CHAPTER 3 THE MAZE AND FORTUNE

“Leith Meadows,” the train captain called down the corridor, “change for Derren Valley and the Southwest. Leith Meadows, next station.”

Varic braced himself in the vestibule as the train rattled over points. A signal standard flashed past the window, and the platform rolled by. The brakes were applied, and the train ground hissing to a stop.

Leith Meadows was a modest wooden box of a station, hexagonal tiles on its roof with a strip of sharp ornamental iron along the crease. There were four tracks, a glass-covered iron bridge leading to the outer three. The just-afternoon sky was almost completely clear, and the sun was warm, though the still air was cool.

Varic opened the door, reached out to assist Longlight to the platform. Silvern had gone forward to the baggage car. Varic said quietly, “It was a pleasant voyage, wasn’t it?”

“Was and is,” Longlight said, and Varic nodded. “Will we be met?”

“We are met,” Varic said, and took a step toward three people standing together under the eave of the station roof.

There were two women, one tall and slender and pale blond, the other shorter and plumper and darker. The shorter one held the hand of a boy, perhaps seven or eight, with neatly combed short brown hair and wide light brown eyes. All three wore livery coats of soft, dark red leather, with a household emblem on the left shoulder: a gold ellipse, blue moons above and below a red four-towered house.

“Tacker and Roan,” Varic said, indicating the tall and short women, “and their son, Hazel. Strange’s first coaching crew. Or does Hazel still intend to abandon stables for an Ironway motive?”

“Honored Edaire says I shall if I study,” the boy said, and Roan squeezed his hand while Tacker half turned her smile away. “Good day to you, Lord Varic,” Hazel said, a little stiffly.

Varic said, “And good day to you, Hazel. This is our new guest Longlight, and you must call her ‘Lady,’ for she is a great Coron of the West.” Everyone exchanged bows, and Varic said to Roan, “Is it only us, or will we be waiting for others?”

Roan said, “No others for a while, milord. Is not our Palion with you?” Her speech had the formal tone of a Northerner, though her accent was definitely Central.

“Up with the baggage.”

“I see him,” Tacker said. Her voice was calm, crisp, almost military. “Meet you at the coach.” She nodded to Varic and Longlight and walked lightly up the platform.

“This way, milady,” Roan said. “Hazel, lead you on.”

They went through the station hall, which was beginning to fill up with transfer passengers checking their connections and staking claims to seats. They emerged almost alone on the station drive. A four-wheel coach with a splendid four of chestnuts was waiting at the curb. A boy in an Ironway jacket was holding the horses; Varic gave him a plate, he touched his cap and handed the reins, with care approaching ceremony, over to Roan.

Silvern came out, carrying his bag, alongside Tacker, who was pushing a cart with the rest of the luggage. She rolled it to the rear of the coach, tossed the canvas cover aside, and began transferring bags without apparent effort. Roan made a quiet and efficient check of the interior and climbed up onto the driver’s box. She took a leather cap and goggles from a chest beside her. “Tacker, how goes the work?”

“Just done now, Roan.” Tacker took a seat on the rear platform. There was a short, steel-fitted carbine in a clip beside her.

Roan said, “Then at your convenience, honored guests.”

“No convenience like the present,” Silvern said.

“Agreed,” Varic said. “Longlight?” He gestured to the coach door.

“How far is it?”

“Slightly over eight milae. Is the road fair today, Hazel?”

“Fair and open and broad, honored,” the boy said. “We should make fine time.”

“Excellent. Then would you help the lady aboard?”

Hazel took up footman’s position by the door and step, held out his hand to assist Longlight. “Does my lady prefer to sit facing forward or back?”

“I shall face back, Hazel.” She boarded, said, “Thank you, Hazel,” and pressed an ace into his palm. He pressed his hands together on it, bowed deeply. Then he turned to face Silvern, bowed, and said, “One arm, Palion? One arm?”

“You’re sure you can manage one,” Silvern said almost gravely.

“Oh, yes, honored!”

“Very well, then.” Silvern extended his left arm horizontally, braced his right against the rear of the coach. Hazel jumped straight up and caught Silvern’s extended arm with both hands, swung up just as if the arm had been a tree branch (and it moved no more than a branch would have) and vaulted onto the top of the coach. He sat down on the driver’s box, next to Roan. The driver put an arm around her son’s shoulders and hugged him.

