Rhosh, known to so many others through the ages as Rhoshamandes, sat by the cavernous hearth in the old stone room looking at his fledgling with a mixture of impatience and irresistible sympathy. He had never been able to divorce himself entirely from Benedict’s boiling emotions, and maybe he had never really wanted to do that. Of all his companions and fledglings through the centuries, he loved Benedict the most—this child of Merovingian royalty who had been such a dreamy Latin scholar in his time, so eager to understand those years which the world now called the Dark Ages. How he’d cried when brought into the Blood, sure of his ultimate damnation, and only come round to worship Rhoshamandes instead of his Christian god—never believing in a world untainted by fear of perdition. But this great superstitious fear was, however, part of Benedict’s eternal charm.

And this hapless child had had a gift for making other blood drinkers better than himself as time passed. Now that was quite a mystery to Rhosh, but it was fact.

It was Benedict who had made the young Notker the Wise of Prüm, who likely survived to this day, a mad genius sustained on music as much as human blood.

Pretty Benedict, always a joy to look at, if not to listen to, whose tears could be as beguiling as his smiles.

Rhoshamandes was dressed in what might have passed for a monk’s long hooded robe of heavy gray wool with a thick black leather belt around the waist, and big deep sleeves. But the robe was in fact made from fine cashmere, and the buckle on his belt was pewter and revealed a delicately modeled face of Medusa with writhing snakes for hair and a howling mouth. He wore exquisitely crafted brown leather sandals because he didn’t feel the cold here on this craggy green island in the Outer Hebrides.

He had short and very soft golden-brown hair and large blue eyes. He’d been born thousands of years ago on the island of Crete to parents of Indo-European descent, and gone down into Egypt when he was twenty. His skin was the smooth creamy tan of immortals who go into the sun often in order to pass for human, and it made his eyes appear wondrously bright and beautiful.

He and Benedict were speaking English now, the language they’d shared for the last seven hundred years, more or less, the Old French and the Latin having passed from their daily speech but not their libraries. Rhosh knew ancient tongues, tongues never known to Benedict.

“It burnt them all,” Benedict sobbed. “It destroyed them completely,” he said in his muffled, hopeless voice.

“Sit up and look at me,” said Rhoshamandes. “I am talking to you, Benedict. Now look at me and tell me precisely what happened.”