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what he wrote on paper was sound. Now was the time for experiments. He looked at the calculations again and grinned and then frowned in the next moment. It was impossible. No one would believe him. If what he’d just written—and Newton’s experiment—was true, he could place a second prism some distance away and realign the colors.
    White light . . . becoming color . . . back to white light. It was white light that held all the colors, not black as they’d thought.
    His mind reeled with the implications. A sudden thought struck him as a blow. He breathed through his nostrils with the vision of it. What if God was like light? Pure and white. And what if man was the splitting into a myriad of colors? And then in the realignment with God, they became pure again.
    “But how?” he asked aloud, rising suddenly, scattering the dust motes to pace in the echoing room. “How might we become pure and white again?”
    He reeled in his agitation, bumped a table and fell. His head knocked against the sharp edge of a wood table. Dazed, he sat up, bracing his hands against the cold, stone floor. Something warm ran down his temple and cheek.
    He lifted his hand to the spot, felt the oozing. When he pulled back his hand, it shone with blood.
    He stared at the smear on his finger.
    Red.
    The color of sacrifice.
    He rose, looked down at his disheveled dress—his shirt hanging open, his breeches and bare feet. He rushed to the room where he kept his few belongings, threw on clothes, and tied his cravat haphazardly. He shoved his feet into shoes that were worn and tattered from the long walk to this ancient, southern place next to the Pyrenees Mountains. Carcassonne.
    He rushed from the crumbling, old castle, where no one dared live for fear the roof would cave in on them in their sleep. His cracked shoes sprang over the bridge to the other side of the Aude River, where civilization flourished—the real living people. Not the ghosts who haunted him.
    The actual village frightened him in the full light of morning. Someone might see him, recognize him as the shabby aristocrat he was, and tell the Republic’s patrols that roamed to and fro across the land. He pulled his long, dark cape closer, hid his face deeper in the folds of the hood, and kept his eyes downcast.
    His steps turned toward the noise of town—the marketplace. The woman’s face from the cemetery yesterday morning rose before his mind’s eye. He would like to see her face in the full light of the day, to drink it in for a few shadowed moments . . .
    His eyes widened at the thought. No. His hiding place and careful routine, these were all he had. He must remember that.
    He turned into the busy street of the city market. There were many booths on each side, selling food of all kinds and tapestries and cloth and anything a man confined to an ancient relative’s castle might need. But all he could smell was bread.
    When had he last eaten? He couldn’t recall. Yeasty warm scents led his footsteps deeper into the street, deeper than he’d meant to go. He lifted his chin, the protective hood deep around his face, following his nose. There.
    He opened his eyes and saw her.
    The impact of her face made him want to shrink back, recoil from such beauty. This world, the world they lived in, didn’t deserve her. Her beauty might break all their hearts—certainly his heart—but he didn’t turn away. He stood and stared. Soaking in the creamy skin reflected by morning’s light. Her eyes were an unusual shade of green, wide and bright with dark, highly arched brows. Her features were perfectly symmetrical, an equal equation. Dark curls lay on either side of the lush display like a frame. She was smiling at a customer. A man.
    Before he knew what he was doing he stepped forward, shouldering the man from her view and snatching up a round, still-steaming loaf.
    “Oh!”
    It was such a feminine squeak of both surprise and then something else—gladness, maybe?—that he pressed his