“You think I can’t—”

“Make a speech,” he challenged. “Make a speech for us right now about how Mycroft Canner is a poor puppy who got kicked once too often. If you can orate on the subject for two minutes without crying, then I’ll believe that you can get us out of this.”

Rage swelled in Kosala’s face, but turned at once to tears.

The Anonymous pressed her to him. “I think Felix is right. You’re proposing that you lie to your own Hive about your opinions. It’s a brave offer, but do you really want to live with that? I don’t think any of us could do it, and I don’t want to ask it of you.”

“Quite right.” The unknown Lady spoke up now—‘Madame’ they had called her? She seemed all smiles and good sense beneath the mask of makeup which made her seem as otherworldly as a china doll. Are you surprised, reader, that she stayed quiet so long? What cares she what happens to this little murderer when the fact that only her salon can solve the crisis is a victory itself? “We’ll find another way to persuade the populace, one that doesn’t put all the strain on one person, or endanger reelection, or precedent, or the law.” She glanced from Power to Power as she listed each one’s concern. “I have all the resources we could want here, and no one expects this decision to be quick. We’ll take our time and sort it out as friends. That is what my salon is for.”

She looked straight at me during the last sentence, exposition for the outsider’s benefit, to make sure I understood her, what she was, her place among the Powers. Doubt burned through me. What I had done I did in the confidence that I knew how the world worked, how it would react, how the Hives and strats and laws and numbers ebb and flow, as Geneva, Aeneas, and Deputy Censor Kohaku taught me to predict. Now, just as Eureka Weeksbooth would thirteen years later, I found a snarl in my web. I felt like an old astronomer, who had spent a lifetime plotting the courses of a flock of distant stars, only to discover on my deathbed that there was a great black something out there pulling all astray—what doom did this spell for the rocket I had launched, loaded with hopes and false calculations? Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.

That moment was when I saw the Child. I do not know how long He had been there, standing close beside my cage, a volume of Cicero forgotten in His hands as His studies found a new object. He wore a tiny mourning suit, fresh from the tailors, period and perfect, trimmed with a Porphyrogene’s imperial purple, since at eight years old He had not yet discovered that the adults would accomodate if He voiced His preference for pure black. His eyes reminded me of the late King Isabel Carlos the First, whom Makenna Mardi had brought me to meet upon his royal deathbed at the venerable age of one hundred and forty-nine. There had been something unfair in the old king’s eyes, a hunger to snatch this world back from the foolish children who had inherited it. I remember shuddering, thinking my generation would have stood helpless against his political guile, honed over a century and a half, that only death relieved us of the necessity of parricide. And now those terrifying eyes seemed to stare at me once more, from a Child’s face.