That He did. I had never questioned why He manifested in the body of a youth, since angels and gods are usually youths in art and icon, but now, as His mother’s tailor tested the new seams across His shoulders, He seemed indeed a different kind of Youth, no longer childlike—like Artemis or playful Hermes—but a Youth of strength—like Mars. It was His new coat. I can’t guess how many museums and histories Madame’s tailors studied to devise this web of buttons and cording, not the uniform of any specific historic nation-state but somehow invoking all of them, that whole vague European flavor of the age when being an officer meant blood and breeding. It was not all black. He Who Visits had been so determined all the years I knew Him to wear only what He considers the opposite of His Peer’s color that I had never imagined Him in anything but black. Even now cautious Madame had been prepared to change it all to black in case he balked. But when He saw her first offering, a black coat trimmed with triple-stranded military braid in royal gold, the porphyry purple of Censor and Emperor, and the pure gray of Romanova’s Graylaws—my Master, like me, recognized the right thing. This coat was shorter in the back than his old one, a thumb above the knee. His coats, like all worn at Madame’s, are short in the front, but long on the sides and behind, with those pleated panels at the back which give Enlightenment-era coats a gownlike breadth, to drape across a horse, or swirl as one spins to sting a foe with blade or tongue. This new jacket had the same voluminous pleating, but was more crisply stiffened than usual, which lent vigor to His motions, like the hiss of a bustle. It is good, I think, to lend some extra impact to the rare occasions when He moves.

«What I do now puts you in great danger, Mother.»

She tucked back a wave of His off-black Spanish hair. «I’ve been playing the most dangerous game in the world for decades, my little Prince. No need to fret if You spill a little water in the ocean.»

I could not read ‘fretting’ in His lifeless figure, which stands still as a dress-up doll even when not serving as one, but I have not the lady’s sensitive imagination.

«I may cause your death without Willing your death,» He warned.

«Sweetness, no one’s going to cause my death except me. You do what You must to make Your bright new world.»

«A new world is betrayal. Change. If people’s works have value, then once the first progenitors set patterns for life, all efforts at change become filial betrayal.»

«Not when what the parent truly wants is to see her Child do great things. But come,» she coaxed, «what really has my little Sage in such a fuddle?»

«A question, posed to Me by a human: What Good Am I?»