Part 1
The second morning of the year came to Long Stones in pale winter gold and found Philip awake in the unfamiliar condition of being entirely satisfied with his life.
For several seconds, he did not move. His rooms held the deep quiet of a family wing the household had not yet chosen to disturb. A coal shifted behind the grate. Through a parting in the curtains, sunlight crossed the carpet, climbed the bed, and rested over the tangled evidence of the previous day.
Philip sat against the pillows with the quilt gathered at his waist and stared at nothing. His body felt heavy in a pleasant, comprehensive way. Muscles he had never associated with romance had submitted formal complaints, and somewhere beneath the quilt his left leg had gone numb.
He smiled before he could stop himself.
Yesterday morning, Natalia had asked permission to undo one button. Now it was morning again. Apparently, time really was relative. In space, time dilated. Around Natalia, it contracted.
Beside him, Natalia slept, and that alone held his attention. Consciousness usually arrived all at once for Natalia: eyes open, mind alert, surroundings assessed before an ordinary person could finish bringing the world into focus. Sleep, after all, was optional for Familiars.
This morning, she appeared to be genuinely and deeply asleep.
Her breathing was slow and deep. One arm had stretched above her head during the night, the hand relaxed against the pillow; the other lay beneath the quilt between them. Golden hair spread across the linen in a disorder that would have formed a Renaissance masterpiece. Her lips remained slightly parted. There was no tension in her face, no small analytical crease between her brows, no sign that somewhere behind her closed eyes she was assessing threats, planning contingencies, or revising a theory of romance through comparative political history.
Philip glanced at the clock on the mantel. Nearly nine.
The concerns of the previous day reemerged.
Still need to get Lydia to check on her mana level!
Low mana had once left Natalia sleeping through whole stretches of the day. The thought should have carried more urgency than it did. Yet she looked peaceful rather than exhausted.
Memory supplied a more flattering explanation, and heat reached Philip's face. Perhaps he had actually been the one who tired her out. The thought produced a brief and deeply undignified glow of masculine satisfaction.
It lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then memory objected.
Strongly.
He suddenly remembered that he had met the full weight of Natalia's passion like a stream against a waterfall.
Philip had mistaken the first pause for an ending. Natalia had curled against him, listening to his pulse return towards survivable levels while asking whether a particular difference had been caused by angle or pressure, and whether the word adventurous indicated physical difficulty, moral disapproval, or merely unusual furniture requirements.
She had been extraordinarily patient. That was the problem. Whenever Philip announced that he required rest, she accepted the decision immediately, settled contentedly against him, and waited without complaint. Then her fingers would find his pulse. A few minutes later, her eyes would brighten.
"Master, I thought of something."
By the third occurrence, those five words had acquired the emotional force of an incoming artillery warning.
And the thing that stayed with him was not her stamina. Stamina was merely the capacity to continue. Natalia possessed something considerably more dangerous: enthusiasm.
Every discovery delighted her. Every answer suggested another question. Sometimes she reviewed what had happened with the concentration of a researcher confronting unexpected results. At other times she forgot analysis entirely and simply pulled him back into a caress, laughing softly against his chest when his attempt at protest dissolved.
His body had been less adaptable. The few years of additional youth had proved useful, but not inexhaustible. At one point, by every physiological measure available to him, the balance had been spent. Natalia had kissed him, whispered something that did not survive memory intact, and somewhere between will, affection, and ego, an additional energy reserve had appeared.
His body had already gone the extra mile twice over. After the first two rounds, each followed by a long recovery, Philip had been quite certain there would not be a third. Then, after nearly two hours curled together in what he had naively assumed was the end of the matter, Natalia had lifted her head, her eyes bright with renewed enthusiasm, and proposed another position.
His spirit had agreed immediately.
His physiology had filed a formal objection.
Somehow, to Philip's own astonishment, the objection had been overruled.
Could that have been… mana?! Did I just become … a real mage?
He still did not know. The possibility that sheer will, affection, and a sufficiently persuasive Natalia had somehow taught him to draw upon mana for that particular purpose was embarrassing enough that he shelved the notion of asking the System for clarification the moment it emerged.
Not that the suspected mana had really made any difference. If anything, it had merely prolonged the process. Natalia had noticed the recovery before he did. Her eyes had widened with delighted recognition. She had still asked before acting. Somehow, that had made refusal more difficult rather than less.
