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cry.” He held his hand up to stop the refutation upon my lips.
    “I know that we are not like them. I know we are different and that we must measure ourselves by one another. But, they… My Father and his men will not measure us by that; and I wish for them to perceive me as sane, and grown, and not the child they knew, the beast they knew.”
    “Were you beastly to your father?” I asked.
    “Non, non,” he said quickly. “I was ever decorous about him. He was my father. I did not wish to battle him; I did not feel I could win if I did.
    But Vittese and the others,” he growled. “I clawed and bit and spat on that bastard every chance he gave me. I hated him.”
    “Was he cruel to you?”
    Gaston sighed and looked away to wipe more tears from his cheeks.
    “Non, he would not hurt me more than necessary to restrain me. He is the man my father has ever sent to do things that require discretion. I was always one of those things. My father would never retrieve me from a school himself. So after whatever incident made them send me away, I would spend days or weeks, or one time, months, locked away until Vittese would arrive to take me to my next place of exile. And he always had this look about him, like I was a thing to be scorned and despised.
    I was an embarrassment. And… he was never my father. For years at a time, Vittese was all I saw of my father. I could only imagine how much my father hated me.”
    I embraced him. I was at a loss as to how to resolve our dilemma.
    The more I thought on it, the more I thought disaster loomed if Gaston tried to become the man he wished to present to them. All his old hurts and angers would seep out of the darkest recesses of his soul and make his Horse ever more difficult to control; and all the while he would be attempting to hold it still with an iron hand upon the reins. Eventually, it would explode beneath him – with righteous indignation if nothing else – and then someone would most likely die. Yet, I well understood his need to present himself as a grown man, a sane and grown man: we so wanted our fathers’ respect.
    “Perhaps if they ailed you could tend them, and thus show them the best you show anyone other than me,” I said lightly. “I could wound them for you.”
    He stiffened in my arms, but then I felt the welcome rumble of amusement in his chest that finally bubbled a little to his lips in a half-hearted huff of laughter.
    He pulled away to regard me. “I wish they could see me as you do, as our friends do, but they are not my friends, and I do not know if I can show them that face, either.”
    I frowned. “Perhaps you should simply show them you. You are a good man. You are loved. You have friends. Damn them to Hell and back if they cannot respect that. And I fear, as I know you do, that they will not. They will never see us as we are: they will only see phantoms of their own devising, and thus they will think what they will. And we have no part to truly play in the matter. So, in truth, if that is the way of it, if they are chained by their habits so that they only see the shadows upon the cave wall, then there is no harm in showing them the truth and in being as you are. If they know you to be mad, no amount of acting sane will change their minds, will it? Look at Striker, and he is our friend.”
    He thought for a time, his eyes holding mine with deep regard, and then he smiled slowly. “You are the one blessed to see the truth of things.”
    I knew not if my words were the truth of the matter, or merely a prayer. I prayed after my fashion anyway as we walked back to the others. I told the Gods that all I dearly wished to see in the resolution of the matter was that Gaston’s father would leave us no worse than he found us: that his visitation should not result in harm coming to Gaston or myself or anyone we cared for.
    Striker averred there should be enough moon to sail by that night, and so we spent the next hours preparing what we would leave