Varic sat down inside the coach, opposite Longlight. Silvern leaned in at the open door. “I’ll sit back with Tacker,” he said. “I need some road air.”

“Tell me if you want a dust-cutter,” Varic said, and Silvern nodded to the two of them and shut the door. Roan clucked to the team and the coach rolled away from the station, between a pair of huge plane trees just edged with autumn gold, and onto a road that was indeed broad and open and fair.

The coach was comfortable, not luxurious, made for trips of an hour or two. Varic could not count the times he had ridden in it, to and from the station, into the apple orchards or around the lake, in the half of his life he had been a guest of Strange’s. The feel of its cushions, its smell of wood and leather and iron, the particular bounce of its springs, were part of the welcome, the stay, the farewell.

The seats were upholstered in kid leather, a once-deep red faded now to dark rose. The fittings were white metal, polished non-tarnishing steel with here and there a touch of gilding. At the corners of the compartment, pressed-glass lanterns hung on gimbals; they could be read by, if you held the book close and the letters were not too tiny. Several small books were shelved above Varic’s head: Shearer’s Essays, Bright’s Back Lanes Lescorial, Fineman’s In Quercian Twilight (that one, with its minute print, for daylight reading only), an Ironway timetable. Above Longlight, in a fitted cabinet, were three decanters of leather-covered glass—whisky, pale brandy, dark rum—and a stack of silver cups.

Varic was about to ask Longlight if she wanted a drink when she stood up, one hand carefully on the brace handle, and sat down next to him. “I’m tired,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“No.”

She settled her head against his shoulder. Her hair pressed his cheek. He felt a strong desire to touch her face, but did not. He wondered what Silvern had told her about the House, the guests. If this was how she was choosing to part from him, he did not wish to interfere with the act. He tilted his head just enough to both accommodate her and see out the window, and that was how they stayed for nearly half an hour. Halfway along, he was aware that the panel to the rear slid open, no doubt Silvern wanting a brandy, but no one spoke, and it closed again quietly.

“You can see the House now,” Varic said quietly, and Longlight opened her eyes and sat up.

Varic said, “There. Across the lake.”

“I hadn’t realized it would be so large.”

The lake was about half a mila east to west, slightly less north to south. A small, wooded island was in its approximate center. On the far north bank, the columns of the pavilion could be seen, and beyond them the House itself. As the coach followed the road around the lake, slowly turning the angle of view, the House took shape, three-dimensional substance.

The central House was sixty steps square and four storeys high, with tall, narrow windows on all sides of the upper floors. To either side, a long wing reached southward toward the lake. The wings were twenty steps across and eighty long, three floors high; they were connected to the main building by columned breezeways at ground level and enclosed halls on the upper floors. At each end of the long galleries was a square-sided tower, twice as high as the building; the northern pair flanked the main House, the southern two overlooked the lake. From certain angles the House looked like a square-bastioned castle of the Altenreigns, though there were far too many windows and balconies for that kind of defensible place, and nothing of that antiquity could have had the House’s array of chimneys and rain gutters. It was surrounded on all sides but the lake with light woods, elms and maples and oaks, green and gold.

“We’ll come up alongside the East Wing,” Varic said. “That’s where guests usually stay.”

“Just the East Wing,” she said with something between laughter and awe. “It looks as if it could billet an army.”

“A small army. There are forty guest rooms, all with cameral plumbing, as well as Strange’s apartments and the staff quarters. A small kitchen and buttery in each wing, in case you’re hungry in the night, and always someone awake to warm a pie or pull a splinter or fill a hot water bottle.” He looked through the trees separating the road from the East Wing, windows flickering between trunks. “It was built for hospitality. And—do you know the fable of the travelers in the hostelry barn?”

“No. It is often said that … Westren hosting’s thin a’base.”

“The same thing is said of the varic coast northish,” Varic said, offhand, and then said, “You should have Strange tell you the story. And show you—no, don’t ask what I mean by that. You’ll see.”

The road curved away from the building, into the surrounding woods. Longlight looked over the House, fascinated, wide-eyed. Twice she began to speak, but did not. Finally she said, “How old is it?”

“Two hundred twelve years. We had a party on the two hundredth.”

“Then—who built it? If not the Lord Strange…”

“Two things,” Varic said, gently and carefully. “One, we do not discuss Strange’s age. Two, Strange does not like to be addressed as ‘Lord,’ even though the House and grounds are technically a Coronage.”

