CHAPTER 6
Screaming, he fell into a room full of mirrors. Raising his head, gathering breath again with his throat raw from his last cry, he opened his eyes and saw, all around him, within mirrors ancient and ornate, framed plainly in wood or silver, oval, square, diamond, hexagonal, vast mirrors too heavy to lift propped against the wall with smaller mirrors strewn against them: crouching figures in torn silk and muddy leather lifting thorn-scarred faces, staring with black, empty eyes. For a moment he did not recognize himself.
The breath left him in a long, shaking sigh, with a sound to it like an unshaped word. He got to his feet; so did his reflections. He had an eerie feeling that even at his back his reflection was gazing at him. As he turned to look, all the images vanished.
He stood like a ghost in a room full of mirrors that took no notice of him.
“I’m dead,” he said, startled. He heard Nyx Ro calling his name. Her voice sounded sharp, bewildered. He looked around for a door, saw only mirrors crowding the walls, a few hanging bannerlike from the ceiling, their faces blank as the Delta sky. He touched one; he could not even cast a shadow.
In sudden panic, he spoke Nyx Ro’s name.
She appeared in one of the ornate mirrors. “I couldn’t find you,” she said tightly. “I heard you scream. I couldn’t find you.”
“I can’t find a door.” He turned again, searching, and caught his breath at the sight of Nyx multiplied, in threadbare blue velvet, her face waxen, a smudge of ash across one cheekbone. “I can’t see myself at all. Only you.”
“I can only see you,” she said. Her arms were folded tightly; she was frowning, at once disturbed and curious. “I thought I knew every room in this house. Why didn’t you come back through the Ring?”
“I did,” he said tersely.
Her eyes widened. She said, “Corleu. Can you touch my hand?” She held it out to him; his fingers were stopped by cold glass.
“Am I some place out of time? Is that why I can’t see myself? Should I break a mirror?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Mirrors hold your image; they should be treated with care.”
“These don’t. They’re all ignoring me. I saw myself in all of them, and then I vanished, as if an eye blinked somewhere, or they stopped thinking of me.”
For a moment, even she stopped thinking of him. “How strange,” she breathed. “How strange… A secret room within a house full of a thousand secrets. I wonder what it sees when no one is here?”
“If you wait long enough, no one will be here, and then you can find out, likely.”
She held out her hand again. “I don’t know why you’re still standing there complaining. One of me is real. Find me.”
He circled the room, touched her glassy hand in every glass. Finally, in a small mirror ringed in tarnished silver, he felt her hand close on his. He stepped forward. The mirror widened into a ring of motionless, icy fire. He stepped through it into her workroom.
The ring dwindled swiftly until there was nothing left of it but a tiny circle of silver that dropped back into the round glass jar. Nyx left it sitting within the circle painted on the floor. She looked for chairs; they had all gone elsewhere. Impatiently, she pulled a couple out of the floorboards, great, shapeless things smelling like mushrooms from the cellar. Corleu sat down gratefully; his eyes closed.
He was on his feet in an instant, pulling away from a glimpse of the Ring he had fallen into. Nyx watched him dispassionately.
“Why did you scream? Did she try to harm you?”
“No.” He wheeled at her abruptly. “You tricked me. I had nothing to give her but my eyes.”
She shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it? What did she give you in return?”
“Not much.”
“Did you tell her what you were looking for? Did she recognize it? As something valuable? Something of power?”
“She recognized it, yes. A toad in a hole would recognize it.”
“But she didn’t—”
“No.”
“Did she help at all? Was she angry with you? Did she not want you to find it?”
“Oh, she does want me to find it.” He found a wall in front of him and paced back. “She does.”
“Did she make any suggestions?” Nyx asked patiently.
“She said there is a web… a secret at the center of the web. The Cygnet flies over it day and night.”
“And that’s where it is?”
“No. That’s where the secret of finding this thing is.”
“A web…” She was silent a little, her brows puckered, a fingernail between her teeth. He looked at her in the candlelight, Lauro Ro’s daughter, with her cold, curious eyes that, for all their look into power, had never glimpsed what there was to fear.
“It’s not just story,” he said harshly. Her eyes rose to his face.
“I guessed that much.”
“If I give the Gold King what he wants, he won’t just vanish back into words. Nor will she. Likely that’s where the stories will end, because now they wear them like rags and tatters, but they’ll grow too big, too powerful for us to keep them trapped in words.”
