Dropping my hand, Gryphon stepped back from me, leaving me feeling coldly bereft. His voice was a low barren sound in the night. "When you took me back, even after knowing I had been in Mona Louisa's bed, I could not believe it, that you still wanted me, desired me. I considered it a miracle. A miracle that I cherished with all my heart. But I knew it could not last." His blue eyes drifted close, his heavy lashes casting delicate shadows over his cheeks.

"There are things about me, about my past that I would have kept from you always, were I able to. But you can never out-run your past, even if you have wings," he said, with a small wry smile. In his other form, Gryphon was a falcon.

Then his smile dropped away. "There are people in there who know me. Know of my past. They would have found a way to whisper it into your ears. I have found that I do not wish to wait in agony, in unknowing torment. I will tell you myself and have done with it."

Faint light streamed out from inside the ballroom, allowing me to see those beautiful eyes weighed down with deep shadows. His voice dropped until it became a bare whisper of sound. "In other places, other courts, with other Queens, I have done things with women… with men. I've done things you could never begin to imagine. Done and had things done to me…" His voice shook with remembered pain, with remembered shame.

I reached up and kissed his trembling lips. To stop him, to take away his pain.

"Shhh. It's all right," I murmured, stroking the dark silk of his hair. "That's all behind you now."

Gryphon was only seventy-five years old. Considered young, especially to have acquired so much power. But even among the lovely Monère, where the plainest of us still drew a human's eyes, he was exceptionally beautiful. Many Queens would have welcomed him in their beds. Until he had become too powerful for them.