The white boy picked up the hoop. He looked at his friend again, in an agony of uncertainty about what sort of support or comfort he should give or should be seen to give. In the end he ran away crying, leaving his playmate to bleed and weep alone. "Ben."

January turned his head. His sister Olympe stood next to Rose's chair. January had two sisters. The elder, born two years later than himself, was the daughter of that fellow-slave whom his mother never mentioned: the tall man with tribal scars on his face who sometimes walked in January's dreams. The younger, Dominique, was St.Denis Janvier's child, their mother's lace-trimmed princess. Dominique had been only four when January had left for Paris to study medicine eighteen years ago. Dominique, January had long ago noticed, came and went through their mother's bedroom-which opened onto Rue Burgundy, in the accepted Creole fashion-as a matter of course.

Since her departure to join the voodoos at the age of sixteen, Olympe had not entered their mother's house at all.

"It's good to see you." With her awkward, wadingbird grace, Rose moved her rough wooden chair aside to make room, and January brought over another of the several dozen seats scattered around among the tables in the shelter of the arcade. People generally bought coffee from one of the stands in the market and brought it here to sit, but the woman who ran the nearest stand came to the table before anyone went to her, with a cup for Olympe as she was sitting down, and had to be pressed two or three times to take the picayune payment for it. That was what it was, January supposed, to be a voodoo.

"I hear Simon Fourchet asked you to find the one who wants to kill him," said Olympe. She was tall for a woman, as January was tall for a man, and like her brother coal black: beau noir lustre, the dealers called that ebon African shininess. She wore a skirt of bright-hued calico, yellow and red, like the market women, and a jacket of purple wool.