Philip had also discovered that Lydia's romantic collection contained works whose authors appeared to regard the limitations of human anatomy as optional suggestions. Some of the positions described were so wildly exaggerated that Philip suspected they had been invented without consulting an actual spine.
He had declined a great many of Natalia's proposals. Some tested the boundaries of practicality. Others tested the limits of the human physique. One in particular had acquired the status of a pending appeal.
His resources were finite. Her list, curiosity, and exuberance appeared to be infinite.
He had gone into the night feeling like a river finally released from a dam. It had taken Natalia remarkably little time to make him realize the chasm between rivers and oceans.
None of which explained why she was still asleep. The mana question returned for half a heartbeat. Philip decided against treating it as urgent for the sake of being able to delight just a little longer in the contentment of the moment.
Natalia shifted faintly at his side, and Philip went still as though caught committing an offence. But she only breathed out and settled deeper into sleep, the movement turning her slightly toward the light.
His eyes followed.
The sun crossed her raised arm first, laying a warm line from wrist to shoulder. Her skin possessed the soft lustre he had spent months trying not to notice consciously. There were no marks from yesterday, no fatigue beneath the eyes, no disorder except in her hair. Even the fine hairs that should have caught the light along an ordinary forearm were almost absent. Beneath the arm, her skin remained smooth and perfect.
Philip's admiration faltered for half a heartbeat.
She is … surreal.
The thought arrived without invitation. No scars from childhood falls. No faded mark from a vaccination. No small asymmetry produced by growth, habit, weather, or accident. Her body had entered the world complete and designed for perfection.
The unease lasted only a moment. Natalia's fingers curled loosely against the pillow, and a quiet sound escaped her—not a word, only the small, contented noise of someone sleeping in warmth. The surreal beauty became humanlike again.
Philip's gaze moved downward.
The quilt crossed her diagonally, covering the centre of her body and most of the side turned away from him. The near side remained exposed from beneath her ribs to the upper curve of her hip. Her waist drew inward in a clean, exquisite line before sweeping outward again beneath the blanket. Her figure was art incarnate.
Until now, he had always been too shy to appreciate it freely. Even now, some part of him resisted the sight—not because he wanted it any less, but because having someone this beautiful, this intimate, felt too good to be true. So good that accepting it seemed almost dishonest, as if he were taking a romance intended for someone more deserving.
His heart accelerated.
Surprisingly, after yesterday, there should have been no remaining mystery capable of producing this reaction. He had seen her. Touched her. Learned, with considerable embarrassment, that knowing the general geography of a person did nothing to lessen the effect of morning light crossing bare skin.
Natalia was still breathtaking.
No. More than that.
She was real.
She was here, beside him.
The distinction opened something in him.
In Bortinto, Philip had spent years in rooms containing beautiful people. His profession naturally drew them. They appeared beneath hotel chandeliers, at skyline recruiting receptions, and at private-wealth dinners where the wine cost more than Philip's weekly groceries. Polished men in tailored suits. Women whose effortless appearance concealed considerable labour. Faces trained to communicate exactly the warmth appropriate to the assets under discussion.
At institutional meetings, the choreography had been restrained. A pension fund wanted governance documents, attribution tables, scenario testing, and a portfolio manager who could explain three bad quarters without appearing to discover them for the first time. Sales arranged the meeting. His boss presented the philosophy. Philip sat farther down the table with the quantitative material and spoke when someone asked about tracking error, drawdowns, or the portfolio's latest failure.
Then there were the private-wealth meetings, with people who occupied the sort of social and financial world Philip himself now inhabited.
He remembered one evening in a glass hotel ballroom overlooking the harbour. A prospective client controlled enough money to justify bringing half the investment team to dinner. Philip's colleague from distribution—a brilliant woman who understood both people and portfolios better than most of the people who outranked her—had laughed at the client's joke about economists predicting nine of the last five recessions.
The joke had been old before Philip graduated.
She laughed as though he had invented comedy. Not crudely, and never enough to be named as flirtation. She leaned forward at the right moments, remembered his daughter's equestrian programme, and made him feel not merely rich but interesting. It was work: relationship labour in conversation, client retention in the spreadsheet.
Philip had been introduced after dessert as part of the team behind the numbers. The client shook his hand, asked one technical question, and looked past him before the answer was finished.