She was gazing at him, motionless. “Are you warning me?”
“You don’t know what it is I’m trying to find. I do.”
“Well, Corleu, what use is there fretting until I do know? Are you going to stop looking for it? Leave your Tiel sitting there forever in a dream?“ He was silent, trapped. ”That’s why I want this thing. I can use it against them, if need be. Was that all she said? A web?”
“She said to ask the Dancer.”
She was still then, her eyes narrowed; he stood tense, waiting for her to catch a glimpse of what he sought. But she said only, “Sit down. Tell me a story, of Corleu and the Blind Lady. Maybe then you won’t be afraid of the dark.”
He sat. He dropped his face in his hands. “She was like… she was like this house. Old, rambling, crazed, untidy, like a beggar woman you might see at a crossroads, mumbling to herself, her fingers moving always, weaving, weaving… At the end, she made me look at her weaving. She threads even the stars into it. I saw the Ring of Time she makes, where all the threads there are flow together and you can’t see one life, one star, from another, and outside that Ring there is nothing.” He raised his head. “That’s the Ring I fell through. I thought I would fall into that nothing.”
She mused over that, twisting a pearl button. “Yet even she is trapped, Corleu. Even she. And what you saw is only another story, of the Weaver of Withy Hold. The Cygnet holds her powerless.”
“And even that is only another story.”
“Well, story or no, the thing you are looking for is real enough. Isn’t it?”
“Likely,” he said after a moment.
“So you move from tale to tale to get it.” She studied the pearl, as if the light shifting across it wove a pattern. “A web… beneath the Cygnet flying day and night. Why does that tease my memories? Something I read when I was little, something I saw…”
“In your books, maybe.”
“Then again, maybe I dreamed it.” She drew herself up. “You’d do best to go ask the Dancer.”
“I’d sooner find the web than wake the Dancer.”
“Why?” she asked, surprised. “All the Dancer does is dream, beneath the ice.”
“I’ll have to carry fire to face the Fire Bear. And I’d sooner find the web than travel to the top of the world and wake someone who dreams sometimes like what appears in your fires.”
“You find the web, then,” she said, turning. “Meanwhile, I’ll find what fire you must take to the Fire Bear.”
“I’m not going there.”
“You’ll go.”
“I won’t need to.”
“You’ll go,” she said, and there was a flicker of something deep in her eyes, another glimpse into his seeking. “That’s what they want.”
Wordless, he watched her cross the room. She turned at the door. “There’s food in the kitchen. I baked bread. Someone will come to the door tonight. My doorkeepers will give him what he has come for. If you stay in here, you may see one or two of them. Don’t look directly at them; they take offense. Good night.”
The kitchen, he had discovered, never moved. It could be found at the bottom of some stone steps, which sometimes moved, but never far from what they were attached to. Corleu carried books down with him, roamed through them for a web as he ate fresh bread and goat cheese and cold smoked river trout. The only web he found was cobweb. Wandering upstairs hours later for more books, he was startled by voices. Something vague and bulky in the shadows that looked like a misshapen hand or a forked root turned a pale eye at him and hissed. He stopped staring hastily, built up the fire and settled beside it with more books.
He woke in the morning, face-down in a book. Nyx was stirring the fire.
“You should never sleep between two spells,” she commented.
He raised his head, blinked at the ancient writing in blue and gold and black inks. Chrysom, it said, at the bottom of each page, like a warning.
“I was looking for the web.”
“You won’t find it in there, that’s spells only.” She tossed fragrant wood on the fire and sat beside him on the floor, leafing through the pages of one of the books lying open. He watched her sleepily. She wore a long dress of stiff green cloth that rippled with light when she moved. Its top button was missing; he could see the ivory skin at the hollow of her throat, and the thumbnail of shadow below that. Her eyes were on him suddenly, chilly, colorless, like a winter sky, like a slap of cold water.
“Corleu. I know the fire you must bring to the Fire Bear, but I haven’t found yet where the Dancer sleeps.”
He sat up, groggy and stiff from the floorboards. “I’m not waking the Dancer. She sleeps in ice beneath the Fire Bear.”
“Meaning what?”
“She’s under the constellation.”
“So is all of Berg Hold. And all of Ro Holding, nearly. Where will you step to, if you go through that ring to Berg Hold? What do Wayfolk say of the Dancer?”
