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her mother over. “I don’t believe he likes it when I bend over. It must crowd him.”
    Her mother took the few steps toward her, her hands dusted with flour. She hesitated. Scarlett took firm hold of her mother’s hands and laid them on the round stomach. Scarlett moved them to the place where she could feel the child move. “Here. Can you feel it?”
    Scarlett’s mother looked up, her round face still unlined, her eyes closing. Her lips curved into a smile. “A baby in the house again.” She blinked rapidly, a look on her face that Scarlett seldom saw. Another sudden turn by the babe and both their eyes grew round as Scarlett’s entire mound shifted. They burst out laughing. “A strong one!” Her mother leaned in and kissed Scarlett on the forehead, and then waved a hand. “Go and get your slugabed sister up. I will finish down here.”
    Scarlett ducked her head and smiled.
    It wasn’t often that her mother kissed her.
     
     
    CHRISTOPHÉ TUCKED THE curtain around the narrow rectangle of the old castle’s window. At one corner he propped up the dusty fabric with an old bottle in the corner of the sill. It allowed a small shaft of light into the vast, stone room. On a table he positioned a prism, hard won and a little stolen; convincing the woman it was but glass. God help him, that had been years ago, soon after he had fled Paris.
    Alone.
    The memory pained him like a stab in his belly, so that he bent toward the table and the prism. He lifted the triangular glass object toward the beam of light with shaking fingers. He held it steady though. He would stop living before letting this prize shatter on the floor into a hundred useless pieces. His life would not look like that ever again, so help him . . . please, God.
    He looked down at the floor. He was standing in one of hundreds of rooms in a crumbling castle. It was a place so large, and in its time, so foreboding, that no army could stand against it. He saw a rusty stain on the floor. He’d heard his ancestral history told to him like a bedtime story. The castle was built in medieval times. It had watched, from this southern border of strength and impregnability, the crushing of the Cathers, a religious sect against the Catholic Church. It had seen the glory of standing firm during the Crusades, thus this floor bore the blood stains of horror stories—stories of the Cathers, the Crusades, the great Trenceval family. And now him.
    Up . . . up . . . through the dust motes, through the darkness, to that one place of light. There. Just there. He held the prism steady as it met the beam of light. But it wasn’t right. Something was not quite right. The beam was too wide, there was too much light in the room. Christophé held the prism at different angles and variations, but all that showed through was a wash of shadows.
    He fell into a nearby chair, frowning, holding the prism in his palms. He stared at it, pondering the mathematical equations springing to his mind. Leaping up, he took up a dry quill, cursed at it, then rummaged around for some ink. Dipping the pen, he scribbled down the numbers swirling in his mind. It always amazed him. This language of time and space and distance and matter. The language of numbers. That it could be put to pen and ink spoke of God. And it could. Somehow, he always knew just what the dripping black point should say. He sighed heavily, his hair hanging in his eyes, his mouth pursed, his jaw clenched until he had the full of his thoughts written out.
    But he had to prove those thoughts through experiments. Like Newton and the scientific papers from England that he had studied over and over at school. Mathematics were only numbers until they could
prove
something by sight or sound, touch or smell, taste or even hunch.
    He reared back and stared at his calculations. He’d learned all that the university could teach him of mathematics in one year. He’d studied geometry and the newer calculus until his eyes were blurry. He knew