Everyone at that table had been performing. His boss performed certainty. Sales performed fascination. The client performed indifference to being courted. Philip performed confidence that his career was progressing.
In his old life, it was just one big performance.
Philip looked at the surreal beauty asleep beside him. There was no client here. No audience. No promotion committee. No one to impress. Natalia was not laughing at a joke, adjusting a posture, or asking him to reassure an investor who might withdraw a mandate.
She was asleep.
And yet the old question rose anyway.
Is she … performing? Just to please me?
Last night, Natalia had been astonishingly competent. She learned quickly even by her standards. Once uncertainty gave way to curiosity, she had observed, adjusted, and applied conclusions with an intensity that would have made an experienced researcher nervous. She remembered every response. Asked permission with increasing precision. Detected hesitation before Philip fully understood that he was hesitating.
And then, between those moments, she had looked at him with her lustrous eyes, bright with unmistakable hunger, and asked whether she was doing well.
At other times, her naivety had seemed almost too perfectly placed.
Had she truly not known? Or had she known that uncertainty softened him—that the woman capable of dismantling an armed security team became less frightening when she tilted her head and asked for guidance?
The thought made shame move through him.
Natalia had trusted him with a vulnerability she could not possibly have rehearsed in full. Her trembling had been real. The sudden tears when he told her he wanted her had been real. So had the startled joy when she discovered that pleasure could belong to her rather than merely serve him.
But real did not mean unmixed.
He looked again at her sleeping face. Was she still the Natalia he knew?
Could someone so beautiful and perfect truly be content with me?
The question formed, and the answer came with unexpected clarity. Yes.
Natalia had not been replaced by some calculating stranger. She had become more fully herself—more capable of wanting, choosing, fearing, concealing, and acting without waiting for him to supply the command. The innocent Familiar who once consulted handbooks for every social response had not vanished. She now existed beside the woman who could construct a covert operation, deceive an investigator, and study the fall of dynasties.
But he had seen the seam.
Margaret had told him that if he still carried any doubt about Natalia, he might put it down. Her loyalty was not in question. Neither was her love. His trust was the least he could give her. The tenderness with which Margaret had said it made the words harder to dismiss.
The evidence increasingly supported Natalia's account: another woman existed, another set of actions, another explanation for the facts that had once seemed to point only towards her. Margaret was not sentimental when sentiment threatened the family. If she believed Natalia deserved trust, that mattered.
It did not make every question disappear.
Glorium remained. Natalia had gone there without telling him. She had decided what protected him, what he ought to know, and what risks he would be permitted to choose. Love had driven the decision. Love had not made it right. Philip could not simply declare that nothing mattered provided she loved him.
But then he thought about whether he was being fair to Natalia. After all, in his old world, everyone performed; everyone deceived one another for supposedly noble reasons, such as smoothing out differences so that work could be more efficient.
The colleague in the ballroom had performed interest without necessarily feeling contempt. His boss had performed confidence while privately terrified of losing the mandate. Philip himself had performed professional certainty while knowing exactly the limit of his model. People smiled when they saw someone they hated because their jobs depended on it. Loved ones softened truths, chose kinder words, pretended surprise over discovered gifts, and selected versions of themselves for the person in front of them.
A mask did not prove there was no face beneath it. The question was who chose the mask, and why.
There was a Natalia beneath hers. Philip believed that.
It was an answer. It was not the whole answer. For once, he allowed that to be enough.
Then another fear emerged from beneath the first.
What if one day she no longer needed him?
The thought was so immediate that he almost laughed at himself. Natalia could already do almost everything better than he could. She learned medicine after watching Lydia, designed political traps after reading history for days, calculated faster, fought better, observed more, and lied more convincingly. At present, she organized that capability around Philip.
Much of the old dependency was already gone. She no longer depended on him for mana. Perhaps the law would one day give her the right to property, status, and protection independent of his. She might no longer require a cover story or … him. Increasingly, she learned faster than he could decide what to teach.
If every condition that had made Philip necessary disappeared, would she still choose him?
Had necessity merely given their love somewhere to begin—or had necessity been one of the reasons she loved him?
Would she look at him and see what some wounded part of him still believed Tara had seen near the end of their relationship: an underperforming asset maintained only because admitting the loss was painful?