“I will remember.”

“No one will curse you if you forget. We just … have our ways, that’s all.”

The road merged into a paved ellipse before the main house. In the middle of the loop was a stone-edged lily pond, a statue at its center, standing on the water. It was a gaunt woman holding a staff and a shutter lantern, wearing a cloak and a full backpack, her face hooded.

Longlight said, “Coris, of course—but that figure, the lantern, must be Wyss.”

Varic said, “Yes.”

The coach rounded the circle and stopped before the main house. It was imposing enough from this angle, a massive face of gray stone and black iron and green roof tile; but the windows were unshuttered and bright, and the sun lit it warmly.

The entrance was on the floor above ground, in the usual manorial fashion, with stairways curving down to its left and right. Between the feet of the stairs was a double oak door, and it was this that opened. A strikingly tall woman came out, pushing a man in a wheeled chair.

The woman had very dark skin; her eyes were large and quite black, with an exotic tilt. Her hair was black and straight, cut all around at the level of her chin, like a helmet. She wore a full-sleeved gown of russet satin embroidered in green, belted with braided green leather.

The man in the chair wore a gown of dark red velvet, a scholar’s gown with pockets for pens and lenses and paperwork. A broad cap of the same stuff drooped over his ears; a thin fringe of gray hair showed from beneath it. His legs were bundled in a black quilt sewn with gold stars, like a sleighter’s black robe. His face was deeply creased, though the skin between the grooves was pink and smooth. His smile was very broad. Muscular hands with prominent veins rested easily on the arms of the chair. He was not a small man, and there was certainly strength enough in his upper body. The chair did not diminish or imprison him.

“Silvern!” the man said, his voice like thunder across still water. “Sa hashta, bardi. And Varic, welcome as ever. And you have brought us a new guest. Welcome to our house, honored mistress. My name is Strange. And yours would be?”

“Longlight, honored. Of the sunset regions.”

“Then you would be the Lord Blackstone’s granddaughter and heir, and welcome for his memory as well as your own.” He raised a hand. “I would you meet Dany, my friend of much help.”

Longlight bowed. Dany placed a hand across her heart.

Varic was looking away from everyone else. He seemed to be watching ripples in the pond. Then he looked up, toward the House’s East Wing. After a prolonged, silent moment, he said, “Agate is already here.”

“Yes, she is,” Strange said.

“Then I must take my leave of you all. Roan, Tacker, Hazel, thanks for your good care. Silvern, Strange, Dany, well met. And, Longlight … I am sure I shall see you at dinner. Expect marvels.”

He hurried up the steps and disappeared.

The awkward silence fell again. Then Strange said, quite genially, “Silvern, why don’t you and Dany go in? I know you’ll be wanting a little combat play, and the arenetto is ready. I’ll see that Longlight is settled. We have an old family connection to discuss.”

Dany took a step back from Strange’s chair. She and Silvern went through the ground-level door.

Strange said, “Which floor do you prefer, middle or upper? Top south end has the best view. Courtyard side, I think. Tacker, you’ll see to it?”

“Of course, Strange.” She pulled up on the rear step of the coach, and Roan drove it around the corner of the main building, out of sight.

Strange turned his chair toward the house. “Come along, then, Longlight, and see the pile from the inside.”

Longlight didn’t move. “Who is Agate?” she said.

“Another of our guests. A Player, as the regulars call themselves. I hope you will soon come to consider yourself another such.”

“Varic seemed in a great hurry to … see … her.”

“Yes,” Strange said, slowly and with a long release of breath. “They are old and particular friends. Please—would you push me in?”

She took the handles of the chair. “Like this?”

“Just so.”

They went through the lower door into a stone-floored foyer, lit by two brass lanterns. Cloaks hung on the walls, and rubber overshoes were neatly racked. There were two other doors into the house, and an iron cage lift. Strange pushed the lift door aside. “This way, Longlight.”

The cage shut, rumbled, and hummed, and rose a floor. They emerged into a broad room that opened into hallways on three sides. The walls were covered with red satin and hung with gilt mirrors and small gold-framed paintings; there was a marble table in the Quercian style, and a wooden one after the Midreigns, and an inlaid desk of fairly modern design covered with papers and periodicals.

