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“I remember you, though. My Lour Nail. And what did it cost you to have me looked after like this?”
    I returned her warm smile. “I’m a philosopher by trade. A catatonic mind presents a unique challenge.”
    “I’ll wager you’ve squandered countless hours telling me bad jokes, trying to pry me from my catalepsy.” She swallowed, resting her voice a moment. Then shook her head in mild reproof. “That can’t have helped the Grove’s only albino win any arguments on the theater floors.”
    “Ah, but this is Aubade Grove, my dear. I convinced the college Savants that there was science to be had in observing and treating your condition.”
    She gave a small laugh. “Nonsense. The Grove colleges study the sky. The mind and body they leave to others. ”
    I shrugged and left her question unanswered. Wasn’t important, anyway. The only thing that mattered was that Anna had returned from a long journey inside her mind. Deafened gods had I missed her. I would never have thought one could hold the hand of the woman he loves and feel so far from her. Know she was far from you. In mind. I’d had eight years of that.
    “All hells, what are we rambling on about, you’re back, my girl.” I paused, happier than I’d been in . . . well, in eight years. “You’re back.”
    “I’m back,” she repeated, and inclined her head, so that our foreheads could touch. The way we used to.
    Anna had been the only woman who’d ever touched me. Albinism has that effect. Or maybe it was my slight frame. A woman has a right to feel safe with her man. My bones seemed to break easy, besides. Physick men and blackcoats called it brittle-bone disease. I called it the nuisance that was my body.
    “Why in every last hell did you ever marry me?”
    It was a question I’d asked myself a lot over these years she’d held that thousand-league look in her eyes.
    She pulled back, like you do when you want someone to hear and see your reply. “Why, because you’re objectionable, of course.” There was a wicked grin on her face now—a subtle thing, but there to be seen if you knew how to look. It wasn’t a tease. In fact, that grin did more to punctuate what she said than refute it.
    “Objectionable?” I said, a bit playful. I think I needed her to explain.
    “You make me laugh,” she clarified.
    In truth, most of the time, I did so more by accident than design.
    “It’s all the popular positions I take in the discourse theaters, isn’t it?” I laughed out loud, and very much liked the sound of it in her little convalescent room.
    She shook her head, clarifying again. “It’s the look on the faces of the opposing panelists that I like best.”
    Good hell did I love this woman.
    I was a slight albino philosopher with unpopular opinions about most things. If there was ever proof of the abandoning gods, it was that any woman could love me. Let alone Anna, who many thought would be the next Savant of the College of Cosmology.
    I smiled, more content than I had a right to be, and inclined to kiss her . . .
    . . . when her eyes grew distant. Her cheeks slackened. And her thousand-league stare returned.
    Just that fast, she was gone again.
    Eight years.
    After eight years I’d gotten eight minutes. If that. And now what?
    Damn me.
    I tried to rouse her. For hours I tried. Bad jokes. Unpopular philosophical arguments. Physical contact. Nothing worked. Eventually, the hospice workers gently ushered me out of her small room and onto the cobbled street.
    It was dark hour. Maybe later. I didn’t care. I stood there in the dark and chill, hating. Hating my bad luck. Hating the abandoning gods. Hating the Bourne and every last creature sent there by those gods during the Placing. The gods-damned creatures had bought Anna from a highwayman and made use of her somehow. Until I’d found a way to get her back—
    “Pleasant evening, don’t you think?”
    I turned, un-startled, toward the owner of the deep, clear voice. A man stood against the