The comparison arrived before fairness could stop it. Philip closed his eyes.
No. That was not what had happened. Or not all that had happened.
Tara had not been a villain who discarded him after his market value declined. They had been two exhausted people living in a city that converted every private weakness into a recurring bill. He had measured her against the highlight reel of other people's marriages—the friends with the homemade soup, the girlfriend who had slept two nights in a hospital chair—and then wondered why she could not fill a frame that had never been built to her shape. She had measured him against men whose lives seemed more secure. Each had mistaken pressure for evidence that the other was failing.
Knowing that did not erase the scar. Being loved and then left had taught some primitive part of him an equation his reasoning could not fully repeal.
As long as he was useful, he could be loved.
When usefulness ended, love would end with it.
He reached for Tara's face in his mind.
Nothing came.
Philip's eyes opened. He tried again. Tara. Three years. The apartment with the water stain shaped like a question mark. Her laptop open on the sofa. Takeout containers on the low table. The morning she said she needed security. The sound of the door closing.
He knew the facts. Her face would not assemble.
Was her hair dark? He thought so. Her eyes—brown, perhaps. There had been a small line near her mouth when she was tired. Or had that belonged to someone else?
Panic tightened his chest. He searched harder, as though memory were a model that might return the correct output if he supplied enough variables.
Nothing. The space where Tara should have been remained blank.
So this was what the System had meant. Not deletion. Erosion. The knowledge remained while the feeling thinned. A life becoming biography.
It hurt.
Less than he expected.
That hurt too.
Philip breathed through it. He could grieve without pretending the process had not already begun. Forgetting Tara's face did not mean she had never mattered. Remembering her perfectly would not have restored what they had lost.
For years in Bortinto, Philip had postponed living. After the next promotion. After the next raise. After rent stopped outrunning his salary. After the fund performed well enough that his boss recognised him. After he and Tara felt secure.
Then this life began, and he had done the same thing with better furniture. After the estate debt. After the assassins, the riots, the concussion, Parliament, Glorium, and the vote.
He had spent two lives treating happiness like deferred compensation: always earned in principle, always vesting after one more condition. Whenever the payout came close, he had added another hurdle.
Outside the window, winter light brightened the curtains. Somewhere below, a service door opened and closed. Muffled footsteps passed along a distant corridor, confirming that the household had been moving around them for hours while tactfully refusing to intrude.
Philip looked at Natalia.
Perhaps happiness was not compensation issued after every danger had been cleared. If he waited for the balance sheet of his life to carry no uncertainty, he would postpone living forever.
This world had given him potential. Not safety—certainly not that—but potential. Wealth, family, servants, influence, people willing to carry him while he recovered. For months, everyone had treated him as an invalid: an amnesiac recovering from a suicide attempt, then a man recovering from one concussion after another, then an heir relearning the shape of his own existence.
That grace could not become a permanent identity. Eventually, the grace period would end, and Philip Redwood would have to shoulder his share of the weight.
He could not rely forever on old memories returning at convenient moments, Lydia correcting him before anyone noticed, Margaret arranging the board, and Natalia solving every danger.
He needed to learn.
This life had been given to him, and he finally realized that he needed to participate in it.
This time, he would not wait until everything was secure before becoming present.
Beside him, Natalia moved. Still asleep, she lowered the arm above her head and turned onto her side, presenting him with the smooth line of her back. The quilt slipped higher over her hip and lower across one shoulder.
Philip eased himself down from the pillows. He turned toward her and moved close until his chest met her back. One arm slid beneath the pillow. The other passed around her waist. Natalia made a tiny sound and settled backward into him with unconscious certainty.
His hand rested over the curve of her stomach.
There had been another golden morning, months ago, when he had found his hand following almost the same curve and snatched it back as though caught stealing.
This time, he knew exactly where his hand was.
He left it there.
Then he let his palm move slowly along the contour of her waist, over the gentle outward line beneath the blanket, and back again. Not furtively. Not as a man stealing contact before embarrassment caught him. The woman in his arms was his. And he was hers.
Contentment spread through him with surprising quietness. This was where he wanted his life to be.
The old thought followed automatically.
Now I only have to make sure it doesn't fall apart again.
Philip almost smiled. No. That was the same bargain in different words.
Philip pressed his face lightly into her hair. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he allowed himself—just for this moment—not to live in fear of losing what he had.
