It was true, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she’d stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.

“Might she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.

Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn’t done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”

“Well, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”

“What?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.

Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The Goodness wasn’t sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes’s Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn’t old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.

The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn’t there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she also wasn’t going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino’s project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father’s grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn’t cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father’s grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.