But his idea bore no fruit. He looked and looked, but there were no malevolent darting shapes living in the weed—or the corpses thereof, which might have justified the expenditure of ops.

He was two hours into the creation of an enhancement working to create a lens of air when he realized that he knew nothing of lenses.

Tancreda rolled her eyes. “I will go to the library again,” she said. “Why not just ask a glass grinder?”

Morgon slapped his knee. “Brilliant!” he said, and was out the door with neither purse nor cloak.

In the emptiness of his absence, Tancreda turned to her noble brother. “You see why I love him,” she said.

He shrugged. “No. He’s quite mad.” He looked out into the street, where Morgon was running—long legs stretching as if in a sprint in the hippodrome.

Tancreda pulled on a cloak, found her talisman for the library, and pulled on a hood and a mask. “No. He doesn’t always communicate well, but he’s not mad.”

“Why the sudden fascination with lenses? We were reading Old Archaic, and then—zip! That’s all done.” Stefanos laughed. “Like a small child.”

“He can be hard to follow,” Tancreda admitted. “But if I read him aright, he decided that the working does function, and that it is killing or removing or perhaps summoning something very small indeed. And now he needs to create the means to observe and prove his theory. Hence the lens.”

Stefanos looked at her a moment. “You understood that from what—his grunting?”

Tancreda shrugged. “Give me twenty ducats. Yes—and the way his hand moved on the passage, and the way he picked up the glass. Yes.”

“You’re as mad as he,” her brother said. “And don’t imagine I don’t know you’ve kissed him, you wanton.”

The last was said with less venom than might be imagined.

“I still know where you keep your little Ifriquy’an,” Tancreda said with equanimity. “So we’ll have no holier than thou here.”

“You can’t marry him,” her brother said. It was more a question than an answer. In fact, he whined it.

“I can, and I will,” Tancreda said. “You’ll see.”

Stefanos had been seeing his sister get her way on all things since he was born. He didn’t doubt her.

“Family dinners…” he moaned.

But the door slammed, and she was gone, leaving the young man alone with a fabulously ancient manuscript, a cat, and a glass of algae.

He patted the cat.

Two hundred leagues further west, an old man made a solitary camp where the mighty Cohocton met with the Dodock coming from the hills to the south. He moved stiffly, unpacking his mule and laying things out, then carefully feeding his fine riding horse and big mule. By the time the two animals were fed and calm, it was dark, and his fire of birch and dry maple was the only light—or warmth—for many miles.

He warmed his hands for a while and then fried some bacon in a small iron skillet with a folding handle.