“You can’t get them out of here soon enough. We’ve handled politically sensitive prisoners before, and our share of whackos, but this has shut us down, completely shut us down. We figured we’d have to keep them away from other prisoners, but it’s just as bad with the guards. I know that look a prisoner gets when they see a—if you’ll excuse the expression—a piece of ass they can’t resist. Half my staff has that look now, more than half. And who can blame them? The nutcase won’t wear clothes. Ripped the uniform to shreds whenever we dressed them by force, just stood there totally stark naked and… distracting. Do you have any idea how distracting—”

“Yes, I know.”

“They won’t eat,” the warden ranted on, “won’t drink, won’t sit down or even lean on anything.”

“I see.”

“They just stood there naked in the center of their cell until they passed out from exhaustion. Got a concussion on the way down, then flipped out when they woke up in the infirmary, attacked the sheets.”

“Of course they did.” These gentle interruptions came from the companion who followed behind me and the warden, his soft steps precise, not like a guard’s stiff march, but like a dancer’s.

“Why? Why attack the sheets?”

“They weren’t silk.”

“So?” I smiled at the warden’s obliviousness as he rambled on. “I wasn’t told about the ex-president being allergic to cotton or anything.”

The view through the infirmary door before us cut short any answer. Milo’s Venus shattered at my feet could not have raised worse sobs in me. The prisoner’s sun-gold mane was sweat-tarnished, his alabaster skin faded from moon-pale delicacy to death’s-door sickness. His fingertips, once so delicate it seemed they could have plucked one flake from a snowbank, were all bandages and scab, his perfect nails cracked from the clawing struggle of the arrest. The injuries of his fall were still with him, bandages on his cheek, around his ribs, his ankle, while newer gauze across his forearms failed to conceal more recent injuries, where he had attacked his own arm after the medics dared mix liquid nutrients with his royal blood. Soft fetters prevented him from increasing the self-damage, but his frame was so weak that he did not as much struggle as quiver in his bonds, like a dragonfly whose death throes are indistinguishable from the breeze that continues to stir the carcass hours after life has left. Zeus himself would not have recognized his Ganymede.

«Be easy, Your Grace,» I called as I broke through the clinging prison wraiths to reach the duke’s bedside. «We’re here to move you to more proper quarters.»