Good morning, darling.
Philip's eyes opened.
The System appeared near the edge of the bed.
Today she had selected the form of a raven-haired lingerie model straight out of an old commercial. Black silk curved around an aggressively idealised figure seated cross-legged on a chair floating beside his bed. One sheer stocking reached high along a sculpted thigh; on the other leg, the stocking stopped neatly at the knee, leaving the thigh bare. She tipped her head back, letting her glossy hair spill over one shoulder, then gave him a thoroughly naughty wink.
I owe you one for yesterday, she announced into his mind.
Before Philip could object, she uncrossed her legs and raised the half-stockinged one with the slow, exaggerated precision of a hosiery advertisement, extending it until the pointed toe completed the pose. The stocking seemed to begin at the very tip of that toe, stretching smoothly over her foot and calf before ending in a rolled rim at the knee.
Her fingers closed around the rim.
The System began to unroll it.
Her fingers guided the rolled rim from her knee towards her thigh, unspooling the sheer stocking along the raised leg with a deliberate slowness apparently intended for maximum seductive tease.
Philip's body, despite its supposed exhaustion, once again performed the same deeply suspicious trick it had managed the night before, drawing upon whatever emergency reserve he had privately decided might be mana.
The result was felt against Natalia's back.
She went perfectly still.
Then her eyes opened with the clarity of a weapon coming off safety and swept the room—across the foot of the bed, through the floating chair, through the raised leg and the advancing silk, and on to the curtains without pausing anywhere between.
The room, so far as Natalia was concerned, was empty.
She began instead to assess the situational context: his arm around her waist, the position of his hand, and, unmistakably, the development pressed warmly against her lower back.
Colour rose into her cheeks at extraordinary speed.
Natalia turned her head just far enough to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were wide and rapidly filling with delighted confusion.
"Master," she whispered, "so you are ready for more?"
Part 2
On the seventh of January, five days later and hundreds of miles to the south, the last of the Duchess of Redwood's six motorcars and a single service van cleared the headland at eleven minutes past four.
The resort stood on a spur of the southern Francimonican coast. It was a low complex of white stone and shuttered glass built for a season that would not begin for another four months. In January the terraces were empty. The pool had been drained. The sea below moved in the flat, hard blue that the Mediterranean reserves for winter, and the wind off it carried the particular cold that surprises people who have been told this coast is warm.
Margaret had arranged all of it meticulously. Her original plan had placed the resort, its staff, and every layer of security under Redwood control. It had not survived the first exchange of correspondence with the Pasha's Chief of Protocol, a chamberlain in all but title and the official entrusted with arranging every private audience his master granted. The correspondence had remained faultlessly courteous and immovable on both sides. By the third of January, they had settled upon a joint protocol.
The final arrangement divided the house with almost diplomatic precision. Margaret supplied the kitchen, the table staff, the inner housekeeping, the inspection of every room, and half of the close-security detail. The Pasha supplied the outer perimeter, communications security, transport and maritime coordination, external counter-surveillance, and his personal household — including Zeina. Each side had vetted every name supplied by the other. Neither had been permitted to alter the list without notice.
Margaret's intermediaries controlled the exclusive lease, the staff contracts, and every room that mattered for the afternoon. What none of them had discovered was that the company holding the resort had long ago been acquired, share by share, by an investment vehicle controlled by the Pasha. The final independent minority holding had been acquired six years earlier. Nothing in the chain of ownership visibly led to him.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the Redwood staff departed with Margaret. The agreed clear-up and restoration of the property passed to the Pasha's people.
He stood at the terrace rail and watched the convoy go. Somewhere in the second car, the Duchess was almost certainly reviewing the afternoon and finding it satisfactory.
She had reason to. The interests she had come to arrange were arranged and the safeguards were accepted. The Pasha had offered no vulgar promise concerning the Upper House vote on the fourteenth. He had merely observed that several gentlemen of influence had recently asked for his opinion of the amended Ascension Bill — and that he intended to speak favourably. Margaret knew how to recognise a commitment without requiring a man of his standing to cheapen it by stating it directly.
The afternoon had also produced working groups, proposed inspections, a second meeting, and enough unresolved profit to guarantee that neither household could politely disappear from the other's life.
Margaret had won the negotiation she came to win.
The Pasha had accomplished the task Aurelia had assigned him.
