Gauvard hadn’t intended to say what he’d said to the two men as they left. He’d been distracted by their youth, probably. Pretty boys. He remembered being pretty once. But they were true, the words he’d spoken at the door: he did feel old, but he wasn’t ready to surrender what life might yet offer before he crossed over to whatever would follow.

There was a paradox here (he liked paradoxes): he’d told the appealing poet that he shouldn’t look in his work or life for certainty, or share everything he knew. But here he was, walking back to his sitting room and his fire, wanting to gain more from life in what others called Jad’s world. The mysteries of it. He smiled, with no one there to see it.

Well, his cat. Who jumped up on his lap again, as he subsided into his usual cushioned chair.

They really had been pretty men, he thought. The poet, Villar, was the sort who’d have tormented his reveries when he was younger. Quick-witted, alert, a smooth, softly bearded face, probably sweeter without the beard. It had been years, he thought, since that actual torment had occurred within him because of a man or a woman.

Lovemaking, given how he was made, had always been complex, requiring a special kind of partner. He’d travelled in search of those (among other things), years ago. All the way to Sarantium, where rumour had it that people such as he were known and accepted in some quarters, not fiercely rejected by family or so-called friends. And the rumours had proven blessedly true, for once.

He’d stayed for years in the wonder of that city. Diminished from its splendour a thousand years before, but still glorious. There was something about the ruins everywhere, how they made you feel walking through, or past. The thoughts they shaped. Fallen statues, monuments from long ago, inscriptions to long-dead charioteers. He had even seen the fabled night fires dancing once, moving in darkness ahead of him along an empty street very late, then gone. Gone. He would remember that as long as he remembered anything, he thought.

He was also remembering now the small house he’d leased not far from the ruins of the Hippodrome, vivid, wondrous pleasures taken there.

And kindness found for a time.

You could live, Gauvard thought, on the memories of love, physical and otherwise. He was doing so, wasn’t he? Right now, by the fire, with a cat? He had come home because he’d known he could do well here, shape a proper livelihood, which had been challenging in the east. Still, to this day, he didn’t know if it had been the right thing to do. Lives were built on such decisions, and regrets sometimes.

A sharp nudge in his mind. A prodding from the half-world. He lived with those, too. Always had, from first awareness as a child.