroom, no choice.”

“We’ll go with you,” Louis said.

I headed out and through the long series of connective salons which stood between me and the ballroom of this my glorified lair. The music was playing as always, and this evening it was Sybelle at the harpsichord and Antoine conducting and Notker’s singers chanting in a monosyllabic delirium—in a riotous waltz spinning off of Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” carrying the melodies to savage heights.

When I stepped into the room, I saw it was packed, and almost every single blood drinker was dancing, either alone or with a partner or a ring of partners. Only a few sat here and there, some caught up in the music as if in a trance. At least a hundred newcomers or recent comers were in the crowd, and if there was any panic over the Replimoids, it certainly was not visible to me. Yielding to the music, yielding to the dance, that is what mattered in the ballroom. Faces brightened as they saw me, bows as they saw me, salutes from the ragged and the bejeweled.

At once, the gorgeously attired Zenobia took my hand and moved out on the dance floor.

“I’m so grateful that Marius has stayed behind with us,” she said. She was delicate of face and build and her fine shimmering black hair was artfully threaded with ropes of pearls. Eyes that had gazed on Byzantium, eyes that had seen Hagia Sophia in all her glory.