“This is the main floor, where most everyday things happen,” Strange said. “The small dining room is just to the south, that way; that’s for informal meals, breakfast usually, unless you prefer breakfast in your room. It has a terrace overlooking the garden, and if we’re lucky the weather will hold fair enough to dine outside. The main library is just to the left, grand parlor opposite; there are more of both all over. The great hall, where we’ll be dining tonight, is just beneath us.” He gestured around at the hallway furnishings. “This is not, despite appearances, a museum; if you see anything that catches your interest, you may handle it and examine it and even ask if I remember anything about it. And of course there’s the room that your grandfather may have told you about—” He stopped abruptly. “Oh, my, the time. I have a short errand to perform, I’m very afraid, and I must abandon you for it. Down that hall to the west, second door to the right, is the Blue Parlor. Do please await me there; I won’t be long. There should be tea. I am happy to have you here, Longlight; I am happy.”

She stared as he rolled his chair into the lift, shut the cage, waved, and descended. She looked around herself for a minima or two, then, having really nothing else to do, went down the hall to the parlor.

It was blue. It had blue damask on the walls and soft furniture, blue velvet curtains, blue crystals in a chandelier glowing golden with glasswicks. A tea cart with a silver service sat beneath the light. A small fire was set in a blue marble fireplace, and a dark-haired woman—not in blue—leaned against the mantel, looking into the fire. Her hair was slightly astray, and she was biting her thumb tip. She turned.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry, I was just brooding.” She held out her hand, which bore a black-and-gold ring.

“You must be Edaire,” Longlight said unsteadily.

“Yes. And whom have I met?”

“My name is Longlight. I … came with Varic and Silvern.”

“Oh! Welcome, then, welcome. Delighted to meet you. Will you sit? I’m sorry if I look frayed, but Agate and I have had a somewhat rough trip. I’m only glad that Varic arrived when he did.”

“Yes. He seemed very concerned about … whoever Agate may be.”

Edaire looked at Longlight eye to eye. “You don’t know,” she said quietly. “No, of course. Varic wouldn’t have said anything, and Silvern wouldn’t have thought to … and you were on the road together two nights, from the City. Oh, my honored dear, do sit down.”

“Your conseil said,” Longlight said firmly, “that you could help me get a train toward my home. I should be very grateful if you could do so. Even part of the way—”

“Will you allow me to tell you some things first?”

“I think I’ve already been told, and quite clearly.”

Edaire frowned, tapped a shoe. She said, “I can stop any train passing, and I will do so if you wish it. But there won’t be one to stop for a while, so you might as well hear what I have to say.” She gestured toward a couch by the tea cart, and they sat, facing each other.

Edaire turned suddenly. “And I do need the tea. I’d nearly forgotten it. Do you want a cup, while it’s still decently hot?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Edaire poured. “I take it from your state of shock—don’t protest, it takes one to know one—that no one even mentioned Agate—or perhaps I should say Varic-and-Agate—until you were through the front door.”

“Just outside it,” Longlight said.

“And suddenly your traveling companion—and doubtless the man you had thought would be your holiday companion, since he has a way of not interfering with other people’s beliefs—runs off to another bedroom, and you’re left alone with a houseful of people you’ve never met.”

“I didn’t think—that is, Varic didn’t know at first that I was coming. Here. To stay. That was your … conseil’s idea.”

“And of course Silvern didn’t tell you about Agate.”

“No.”

“Just as well. As much as I love him—and do not let my tone confuse you about that—he wouldn’t honestly know how. Silvern’s understanding is great, but in his own elemental aspect. So: Agate is an Archpoet. Do you know what that means? In these terms?”

“No.”

“Have you known any sorcerers well?”

“In what sense?” Longlight said dryly.

“Any sense you please,” Edaire said, just as dry.

“Yes. When I was younger. The family healer.”

“And was that person … sensitive to certain things? When you were sick or hurt, did the healer seem to hurt as well?”

“You’ve talked to Varic,” Longlight said, her tone unpleasant but with a certain humor.

“I haven’t even seen him,” Edaire said with relentless calm. “To the point again. The Archain are all like that, if they have any ability at all; Silvern can hear a dull sword cry from across a room. Agate’s Craft is poetry—rhythm and meter; and there’s a lot of bad rhythm in the mortal world. I was lucky to find her when I did, if you believe things like that are luck.” She sipped her tea. “Blackberry and dewbell,” she said, running her tongue over her lips to taste it again. “Very calming. Do not underestimate your host, Longlight.”

