I held her firmly with my right arm.

We were gazing on this little wilderness of thick pink hydrangea and luminous calla lilies, of creeping moonflowers on tree trunks and glistening white gardenias that gave off the most intoxicating scent. High above, the sky shone with reflected light.

They appeared as if out of nowhere. Fareed, with this radiant mortal boy in his arms. One moment we were alone, and then we saw them standing against the back wall, before the stately promenade of trees, and the boy—the young man—came towards us ahead of the dark hesitating figure of Fareed.

Rose ran to him. She rushed towards him and he took her at once in his arms.

Had I met him anywhere in this world, I would have been staggered by his resemblance to me, the bright golden hair, the way my hair had once been before the Dark Blood had lightened it and the repeated burnings had lightened it so that it shone almost white. That was how it had once looked, full and natural, like that, and this was a face I knew that looked at me now, a face that so resembled the boy I myself had once been.

I could see my brothers in him, my long-forgotten brothers who’d died unmourned in the mountains of the Auvergne, bodies left to rot by a mob of peasants in those awful days of revolution and destruction and competing visions for a brand-new world. A raft of sensations caught me off guard—smell of sunshine on the haystacks, and the straw bed in the sunlit room of the inn, taste of wine, sour and acidic, and the dreamy drunken vision from the inn window of that ruined château rising out of the very rocks, it seemed, a monstrous yet natural excrescence, in which I’d been born.

Rose released him tenderly as he walked towards me and I took him in my arms.

He was already passing me in height, and sturdier and more robust than I’d ever been, a human child of modern times of plenty, and out of his heart there came a palpable generosity of spirit, a great respecting curiosity and willingness to know, to love, to be overwhelmed. He was totally without fear.

I kissed him over and over. I couldn’t help it. This was such fragrant and flawless human skin, this, and these eyes that looked into mine hadn’t a particle of evil in them, and no conception of me or us as evil, and much as I couldn’t understand this, I warmed to it almost to the point of tears.

“Father,” he whispered.

I nodded, at a loss for words, and then murmured, “So it seems, and so it is. And the world’s never given me such a treasure.” But how weak these words seemed.

“You’re not angry?” he asked.