Isabelle shook her head. “If you think about it, the whole point of the Prophecy is that once the Savior comes, what I do or you do or anyone does will cease to matter. ‘He shall drive out the Breaker who Iav let into the world, and Paradise Everlasting shall be restored.’ Neither Legend nor Prophecy explain what Paradise Everlasting is supposed to entail, except to say that it is the perfect place, saturated in peace and harmony by the Builder’s beneficent will.”

“So you hope Quill is wrong,” Marie said.

Isabelle frowned, trying to put her feelings into words. “I want the world to be a better place. If someone came along and abolished slavery and ended the practice of making bloodhollows I would surely honor them, but that’s not the sort of change the Savior is supposed to bring. He’s meant to drive all wickedness from the world and perfect it.”

“And you don’t believe in perfection.”

“Not exactly. In simple arithmetic, problems have a single solution: two and two sums to four. But when you start doing real mathematics, you realize that most equations don’t have single solutions. In fact, most equations aren’t even complete by themselves but are part of larger matrices of logic. In order to perfect the world, the Savior would have to find a solution to all the world’s problems, and doing that would mean simplifying the world down to something so basic and constrained that we would have to be nothing more than ants to survive in it.”

Marie helped Isabelle into her nightclothes. “Shouldn’t Rebecca be handling this?”

Isabelle said, “Tomorrow. She’s had enough for one day, and so have I.” Her ancestral chorus kept throwing up unhelpful bits of semi-coherent babble. She’d take her next draught and escape them in sleep.

“But speaking of our latest stray; what do you think of her?” Isabelle asked.

“She’s trouble,” Marie said. “Too clever for her own good, impulsive, overconfident.”

“So she’ll get along famously with Jean-Claude,” Isabelle said.

“I don’t think Jean-Claude knows what to do with himself without a child to teach: You, me, now Rebecca.”

“At least he’s a good teacher. Speaking of which, how is your training coming along?”

Marie paused, constructing her response carefully. “Djordji says I have the potential to become a fellhand.”

Isabelle’s eyes rounded. “Truly?” Those were the clan champions of the Gyrine, duelists of great renown. “But isn’t that a title they keep to themselves?”

“When all this is over, he means to adopt me into his clan.”

“Ah,” Isabelle said, trying to summon delight on Marie’s behalf. Of all people, Marie deserved whatever life she wanted, but a cold thread stitched through her heart at the thought that she would be gone. “Good for you.”