Longlight drank some of the tea. “Am I calm enough to hear the rest of this story?”

“Listen, then, and I will try to tell you,” Edaire said. “After that, if you still want to leave, I promise you that a train will stop for you.”

---

Varic climbed the last turn of the northwestern staircase and was on the top floor of the West Wing. The hall was a little more than three steps wide, half again that high. The center of the ceiling was elevated, with shallow windows along the sides for illumination. The clerestory windows were of rippled, translucent colored glass, and pastel shafts fell across the hallway. More of the House’s endless collection was along the walls, separating the oak apartment doors: armor cabinets, tables from three different eras of design set with lamps and bowls and candlesticks and oddments from a dozen more periods, mirrors and paintings on the walls. In about the center of the eastern wall, to Varic’s left, was a particularly good Beadsmith, a view through a wet dawn forest of a Midreign stronghold—either a ruin, or an intact castle partly hidden by the mist.

There were three clocks in the hall, two blocky, ornate table dials and a slim Nockerby tallcase in white birchwood. All—in fact, every clock in the West Wing—had been stopped, their hands set tidily at twelve up, for the duration of Agate’s visit.

Varic stopped at the last door on the right. A few steps farther on, the hallway ended in another door, flanked by maid’s cabinets; it led to stairs down to the hall kitchen and up to the tower.

Short of that tower, this apartment was as far as one could get from the House’s center, the occupied areas. He paused before the door, but did not knock. He pushed it open, slowly, silently, slipped inside, and shut it again without a sound.

Most of the guest chambers were laid out like this one. The hall door opened on a small parlor, with chairs, a secretary table, a fireplace, and an angled skylight. A short hallway led past the bathroom door, to a large, square bedroom with tall windows and a canopy bed. The furnishings varied, by taste and whim and utility. Agate’s room was dressed in sea greens and neutral charcoals. The windows were completely hidden by heavy velvet drapes, and the bed was heavily curtained as well. The curtains were open on satin sheets, turned back but unused. A writing desk was open, supplied, ready, but again showed no sign of use. The chandelier, of crystal fitted for electricity, cast a soft yellow light.

Agate was sitting in the center of a green-cushioned cherrywood sofa, space to either side of her. She was wrapped up close in a quilted robe of purple satin printed with silver flowers; a scarf wound up to her chin, and her brown hands lay inert in her lap. Her feet, in white silk bed socks and kidskin slippers, were propped up on a hassock. There was a tea tray in her reach, with a little tea left in a cup and cookie crumbs dusting a plate.

Her hair was loose to her shoulders, gently waved, sun-bleached so that its color varied brown to golden. Her large, clear brown eyes—the eyes she had been named for—were open, but surrounded by darkness, and focused far away. Her face was taut, and her head nodded slowly, with a terrible combination of tension and exhaustion.

“Bath and dress and tea we’ve had,” she said, her voice clear and startling as the chime of a clock in a silent room, “how d’you like your lady mad?” The teacup began to spin erratically in its saucer, the splash of liquid inside whirlpooling.

“I see only you,” Varic said, and took three steps closer. “Are you mad today, then?”

“Rain come, brain go, kettle boil, I’ve been half the country’s toil. Many those who rode my wake, would have called it Crown Communion; bended me the knee, said, ‘Take up the throne and bring us union.’” The crumbs on the plate imploded into a small, perfectly round cookie, half a raisin at its center.

A joke came to Varic’s mind, but he repressed it, tried to not even think it. For the next few minimi, they needed silence; each word was a primed charge, and he was not yet set to receive the blast. He simply spread his hands, and she nodded.

Agate was not royal, of course—less so than Varic. Archanum and kingship had never mixed well in Lescoray; the Talent was just too wild. And where was it wilder than Crown Communion, the population’s traces of power focused on the King? Kings were not trained. Agate was a master crafter, and look at her, look at her, candlebellbook at her—

Varic felt himself sway as the power struck him, bouncing like static sparks through his body. “No,” Agate cried, and twisted in her wrap. “Here she is metered in marrow and blood, breathing by more than the air inspired; know she would stop it if only she could, know as you must she is terribly—”

“Weary,” Varic said, and they both twitched with the pop of released power, felt muscles loosen as energy ebbed.