“If you think of her at the fair side of midnight, you’ll have good dreams; at the dark side, you’ll have foul dreams. If a woman’s braid is undone during sleep, Dancer can draw memory away. If you sleep with fresh lavender on your pillow for her, she’ll tell you who you will marry. If the lavender is withered, she’ll tell who will die. If she dances hooded in your dreams, your life will change. If you see her face in your dreams, you will die. The Cygnet trapped her in ice so she could not dance. Freed, she never stops. Fire Bear would free her, but it has no fire left in it, after pursuing the Cygnet. So it guards her.”
“But where?”
“At the top of the world…” He paused, then shook his head. “That’s all I know. At the top of the world. You never saw a likely place in your wanderings?”
She mused, remembering. “In Berg Hold I visited the northern witches. I sat around their fires in the dead of winter in their tiny dark huts smelling of tanned hides and smoke and bitter herbs, and I learned how to foretell from the forked horns of snow deer, and how to braid strips of leather into safe paths through the snow, and how to understand the language of the white crows, who gossip of bad weather, travellers, deer herds, death. The witches made do with what they had against storm, hunger, fever. They used to dance to invoke dreams of foreseeing. To them, the Dancer came alive in those dreams; where she slept in the ice was of no importance, that was only a tale. I also studied with the mage Diu, who is the last living descendant of Chrysom. He is very old; he went to Berg Hold to live in peace, he said. But he taught me what I wanted to know, anyway, for Chrysom’s descendants have always spent time serving Ro Holding. He made nothing of the Dancer, for he slept little. He only knew what Chrysom had written. The Dancer was a folk tale. A constellation. Inconsequential.” She turned a page, leaving Corleu to wonder at her down-turned, secret face.
“You were curious,” he ventured. “That’s why you went there. To Berg Hold, to live close to earth in the dead of winter. Just curious.”
She lifted her head, gave him for the first time a true smile. “Yes.”
“Were you always this way?”
Her eyes were clear again, expressionless, but not, he thought, offended. “I like to use my mind,” she said.
“Does—does the Holder—” The mist in her eyes seemed to chill into frost then, but he persisted. “Does she wonder— does she know—”
“Does she know that I’m in the Delta torturing small animals?”
“I wondered,” he confessed, and she shrugged slightly.
“Oh, yes. She knows. After this, she may not want to see much of me again, but I think she will always know where I am.”
“How could she not want to see you?” he protested. ‘’ You‘ re her daughter.’‘
“She has Iris and Calyx. And she has Rush Yarr, who is not her son but might as well be. And she has Meguet. She can spare me.” Her voice was dry, dispassionate. Corleu, feeling as if he had blundered into some complex, bewildering and totally unfamiliar country, said:
“You’re like a story to us. The Holder of Ro Holding and her children: three daughters who wouldn’t recognize their fathers from three fence posts, because that’s the Holder’s business and that’s the way it is in your world. Once I saw a procession crossing Withy Hold when I was harvesting. We all stopped to watch it: long lines of riders in black, with other riders in fine, airy colors between them, and the Cygnet on a pennant as long as a furrow, flying like a black flame over them all. That’s all I’ve seen of the Holder. Is she so cold or cruel or stupid that you ran away from her?”
The Holder’s daughter shook her head, surprised. “My mother is none of those things. Maybe if she were, I could have lived in the same house with her.” She added abruptly, frowning, when Corleu opened his mouth, ”Enough. I don’t like answering to her, why should I want to answer to some Wayfolk man who fell out of the sky?”
“Likely,” he suggested, rising, “because of how I got there.”
He wandered away to wash and change his clothes, torn by the thorns and stained by the fields he had known in some distant, lost life. When he returned, dressed in odd, rich, mismatched clothes, combing his wet hair with his fingers, he found her in the same place, beside her fire, so immersed in what she read that she seemed only an illusion of herself.
But she raised her head after a moment. “I have work to do this morning. You won’t want to watch it. Take what books you want with you. I’ll find you when I’m done.”
Chilled, he took himself and an armload of books far enough away, he thought, that not even the anguished bellow of a swamp tortoise could reach him. In a small room containing an old velvet couch, an empty chest, an empty picture frame and an empty bird cage, he searched for a web until he fell asleep himself and dreamed of Tiel within a fall of vines within the bird cage. He woke and saw the sorceress’s face above him.
