“I made it into colors,” Viktor said to me now. “I saw the pain in red and yellow, and when it was at its worst, it was pure white. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. I couldn’t. And no one came out of the Council Chamber to tell us. And we didn’t dare move. Louis was holding Rose when it all happened. I wanted to hold her. I couldn’t hold her.”

Louis sat in a chair nearby, quietly resplendent in his Lestat-chosen clothes, the inevitable dark blue velvet jacket and the layers of tiny, subtle lace at his throat, and the emerald shining on his finger. His boots looked like onyx.

Inside me, Amel said: “I didn’t mean to make the pain, I didn’t mean for there to be any pain; I couldn’t stop the pain. The pain was never the point.”

This was the first time he’d spoken to me since I had awakened. He hadn’t been there for the first hour while I lay obediently in my coffin bed of satin, unable to risk the last rays of the sun above.

I spoke to him silently. “What do you want now?” I asked.

“Want?” The long sigh, a sigh so distinctly his I would have known it was his sigh if I’d heard it amid a multitude of sighs. “Want.” Not a question. Just a remark. Silence. The fire crackling behind the brass fireplace screen.

The room swam in my sight. A chamber fit for a prince.

“Listen to me, all of you,” I said. “He didn’t mean for there to be pain. He will try very hard never to cause such pain again.”

Viktor nodded.

Rose stirred against my shoulder. “Even if it has been only for half a year,” she said, “it has been a lifetime.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Viktor. “What, are we holding a funeral for ourselves before we’re even dead?” He looked at me. “Father, you are not going to allow these Replimoids to destroy us!”

He stood up, facing me, his arms folded. Powerful shoulders, fine body. No father in the world ever asked for a finer son. “Throughout the Château,” he said, “everyone is grim! How can they be so grim?”

I nodded that I understood what he was saying, but I had no words.

“My mother felt the pain,” he said. “She called from Paris. It must have been felt all over the world. Benedict and Rhoshamandes must have felt it. I wish I knew how many of us there are in the whole world.”

“No one knows that, not even Amel,” I said.

Little pulse at the back of my neck, little spasm in the blood vessels under the skin of my temples.