Behind him, quietly, the fiction of joint custody ended, and the headland returned to the hands that had quietly owned it all along.
The Pasha's approved outer-security contingent had been on the headland since the day the revised protocol was settled. The others had arrived under quieter descriptions: in fishing cottages, in a closed hotel, in shoreline maintenance sheds, and in a van belonging to a road-resurfacing firm that had existed for eleven years. Over those same years, separate investment vehicles had acquired the hotel, most of the cottages, the local road-maintenance concession, a small boat-repair yard, and enough surrounding land and leases to ensure that inconvenience could always be produced legally.
Within twenty minutes of the last Redwood vehicle clearing the gate, the clearance perimeter had gone out to four kilometres in every landward direction and rather farther at sea. The coastal road was closed for resurfacing under the same renovation notice that publicly explained the resort's winter closure. Two recreational fishermen were courteously redirected from the cove because of supposed underwater works. A shepherd and his dog were turned aside more delicately: a thread of mana produced unease in the dog, and the dog led the man onto another path without either understanding why.
Only then did eleven specialist mages move in from the closed hotel, the fishing cottages, and shoreline positions beyond the agreed inner cordon.
They worked without speaking. Ten took positions at measured intervals around the headland. The eleventh climbed to the flat roof above the main house and stood precisely over its centre.
They raised a barrier.
The chief mage came to the terrace door, laid his right hand over his heart, and inclined from the waist.
"Sealed, Excellency."
"Thank you." The Pasha did not turn from the rail. "Zeina remains. No one else inside the house. No one on the stair or the terraces. I require complete privacy. If it takes six hours, it takes six hours."
The man nodded and withdrew.
The doors closed.
Inside, the long room remained almost exactly as the meeting had left it. The Redwood attendants had removed the empty service trays but disturbed nothing else; the Pasha's people were to restore the room after his departure. The low table, the cups, the folded map of the Middle East, and a single glass of Margaret's untouched sherry still stood as witnesses.
The Pasha unbuttoned his jacket and sat down with the first unperformed relaxation he had permitted himself all afternoon.
Zeina remained quietly beside him.
She had been there all afternoon, stationed at his left shoulder through four hours of proposal and counter-proposal. Two Redwood attendants had poured, offered, and cleared with the specific invisibility that only very well-trained professionals could achieve. Zeina had moved only when the Pasha required something directly: a document, a fresh glass, one quiet word at his ear.
She was enchantingly beautiful: olive-skinned, with a face delicate to a fault and dark hair bound in a fashion borrowed from antiquity. Diaphanous white linen moved around her when nothing else did, and at her throat and collarbones lay a collar of beaten gold heavy enough that a normal dancer would have ached by the second hour.
She had not ached. She had stood with her head lowered and her hands folded at her waist and her eyes on the floor a metre in front of the Pasha's chair, in the posture of a personal attendant of his household — formal, deferential, entirely without self.
She held it for perhaps four seconds after the Pasha unbuttoned his jacket.
Then she let it go.
It was not a movement so much as a change of attitude. The lowered head came up. The folded hands came apart. A playful light entered her eyes. The deference went out of her like water out of a glass, and what was left was a coy, unhurried, thoroughly naughty smile aimed directly at the Pasha.
She crossed the two paces between them and dropped into his lap with the boneless mischief of a cat choosing an inconvenient place to sit.
The Pasha's arm went around her.
He leaned in. She met him halfway, one hand sliding up along his jaw, and the kiss that followed was passionate and long.
When it ended, he did not let go of her.
"Well," he said against her cheek, "what do you think of today's meeting?"
She smiled — and slipped out of his arms, out of his lap, and onto her feet in one continuous motion, turning as she went.
By the time she had turned all the way round, the olive skin had gone to flawless fairness. The darkness withdrew from her hair, from root to tip, like ink withdrawing from water. What replaced it was silver.
Her eyes turned crimson.
Aurelia sighed.
It was a long sigh, and a deeply aggrieved one.
"You did well," she said. "It really disappoints me that my little Margaret has grown so old."
"My lady—"
"She was irresistible." Aurelia turned, walked three paces, and sank onto the arm of the opposite chair. "You never saw her in the late seventies. Chin up, spine straight, walking two steps behind the Empress and taking the soul out of every young man with a single glance. She was the embodiment of feminine power and allure. Aristocratic prestige and grace. The aura she radiated was wealth given form."
