“Thank you,” he said. “I’m glad, very glad. I want to know you,” he said. “I want to know you well enough that I can come and go at Court and it will be nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve heard of the Friday-night balls, the theater, your little performance of Macbeth, and the chapel wedding of Rose and Viktor.” He smiled. “All this speaks of vitality,” he said, “vibrant communal life, something that’s never before united the Undead. Yea gods, are we done forever with cults and ancient worship? And I know you’re exhausted. Others have told me. They worry that it wears you out, and I don’t blame you for leaving the rules to a council. You can’t make the rules and be this powerful creative monarch.”

“Then it’s decided,” I said. “You’ll come and often. You’ll come tonight and tomorrow, whether I’m there or not, and you’ll come when you wish. You’ll walk through the front doors, just as blood drinkers do who are coming from all over the world. Macbeth is only the first of the plays I want to do, by the way. I want to move on to Othello. The music composed for the balls is being recorded and collected, and Marius is painting again, though how he finds the time I don’t know. He’s covering new bedchambers and salons with his Italianesque murals.”

I realized I was talking too fast. I was excited. He’d spoken of exactly the aspects of the Court that excited me, playing Macbeth myself on our little stage for an audience of two hundred blood drinkers, young and old, and the Great Sevraine providing her enchanting Lady Macbeth with a deep current of feeling that astonished her companions. Of course we had our critics—the cynical ones, the dark, deeply conservative ones who wanted to know why blood drinkers would bother with anything, presumably, but savaging humans for their blood.

You can’t build a culture with Devils out of Hell!

“The Hell I can’t” had been my answer. I went on for a moment, talking about Notker’s musicians and how new musicians had appeared to make up our orchestras. I spoke of Antoine, my long-lost fledgling, writing concertos again for the violin. And then a sudden darkness came over me, because Antoine wanted to bring over into the Blood a musical secretary who could transcribe for him all he performed and recorded, and that had brought up the central question I couldn’t yet face: