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Would it take a night, or a hundred nights? Whatever the time, it would not be endless.

Amadeo was destined for me.

I turned and wrote in my diary. Never had such a design occurred to me before, to educate a novice for the Blood! I described all the events of the night so that I might never lose them to overwrought memory. I drew sketches of Amadeo's face as he slept.

How can I describe him? His beauty did not depend on his facial expression. It was stamped already on the face. It was all wrought up with his fine bones, serene mouth, and his auburn curls.

I wrote passionately in my diary.

This child has come from a world so different from our own that he can make no sense of what has happened to him. But I know the snowy lands of Russia. I know the dark dreary life of Russian and Greek monasteries, and it was in one of these, I am quite convinced, that he painted the ikons which he cannot speak of now.

As for our tongue, he's had no experience with it except in cruelty. Perhaps when the boys make him one of them, he will remember his past. Pie will want to take up the paintbrush. His talent will come forth again.

I put the quill aside. I could not confide everything to my diary. No, not everything by any means. Great secrets I sometimes wrote in Greek rather than Latin, but even in Greek I could not say all that I thought.

I looked at the boy. I took up the candelabrum and I approached the bed and I looked down at him as he slept there, easy at last, breathing as though he were safe.

Slowly his eyes opened. He looked up at me. There was no fear in him. Indeed, it seemed that he still dreamed.

I gave myself over to the Mind Gift.

Tell-me, child, tell me from your heart.

I saw the riders of the Steppes come down upon him and a band of his people. I saw a bundle drop from the boy's anxious hands. The cloth wrapping fell away from it. It was an ikon, and the boy cried out fearfully, but the evil barbarians wanted only the boy. They were the same inevitable barbarians who had never ceased to raid along the Roman Empire's long-forgotten Northern

and Eastern frontiers. Would the world never see an end to their kind?

By those evil men, this child had been brought to some Eastern marketplace. Was it Istanbul? And from there to Venice where he fell into the hands of a brothel keeper who had bought him for high payment on account of face and form.

The cruelty of this, the mystery of it, had been overwhelming. In the hands of another, this boy might never be healed.

Yet in his mute expression now I saw pure trust.

"Master," he said softly in the Russian tongue.

I felt the tiny hairs rise all over my body. I wanted so to touch him once more with my cold fingers but I did not dare. I knelt beside the bed and leant over and I kissed his cheek warmly.

"Amadeo," I said to him so that he might know his new name.

And then using the very Russian tongue he knew, but did not know, I told him that he was mine now, that I was his Master just as he had said. I gave him to know that all things were resolved in me. He must never worry, he would never fear again.

It was almost morning. I had to leave.

Vincenzo came knocking. The eldest among the apprentices were waiting outside. They had heard that a new boy had been brought into the house.

I admitted them to the bedroom. I told them they must take care of Amadeo. They must acquaint him with all our common wonders. They must let him rest for a while, surely, but they could take him out into the city. Perhaps it was the perfect thing to do.

"Riccardo," I charged the eldest. "Take this one under your wing. "

What a lie it was! I stood thinking of it. It was a lie to give him over to the daylight, to companionship other than my own.

But the rising sun gave me no more time in the palazzo. What else could I do?

I went to my grave.

I lay down in darkness dreaming of him.

I had found an escape from the love of Botticelli. I had found an escape from the obsession with Bianca and her tantalizing guilt. I had found one whom death and cruelty had already marked. The Blood would be the ransom. Yes, all things were resolved in me.