His friend Medor, who had taken leave from his position as provost of Orane, handing that role to Aubrey, was hesitant at first to explore the city and its people. He was by far the most anxious of the four of them here. But one night, over a dinner of lampreys and fresh-caught fish on the terrace of a tavern by the port, he stood abruptly when the meal was done and walked out with another customer who had been looking at him—a tall man, younger than Medor, but not so much younger—and his life changed.

He was freed in that city to be what he could not be in Orane. And that tall man, a merchant from Batiara, Tazio di Cenna, became the partner, the companion, Medor Colle had never had in his life—and remained so. Remained. We can be given such gifts sometimes, if we are deeply fortunate.

Thierry Villar wrote there, from the start, steadily. Many of the poems were about Orane. They became, for a number of readers (and scholars, afterwards) his defining works, those poems from his Sarantium years. This happens often in art: being away from a loved place brings it more vividly to us. The need to evoke, recapture—images, feelings, memories. He flourished in Sarantium, remembering home.

Silvy Gautier, walking alone one morning, stopped by the open doorway of a small workshop and stepped inside to see what was happening there. They were crafting mosaics.

They greeted her courteously (not always a thing that happened in a city notorious for arrogance). They let her observe quietly and then, as she kept coming back, they undertook to teach her some of their craft. She became an apprentice, initially cleaning and sweeping and sorting tesserae, but, after an interval, she was allowed to handle and place background stones herself, for pieces that would go into the homes of the wealthy.

Most of these would be destroyed when the city fell.

She came to know the pleasure of making, day after day, adding that to the joy of being with her love, and being loved.

They never had a child, she and Thierry. Physicians consulted (another reason they had come east) included a grave Kindath with a long grey beard. Remedies were proposed and tried.

They never had a child. Sorrow will be present among joys. Our lives are made that way.

They had intended to come for a visit and sail home. They stayed for years, all four of them. Gauvard Colle died peacefully there—friends by his deathbed, not only the three of them. He went to whatever he believed in, content with his life, at ease with mystery. He was laid to rest, by virtue of the intercession of a friend of rank at court, in a corner of Valerius’s Great Sanctuary of Jad’s Holy Wisdom, under one of the smaller domes.

Silvy, still young, died only a year after that.