Madame had flinched, and loosed a dainty yelp midway through this, when her fingers, tucking the minor’s sash about His waist, encountered the sudden undulation of a swissnake, prowling through the coat to test the many security systems Utopia had worked into the weft. Such a mother does not let her Son march forth armored by common cloth. Madame clucked at Voltaire, who bowed silent apology, while the tailor and valet who dressed the Great Prince snickered at the Utopian barbarian.

«You’re quite right, my Little One,» Madame answered as she recovered her smile. «You must think of Your Great Conversation, against whose infinity any finite thing weighs as nothing, right? Right?» she coaxed, taking His chin in her soft hand. «Think, as You say, only of the Host. Your logic is almost perfect; I would criticize only by reminding You that ants are far more like humans than humans are like the Author of Sun and snow and soul and cyanide. Or like Yourself.»

Cyanide seemed a strange choice for her, death too quick for thought; Madame I associate with slow contagions, the kind that drip invisibly from host to host, as the dark sensayer arts she bares now dripped from her through Dominic, through Julia, through Julia’s pawns and Conclave to a vulnerable world.

«I hate suffering.» Even with His face inches from hers, the Child did not meet His mother’s eyes. «I do not want to be an Author of it, even as co-Author of the Great Conversation.»

«It’s not Your deeds which make the suffering exist, my Sweet, it is the capacity for suffering which He planted in His creations, against Your good advice.» She flicked the side of His nose with a playful finger. «Now, come, let’s go show Your father and the others Your new clothes.»

He to Whom Distance is an enemy took some seconds to process and recover from the slight but unwilled motion of His head which her nose-flick had caused. «I have a father here? Which?»

«It’s all Your stray’s fault.» She smacked me gently with lotion-perfected fingers. «Cornel turned up because they tracked Mycroft and realized You must be coming here, and Your dear Aunt Bryar also tracked Mycroft, and each of them quite refuses to let the other see You first. But Bryar couldn’t come in person, just on screen, and You know His Majesty my fiancé doesn’t want me to see Cornel without someone else to chaperone, so I invited Your Dominic to chaperone us, thinking the poor pup could use some wholesome French between this tiresome Mitsubishi nonsense, and then Your Uncle Felix just turned up, the way he does. Now it’s quite the crowd.»

Saladin, sprawled on his belly in a window-shaped patch of sun behind his mistress’s chaise longue, laughed. Can you see him, reader? How his bronze skin glows with Phoebus’s touch?