The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

was alone, coming toward me. It was raining more heavily now and my braid was so wet it was coming down from where it was bound up around my head. “I need to ask you something,” I said.
    â€œCome inside,” he said, opening the door of a nearby house. “This is going to be Ardeia and Diomedes’s house.”
    The house was complete, and held a large bed. “I don’t want to go inside there with you,” I said.
    Ikaros rolled his eyes, half-smiling. “You’re not as irresistible as you imagine,” he said. “I have quite enough going with Lukretia.” Lukretia was a woman of the Renaissance. She had been the other master of Ferrara, and now she and Ikaros were sharing a house here. “But stand in the rain if you prefer. I shall keep dry.” He stepped inside, and I stood in the doorway, in view of anyone passing by. “Which of us are you afraid of, you or me?” he asked.
    â€œI have quite enough going with Lysias,” I snapped. The trouble was that there was some truth in his accusation. I had always found Ikaros powerfully attractive. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be taken against my will, and he had shown me that he didn’t care what I wanted.
    â€œWhat do you want me for then?” He grinned, and I scowled at him.
    â€œCrocus wants Thomas Aquinas. In Greek. And he says you have it.”
    Ikaros’s face changed in an instant to completely serious, as serious as I had ever seen him.
    â€œI wasn’t going to do without books I needed,” he muttered.
    â€œYou took them when you were rescuing art?” I asked.
    â€œYou know I did. I got you that Botticelli book. It was more than anyone could bear, all those printed books, right there to my hand. I bought them, I didn’t steal them. And I didn’t contaminate the City with them.”
    â€œNobody says you did,” I said, but I shook my head. “You think rules are for everyone but you. How did you get them without Athene knowing?”
    He ignored my question. “I have done no harm with the books.”
    â€œYou might be going to now. Who knows what Thomas Aquinas will do to Crocus?”
    He grinned irrepressibly. “Have you read Thomas Aquinas?”
    I shook my head. “I have never had the slightest interest in him, or anything else medieval. But I hear he’s extremely complicated, and you are going to have to translate him into Greek and read it all aloud.”
    He looked horrified. “Do you know how long it is?”
    â€œNo,” I said, crisply. “Long, I hope. It’s what Crocus wants in return for making us glass bowls for lamps, and without them the lamps won’t give enough light for reading and working. So I think you’re going to do it, and as the book is still forbidden by the rules of this city as well as the original City, you’re not going to have any help doing it. And I think that’s going to be an appropriate punishment for bringing the book in the first place.”
    It might have been unkind, but I couldn’t help laughing at the look on his face.

 
    5
    ARETE
    For a long and terrible time, all that autumn and on into winter, Father insisted on getting vengeance for Mother and everybody else kept arguing with him because he clearly wasn’t being rational.
    â€œIt’s sad, and we’re all extremely sorry, but you’d think from the way you’re acting that we’d never lost anyone before,” Maia said.
    Father didn’t say so to her, but the truth was that he’d never really lost anyone he cared about before, not lost them permanently the way he’d lost Mother. He said that to me and my brothers after Maia had left. He said it very seriously and as if he imagined that this would have been news to us.
    â€œWho would have thought grief would crack Pytheas that way?” Ficino said to Maia, in Florentia, when he didn’t know I was listening.
    It