"It matters to me."

Mamzelle Marie said nothing. Where the orange light brushed a greasy finger her earrings had the gleam of real gold, the dark gems on the crucifix suspended from her neck a true sapphire glint. "It's nowhere near so bad as it was last year."

Last year.

It had been almost exactly a year.

Paris in the cholera. January felt again the dreadful stillness of those suffocating August days, the empty streets and shuttered windows. Though he'd been working then for ten years as a musician, he'd gone back to the Hotel Dieu to nurse, to do what he could, knowing full well he could do nothing. That epidemic had recalled to him all the memories of fever seasons past: the families of the poor brought in from the attics where two or three or seven had died already, the stench and the sense of helpless dread.

Whenever he'd stepped outside he had been astonished to see the jostling mansard roofs, the chestnut trees, and gray stone walls of Paris, instead of the low, pastel houses of the town where he had been raised.

One day he'd walked back to the two rooms he and his wife shared in the tangle of streets between the old Cluny convent and the river, to find them stinking like a plague ward of the wastes Ayasha had been unable to contain when the weakness, the shivering, the fever had struck her. To find Ayasha herself on the bed in the midst of that humiliating horror, a rag doll wrung and twisted and left to dry, the black ocean of her hair trailing down over the edge of the bed to brush the floor.

Death had spared her nothing. She had died alone. "No." Though January had never spoken of this memory to his sister-who he knew was a disciple of Mamzelle Marie-or to anyone else, he thought he saw her knowledge of the scene in this woman's serpent eyes. Maybe she really did read people's dreams. "No, it's not so bad as last year," agreed January again, softly.