He started, confusing himself, cages, small wingless birds. Then he drew a breath, leaned back again. He lifted the book that sprawled opened across his chest and said, “I found the Dancer.”
“Where?”
“ ‘On the top of the world,’” he read.
“ ‘ On the top of the mountain,
On the top of a cliff,
On the top of a stone,
Beneath the night,
Beneath the moon,
Beneath the snow,
Beneath the ice:
The Dancer sleeps.
In her breath,
The last breath of winter,
The breath of prophecy.’ ”
He closed the heavy book and sat up. “It’s someone’s—I don’t know—scraps of sayings, tales, bits of history, even recipes. Riddles. Accounts, where wild herbs were found. Such like that.”
She took it from him. “Rydel. She was head gardener for Timor Ro. She knew some herb magic. Chrysom’s grandson wrote of her. He thought highly of her. He wrote that she held secret powers of a kind not even Chrysom knew of, or would have understood. So I read whatever I could find that she wrote, or was written of her. But all her other writings are of herb lore, and no one else attributed such great mysterious powers to her. I have read these lines about the Dancer. I didn’t remember them.”
“Is there only one mountain in Berg Hold?”
“There is one peak much higher than the rest. There are many tales about what lies under its mists: ice spirits, the ghosts of travellers, the palace of the north wind, a real fire bear. I should have remembered that the Dancer and the Fire Bear are always together, even in tales. It’s a grey barren peak in late summer, and by autumn you can no longer see it.”
Corleu was silent, weighing the impulse to step out of the Delta onto the frozen peak of the world, to free the Dancer and ask her a question that might end his search, and then, with Tiel safe, to close his eyes and hope that the heart of the Cygnet and the heart of Ro Holding had no more to do with one another than a random pattern of stars had to do with a smallfolk rhyme. Impulse turned to desire; desire was nearly overwhelming. He said, his voice shaking, hearing the rustle of leaves in a place where there was no wind, “And if she doesn’t know? You know where she will send me.”
The green in his eyes resolved into the watery sheen of the sorceress’s skirt, rustling as she shifted. She said only, “And if she knows?”
“And if she doesn’t?” He closed his eyes, counted recklessly, deliberately. “Gold King, Silver Ring, Fire Bear—it’s not only tales I’m stirring up. It’s Hold Signs.”
She was silent. He looked up; her eyes caught his, absolutely colorless. She made no movement, no sound. Suddenly terrified under that chill gaze, he thought she must have seen straight through his thoughts to the place where he had hidden his secret, and that, child born under the Cygnet’s dark wing, she would kill him before he shook apart Ro Holding.
But she moved finally. Her fingers closed tightly on her arms; her face, always pale, seemed ghostly in that pale room. “How complex and fascinating,” she breathed. “This is a power like no other power I have ever encountered. If in the end I must fight it, then I must understand it. And I can only do that if I see it unmasked, open, not skulking behind poetry and folk myths. If you don’t finish this, the Gold King will find someone else who will, someone who may not fall into my hands as tidily as you did.”
“You’d risk Ro Holding out of curiosity,” he challenged her, miserable and desperate. Her brows went up. Behind her, in the frame that had been empty, he saw the night sky in miniature, the constellations of the Holds—the Gold King, the Silver Ring, the Fire Bear, the Blood Fox—circling the Cygnet in its flight. Circling among them were the lesser stars: the Peacock leading the Blind Lady, the Mage shadowing the Blood Fox, the Dark House, the Dancer guarded by the Fire Bear.
“Of course I’m curious,” Nyx Ro said. “What else would I be?”
“Likely if you’re that powerful you don’t have to be afraid.”
“Not until you tell me what it is you want me to fear.”
He looked away from her steady eyes, back to the night sky. The frame was empty again. “If I knew exactly,” he sighed, “I could say. They’re just tales, how could there be danger? Just stars our eyes picked out and made into patterns so the night would be less lonely with faces looking back at us. But because of stars and smallfolk rhyme, I’ve lost everything I ever knew.”
“It’s only a step through time from here to there, from Delta to Berg Hold, Corleu. From not knowing to knowing. And only at the cost of fire. Will you wake the Dancer?”
Fire rippled inside the picture frame: a Fire Bear’s soundless roar, a tinker’s fire. He saw the tinker’s face in the fire, his yellow eyes, his narrow, sidelong smile. He stared back at it, trapped and shaken with sudden fury at his helplessness. He said abruptly, “No.”
