Like a spring pulled too tight, Quincy cocked her small chin up in the direction fo the voice.

She froze. Several silent moments passed between them. More than one stranger walked around their still figures. She tried to speak, but Quincy was mortified from feeling at such a severe disadvantage, something she had not felt since she was a little girl on the streets, a little girl in the foundling factory, a little girl who had sworn that she would never feel this way again.

But love?” She made a face. “It’s an all-encompassing machine, with no parts but the weak human heart. You give everything to it with no promise of security in return.

Amazing how often the words fool and love go together,” Quincy drawled.

As they walked down the stairs to the wide sidewalk, Quincy said, “I never thought you for a churchgoer, Arch.”“You forced me to it, St. Claire. Some demons drive a man to the bottle, some demons drive a man to the church.

Do you play?”Quincy jerked her eyes away from the instrument to find Lord Arch watching her, his mouth drawn in a very familiar straight line.“Only for myself, now that Ezekiel is dead,” she answered truthfully.“How delightful,” he said, smiling, his handsome face giving way to the refined wrinkles of his age. “Why don’t you play for yourself now, and I’ll just listen?

After some time, Fisher said, “Per aspera ad astra.”Quincy turned towards him. “What’s that?”“Latin. It means to the stars through difficulties.”By natural extension of the conversation, she looked up, viewing the faint points of light fighting down through a soft haze. “Does anyone make it, Fisher? To the stars?”“I believe we have, Quince. We’ve seen the worst but known the best.

She kept thinking that a time like this required words—one million lines of type, laid out perfectly, with no ink stains, no backward letters—to say what should be said. But that couldn’t happen, and she didn’t know what else to put in its place.