"I built myself an orchestra. It gave me a pretext to enter those grand state balls she attended with the Empress. In more than four thousand years, she was the first woman who ever made my heart beat as it had when I first saw you tending the gardens. The very first."
She said the last of it to the ceiling.
"You missed her in her prime. It is quite a pity." A pause.
The Pasha remained attentive but did not speak.
She let herself fall back against the chair and laid the back of one hand across her brow in the manner of a woman expiring in the third act of some play.
"And today I felt nothing in her presence. I stood at your shoulder for four hours, waited for it, and it simply would not come." A long and tragic sigh. "Tell me, Sargon, is it me who changed, or her?"
"It might be both," the Pasha said.
Aurelia's head came around. Clearly, she had not expected an answer.
The Pasha permitted himself the small motion of the mouth that in another man would have been laughter.
"She is remarkably youthful for her age, however," he said. "By any measure. I would not have put her beyond her mid-forties this afternoon."
"Mm. That would be the work of her feisty little friend."
He paused. "You mean the Avalondian Empress."
Aurelia smiled.
She let the smile do the answering.
"I do adore that girl."
"I had gathered."
"No — truly. There is nothing in the world quite like our little Celestica." One finger traced the arm of the chair. "Do you know she still burns for a man who has been in the ground for twenty years, and she has never bent a single degree away from his will — not for an empire, not for a parliament, not for her own survival. Inflexible. Absolutely inflexible devotion to somebody long dead." She sighed again, and this one was different. "It is the most touching yet stupid thing I have ever seen, and I have seen a great deal. Which is why I can never stop myself from messing with her once in a while."
"So is the Empress the reason you wanted access to the Duchess?"
She turned back to face him, and the mischief returned to her mouth like a light coming on.
She came off the chair arm, crossed to him, and leaned down until they were very nearly at a level. Her hand came up and her fingers moved slowly through his beard, once, twice, tracing the line of the jaw beneath it with the possessiveness of someone examining a treasured piece of art.
He leaned back. She did not move away. Instead she leaned the rest of the way down, took his face in both hands, and kissed him — slowly, deliberately.
When she finally straightened, she merely took a few steps back.
"You are always the curious one."
"It is a failing."
"It is not." Her smile softened. "No. The Empress is not the reason."
"Then why Margaret?"
Aurelia's eyes gleamed.
"I wanted a closer look at how Plan B is progressing."
The Pasha's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Plan B?"
"Yes."
"Plan B for what?"
"For Project Eden," Aurelia said.
He sat forward.
"You have a Plan B?"
There was a degree of surprise in it, born of millennia of accumulated experience and observation.
She tapped his shoulder playfully.
"No. Not me. You know me far too well for that." She turned, and drifted a step away, and her voice came back over her shoulder. "The One."
The room went very quiet.
"Or rather," she went on, "the One has two plans. I simply prefer to think of my part as Plan A — I find it improves my mood. But the two are entirely compatible. They run alongside one another. If both succeed, all the better. If either fails, the other remains."
"My lady." The Pasha had gone quite still. "Forgive me. Do you mean — the One actually exists?"
Aurelia turned around and put a hand to her breast in exquisite mock astonishment.
"Oh — what. Did you think the One was something I made up for propaganda purposes?"
The Pasha said nothing.
His eyes, however, supplied the answer, and for once she did not laugh.
When she spoke again, the playfulness had gone out of her voice. What replaced it was something solemn, something rarely seen on her face.
"He exists," Aurelia said.
"He designed Project Eden. It was never mine. When I chose you, I was only following my heart, and perhaps a little of my passion. I have only recently learned of the design." For the first time, something like reverence appeared on her face. "And I am beginning to remember my own past. A piece at a time. Not in order. Not kindly. But it is coming back."
The Pasha rose from his chair, shock plain in his expression.
"Then the Duchess knows about Project Eden?" he said. "And our nature?"
And Aurelia smiled.
It was tender, with a tinge of mystery.
"My dear garden boy," she said. "Naive as always."
"My lady—"
"No. She does not know." Aurelia moved past him toward the dark window, her silver hair flowing behind her in soft waves.
Aurelia looked through the glass and her expression turned solemn.
"But that Familiar of her grandson, she is an indispensable part of Plan B."