“No? Corleu, it might take a lifetime to find the web, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“What I’m thinking is that likely I’ll have to give the tinker what he asked for, but there’s no reason to give him the world and stars besides. I don’t have to bring the Dancer to life for him. All I must do is ask a question.”
“So—”
“So.” He met her cool, misty, slightly bemused eyes. “I’ll wait for the last day of winter. She’ll answer me truly and then she’ll dream like always, and none of us will have to see her waking face.”
Nyx was silent, studying him. Her head bent slightly; she turned, closed a couple of tomes and picked them up. She said only, “The work I do here might well drive you to Berg Hold long before the end of winter.”
“I’ll chance it.” He heaved books into his arms. “If you’ll let me stay.”
“Only yesterday you would have given the world and stars to get out of here.”
“That was yesterday.” He waited for her to open the door, for she would find the workroom behind it, while he would find only another memory. “I can search for the web. If I find what that is, I won’t need to ask the Dancer anything.”
“You won’t last here till winter’s end,” she predicted, and opened the door.
“I’ll last,” he said.
There was a woman leaning against a cauldron in the workroom.
Nyx stopped so abruptly in front of Corleu, he nearly dropped books on her; it was a moment before she spoke. The woman waited, her face composed. She wore black silk and leather; the Cygnet, limned and ringed in silver, flew in the hollow of her left shoulder. She was slender, broad-shouldered, tall enough to wear the long blade at her belt. Swans swirled up the metal sheath and over the hilt of the sword; one tried to soar out of the pommel. Her braided hair was pale ivory. Her face, broad-boned, sun-colored, reminded Corleu at first glance of the easily smiling daughters of the wealthy lords of Withy Hold. In the next moment she reminded him of no one he had ever met in his life, and he guessed where she must have come from.
“Meguet,” Nyx breathed.
“The Holder sent me.” She did not look at Corleu; her still, intent gaze was for Nyx. Nyx moved finally, to a table, and set her books down. She folded her arms. Corleu, following, saw her face as she turned. It looked bloodless in the candlelight; she was frowning deeply.
“Is the Holder well?”
“The Holder, both your sisters and Rush Yarr are all well.”
The woman’s voice, low and slightly husky, was quite calm under the stares of Nyx’s assortment of skulls.
“I didn’t ask about Rush Yarr.”
“So you didn’t.” She detached herself from the cauldron with the grace of one intimately acquainted with movement. Her curious glance fell here, there; she picked up a bird skull, examined its clean, delicate lines, its empty eyes, as if searching for the magic in it. Nyx opened her mouth to protest, closed it again. Meguet put the skull down. “So you didn’t,” she said again. “I’ll tell him that if you want. He’ll ask.”
“After all this time?” Nyx asked sharply. “Nine years?”
“He won’t listen to reason.” She touched a book or two, paced back to the cauldron, her movements light, quick, restive, like one troubled by walls, Corleu thought, or more likely only these, full of bones and smells. “He still loves you.”
“What for?” Nyx said, astonished. The woman’s eyes flickered at her; in the pallid light, Corleu caught a hint of their color.
“You must ask him to know. If it’s important at all.” She glanced into the cauldron. “You have a toad in your cauldron. A big, bloated moon of a toad.”
“It’s an albino,” Nyx said crossly. “You’ve known Rush as long as I have. Tell him to stop. Tell him I said to.”
“I will tell him. Does it jump?”
“It jumps out of everything but that.”
“It looks too fat to jump.”
“It jumps.”
“Its eyes are sapphire… He would have come with me, had he known.”
“He should have come,” Nyx said dourly. “This house would have opened his eyes.”
“Perhaps. What do you do with an albino toad?”
“You feed it to an albino fire.”
“Ah,” the woman said softly. She reached into the cauldron with one hand, did something that made the toad give a deep, lazy grunt. “It speaks.”
“As it will in the fire,” Nyx said implacably. “If you are finished playing with my toad, perhaps you will tell me why my mother sent you.”
“The Holder sent me to remind you that you will have been away from home for three years in spring.”
“Three—” Looking surprised, she calculated, from dust motes apparently. “Two years in the desert, last spring here… so it will be three years.”
“In spring. The Holder asks that you remember your promise to return for the Holding Council.”
