It was all right touching them, feeling their skin. He had not felt the frisson he’d been dreading. However powerful they were, they were suffused with a genuine human heat, and it was all right.

Yet now that they were going down the stairs, Derek felt a cruel little surge of joy that Roland was dead. Roland had been punished for what he had done to Derek. Roland had lost his “immortality.” Roland was no more. That Arion had aided in the punishing of Roland, this too made Derek happy, but it felt very bad to Derek to be happy that any living creature was dead. It flashed through his mind suddenly that when they did get away to some safe place, they would all be joyful because death would be no part of it, and fear would be no part of it, and they would be a colony and a kindred in their own little world. A deep sense of Atalantaya came back to him, as it had last night all during Kapetria’s story, of warm nights in Atalantaya when it seemed all living things were content and flourishing, and the music played on the street corners and in the little cafés and the flowers perfumed the air, and the tall thin trees with their yellowish-green leaves sent lacy shadows over the shining pavements, and the birds sang, all those tiny birds that lived under the great dome of Atalantaya, of which they’d not spoken a word, any of them, behold such birds.

Kapetria went to the window and moved back the white curtain. Derek stood beside her, looking down on them as they stepped out under the lamp above the sign of the inn and then both figures vanished.

Kapetria uttered a small delighted laugh. “Did you see which direction they went?”

“No,” said Derek. “They simply disappeared.”

“Now if we could only move like that.”

She stood gazing down at the empty street. Derek could hear the dull echoing thrum of the music from the Château.

“It’s Marius who rules, isn’t it?” he asked in a whisper.

“Not really,” said Kapetria, still looking out and up over the pointed roofs opposite. “I thought so at first. I thought it was obvious. But I was wrong. It’s the Prince who rules. It’s the Prince who’s decided to trust us.”

“Is that why you gave him the blood?” Derek asked. “Are you sure you should have done that?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Kapetria said. “Don’t worry, Derek.”

“If you say so,” he responded. He felt better already. He felt that nothing bad could ever happen to him again if Kapetria was here. He thought of all the times that Roland had drunk his blood. And to think there was this blood drinker doctor, Fareed, and what he might have given to study the blood.

Kapetria was still looking out into the night.