At once Varic was tired, too. He was ready and entirely able to drop where he stood. But it wouldn’t do, for a long while yet.

He covered the last few steps to the sofa, sat down just at her left. He was breathing raggedly. Good; one less rhythm. He pointed to the teacup, and she nodded. He lifted the quilted cozy from the pot and poured, dripped in some lemon—stirring would have been a very bad idea—raised the cup to her lips. She swallowed, relaxed with a visible movement of her shoulders.

“We must get you back to prose, my dear,” Varic said. “Tell me what’s happened.”

She took a breath. “Blackice Gorge … smithy and—”

Varic shook his head, just once. Agate did the same and said, “Valley’s usually quiet … empty. Not this time.”

“Someone was there?”

“Bridgers. Pitchers of dirt and ditchers. Flangers and benders and welders and renders. Belting and tressure and bolting and pressure.”

Stressed syllables banged on Varic’s heart. But he could not stop her now. There was a point in this dance beyond which he had to stop delaying, sidestepping, easing her along; when the cankered energies had to be released. The point was not clearly defined, though, fortunately for them both, there was some latitude about it. Still, if he were wrong enough—

Still. Still. Still was what he had to be now.

Agate said:

“In the working of the reaping,

Serving Craft by Crafting service,

Working Art by bought commission,

Power shaped by taut volition,

Leading to this fraught condition,

Muscle, flesh, and bone all nervous,

Troubled thought, an end to sleeping.”

The chandelier trembled, cracked the dim light into pale rainbows. Agate shut her eyes again, seemed about to weep. He could feel her mind hanging from a precipice, feel her ache and sweat with the grip. His own head was starting to spin.

“All’s well, brown maid,” Varic said, not really words but only sound to stop the world from her ears; he glided a hand across her shoulders in a caress that made no contact and had no rhythm, fighting the impulse to embrace her.

“It was not that I did not think of space,

Or spared myself the eloquence of time;

But came within my place a belted brace

And measure-beat a different kind of rhyme.

“Iron coursed and iron beat

And wood gave splintering in receipt

Rivets spat hot from the windsuck forge

And straight sharp iron cut the throat of the gorge.”

He understood. She had done a job for a town, somewhere to the east, something to do with the harvest—the details didn’t matter. Afterward she had needed to be alone and quiet, and had walked through a valley that should have been empty. But wasn’t.

Her dry voice rose, and chimes from nowhere accompanied it. Bubbles of light rose and burst in the room air; Varic shut his eyes for a moment, and the sparks remained.

“Iron and fire in close collusion,

Oil and slag and slow pollution,

Steam and shriek in grand confusion,

Gap’s elision, speed’s illusion.”

He saw the room as if from a great distance. He could see the curtains rippling, the bed breathing, the tea service whirling in space like an orrery of Sun and Planets. He could feel the ends of his ribs burning, and wondered how long it had been since he had breathed.

It was, in a way, easy enough: all he had to do was remain disinterested, let the storm pass him and the lightning go to earth. In another way, this was live working sorcery, and he could easily end up with his knees folded into angle-iron within his rib cage, or turned to iron, heated red and glowing.

“You could die,” she had said, years ago, when first Strange had put them together in this ongoing experiment. Yes, well. He hadn’t yet, though. Hardly interesting anymore.

One of the drapes came down from the window, and dusty light slashed across the room. Agate looked up, her pupils enormous, eyes just black and white like a doll’s, seeing something beyond things. The falling drape folded over the light as if the beam were a valet’s forearm, twenty pounds of velvet arched on a streak of sun.

She was thinking on bridges, Varic thought; on suspension. He could hear his ribs creak under load. He could feel the steam hammer in his skull, sinking pilings into his brain. Strap iron laced his girdered fingers. His nerves dangled over the dizzying gap.

She was the motive, he was the rail: together, all they had to do was reach the far side.

When it was this bad, it always broke suddenly; sometimes, when she was less terribly nerved, there was only a gradual calming, but high tension resolved in a high moment.

It came: power sheeting across him like hard driven rain through a suddenly opened door. Like rain, it soaked his skin but went no deeper; it drew warmth from him, but what was that? There was little enough to lose.

He heard the crockery thud to the carpet, the curtain fold up with a groan of trapped air. Agate’s head tipped forward, and her shoulders slumped. He did not touch her for a full minima, until the small Craftlights ceased to shift around her eyes and fingernails.