Nyx was silent. She went to the fire, tossed a handful of wood chips from a bowl beside it onto the embers, and the harsh, charred smell in the air subsided. “Of course I’ll come home,” she said reluctantly. “I did promise. But I would think, under the circumstances, she would rather not see me in the company of all the Hold Councils.”
“You think she should wait until you are doing something less disturbing and all the disgusting rumors of you have died down?”
Nyx met her level gaze. “You could put it like that.”
“I just did. You’re overlooking one thing. Your mother misses you.”
Nyx’s fingers found a strand of hair to worry. “I can’t think why.”
“She hoped you would come back with me.”
“She must be getting tired of hearing comments about my life.”
“That would be the only reason she wants to see you.”
Nyx sighed. “If I go back now, we’ll only quarrel.”
“You’ve been here nearly a year. Is there that much to learn in this soggy backwater?”
“There are a few things left. Tell my mother I will come home in spring.”
Meguet inclined her head without comment. Nyx studied her a moment, the look in her pale eyes unfathomable. She asked, “Is that the only reason you have come, Meguet? All this way through the swamp, up my rickety stairs? The Holder could have sent a message upriver; it would have reached me, my reputation what it is.”
Meguet did not reply immediately; she seemed to hear a question beneath that question. “Your mother holds you in more regard than that. Even now. As for your stairs, I would think anyone as powerful as you could mend a stair.”
“It discourages visitors.”
“So it must. There are two morose trappers waiting for me in a boat at your dock, who almost refused to bring me here. They said you wouldn’t want company.”
“They were right.”
Meguet’s calm gaze did not falter. “Then I will leave you,” she said softly. “It’s getting dark and the trappers may not wait for me.”
“How do you know it’s getting dark?”
“What?”
“You can’t see out of these windows.”
“It was dusk when I came in,” Meguet said surprisedly. She picked a heavy black cloak off a chair and swung it over her shoulders. The Cygnet, black and silver within a ring of silver, flew around her and settled at her back. She stepped into candlelight; the fire turned her pale hair silk, and Corleu shifted. A memory nagged him, a tale. Her face looked pale now; the things half-hidden in the shadows wore at her, or the odd sharpness in Nyx’s questions. Nyx said more easily:
“I forget sometimes whether it’s day or night when I work. Tell my mother I will see her in spring.”
“I will.”
“And tell the trappers to come back here in the morning; I will have work for them.”
“I will tell them,” Meguet said evenly. She held Nyx’s eyes. “They say you are ensorcelled by this swamp. But, now and then, I think I actually see why you are here, why you burn albino toads. I may be wrong. I know so little of magic. But I do wonder, if any of us knew as much as you, where we would make the choice to stop learning.”
A little color rose in Nyx’s face. She did not answer, but words gathered in the air between them. Before she turned to go, Meguet looked at Corleu. He saw the color of her eyes. And then he saw the corn rows standing in the summer light, the cool, secret, shadowy world they hid between their leaves. He blinked, but he could not separate her from the tale: corn-silk hair and eyes as deeply green as his great-gran’s green-drenched memory.
He swallowed drily, motionless under her gaze, not knowing how long they stood there silently, not knowing, from her expressionless face, what she thought. She turned suddenly, and almost dragged at him to take a step and follow her. Nyx stayed silent, listening to the fading footsteps on the porch. She looked as grim as Corleu had ever seen her. He asked tentatively,
“Who is she?”
“She is a far-flung cousin, Meguet Vervaine. She lost her family early; my mother took her in, raised her with us. She has a penchant for weapons and for wandering. She goes where the Holder sends her, and she is the only person in all of Ro Holding permitted to enter armed into Ro House. She is a descendant of Astor Ro, Moro Ro’s wife, who in a thousand years produced some varied and eccentric descendants.”
“Does she have power? Like yours?”
She gave him a brooding, searching look. “She has never shown signs of it. Why?”
“Just—how she looked at me, before she left. At me, into me, and out the nether side. As if—as if she might know me, but couldn’t remember… Something like you’re looking at me now, only it’s not me troubles you, it’s her.”
“She was in my house.” Her fingers tightened on her arms; she stared at the dark empty hallway as if to see her cousin’s shadow there. “My doorkeepers could keep even Chrysom out, and Meguet walked through them twice as if she did not even realize they exist.”