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"Listen to me, all of you," I said. "He didn't mean for there to be pain. He will try very hard never to cause such pain again."

Viktor nodded.

Rose stirred against my shoulder. "Even if it has been only for half a year," she said, "it has been a lifetime."

"Don't talk like that," said Viktor. "What, are we holding a funeral for ourselves before we're even dead?" He looked at me. "Father, you are not going to allow these Replimoids to destroy us!"

He stood up, facing me, his arms folded. Powerful shoulders, fine body. No father in the world ever asked for a finer son. "Throughout the Chateau," he said, "everyone is grim! How can they be so grim?"

I nodded that I understood what he was saying, but I had no words.

"My mother felt the pain," he said. "She called from Paris. It must have been felt all over the world. Benedict and Rhoshamandes must have felt it. I wish I knew how many of us there are in the whole world."

"No one knows that, not even Amel," I said.

Little pulse at the back of my neck, little spasm in the blood vessels under the skin of my temples.

I couldn't stop seeing Mekare's empty shell of a body. Was it all luracastria? And does the subatomic luracastria transform the cells to a more resilient and ever-perfecting luracastria that becomes at last immune to the sun, almost entirely immune, except for me, the host of the brain of Amel?

Inside me, he made no response to this.

Carefully cradling Rose in my arms, I rose to my feet and placed her carefully on the settee. I kissed the top of her head.

"Whatever happens," I said as I looked from her to Viktor and finally to Louis, "I will fight for us and who we are. We are the strange flowers of this entity, but it is through us that he's discovered himself, and he knows that I love him, and I love him all the more with every discovery about him, and I know that he must love us, must know--."

Love you.

"And there is no reason," I went on, "for this to end for us. There is no way right now that Kapetria or the other Replimoids could conceivably want it to end for us; they are not waiting with scalpels in hand to free him from me because they have no place to put him."

This is true.

"Now, I'm going to go back upstairs and work with the others towards some sort of solution."

"Where have they gone?" Louis asked. "When I woke, I was told some of them left the village at about two o'clock, and that the others remain here to await some action against Rhoshamandes."

"That's correct," I said. "Twelve of them left. Twelve. And the elder four remain."

"You mean they increased their numbers in the space of one day?" asked Louis.

"Apparently," I said. "I suspect each one of them generated another. That would make a total of sixteen. Subtract the four elders and you have the twelve who left, two of whom were women, and all the rest males. I was getting word on all this earlier while I was still in the crypt."

I could see the mingled revulsion and alarm in their faces.

"They don't suffer anything when they multiply, do they?" asked Rose. "They simply do it."

"How can we know?" I asked. "But what is the point of becoming alarmed about this? The fact is they could have done this anytime easily. What do they require but a safe room in which the process can take place?"

I had thought when I first awakened that it would be our task to communicate what had been said in the conference room to others within the Court, but Marius and Gregory had already done this. And the news had been traveling fast.

"There are other things for us to talk about now," I said. "Gregory, Seth, Teskhamen, and Sevraine have gone to find Rhoshamandes. They left before I even opened my eyes because they wake sooner than I wake. Arion soon followed. So did Allesandra, and Everard de Landen, and Eleni. These are Rhosh's fledglings, as you know."

"But you didn't give your permission for this, did you?" asked Louis. It was asked in such a neutral way that I couldn't interpret it for or against.

"No," I said. "Maybe they've gone to lay down the law that Rhoshamandes cannot harm the Replimoids any more than he can seek to harm us."

They seemed to accept this, and I sensed as I had so often in the last six months that everyone, near everyone, expected me to articulate certain things, and when I did articulate them, there was inevitable relief for the moment.

"I see no way out for Rhoshamandes," said Louis in a soft voice. He wasn't challenging me, just reflecting.