So it was done again. Not so hard after all, nothing really required on his part except to sit still enough, to care little enough. A soul with any decent capacity for affection would have burned up.

There were legends about sorcerers remaining virgin for the sake of their Craft, and of less resolute Archain drinking the—well, whatever—of their lovers. As with most good legends, there was a truth buried there.

He got his arms under her back and knees, carried her to the bed; he placed her on it, then collapsed on the step stool, his head deadweight on the edge of the mattress, until his heart slowed enough to distinguish one beat from the next. His head ached—dully, not the shattering pain he was used to, as if the headache itself were worn and weak.

He stood up, adjusted the pillows around Agate’s head, moving hairs away from her eyes and mouth. He pulled her slippers off, set them carefully beside the bed step, and drew the canopy curtains.

He looked at the mess across the room. Worse than usual, but nothing new. He went down the hall, hands braced against the walls, and out of the room.

Bliss, Strange’s chief butler, was in the corridor, in his black velvet coat and red satin waistcoat. Bliss was a plump but graceful man, with fine, delicate hands. His face was round, with a large, carefully trimmed black mustache. His eyes were small and brown and bright. He turned away from a hall table, as if he had merely been checking it for dust when Varic happened to emerge. No coincidence in it, of course.

“May I assist you, honored?” Bliss said. “Milord looks a bit pale.”

“Milord feels pale.” Varic tried to reach for the wall, but could not judge the distance. As he staggered, Bliss’s hand somehow managed to touch Varic’s, steadying him.

“The apartment two doors up and across is clean and untenanted, honored,” Bliss said. “As it is rather a long walk to the East Wing.”

“An excellent thought, Bliss.”

“Thank you, honored.” He led the way, all dozen steps, and opened the door. “Strange is anxious to know if mistress Agate is well?”

“Tired. Asleep now. But well.”

“Should she be allowed to rest, then?”

“I think it will be all right to wake her for dinner. She would be unhappy to miss the gathering, first night.” He stopped in the doorway, looked down the hall from parlor toward bedroom, which seemed to tilt, and shook his head. “I’ll ask the same.”

“Of course, milord.”

“Her room will need tidying. And there’s a curtain to be rehung.”

“It will be seen to. Is there anything else for you, honored?”

“I’m positive there must be something, but just now…” He waved a hand aimlessly.

“Of course, honored. Will you go in now? Do ring for anything.”

Varic nodded and went into the parlor, Bliss closing the door silently behind him. At the end of the hall, the bedside lamp was lit, and a tray held decanters of whisky and spring water.

He climbed up onto the bed, got his boots off and let his feet dangle. He sloshed some of the whisky into a glass. As he drank the flourish, he saw that his dinner suit was standing ready on a wooden valet rack at the foot of the bed. How boringly predictable I’ve become, he thought. His arm dropped, apparently of itself; the empty glass seemed to be crawling from his fingers. It got away, he could hardly stop it, as he slowly toppled backward across the bed; he never heard it hit the carpet.

---

As she had been speaking, Edaire had been watching ripples in her teacup, radiating, crossing, intersecting. From time to time she looked up at the chandelier, its crystals moving in a nonexistent draft, never quite jingling. Now all the small motions stopped. She put the cup down.

Longlight said, “It’s over?”

“Yes. As I believe you can sense for yourself.”

“I suppose so. It’s a new experience.”

“What is?” Edaire said, in a very plain voice.

“I do not want to stay—I do not intend to stay—in a house where I am not wanted.”

“Strange has welcomed you here, has he not?”

“Yes. But he—”

“Has a great many things to do today, yes. All the arrivals, rooms and dinner to consider, dispatching Roan and Tacker efficiently, Birch up in the Bright Room—”

“The Archimage Birch?”

“Yes. A guest long before that, though. Before he was a priest at all, actually. You’ll meet him tonight. But as I was saying, Strange has made you welcome: therefore, you are a guest here, and welcome, and would be so even if there were truly great differences involved. Which—I ask you to believe—there are not.”

“Varic could have told me.”

“That is undeniably true,” Edaire said.

“He just—he acted—”

“How did he behave?” Edaire said.

“I ought not tell you,” Longlight said harshly. “I ought make you wonder—and oh, wheran comes this cruelty?”

“From hurt, whence all cruelty comes,” Edaire said, “and I can tell you talked with Varic, if you think that doubt could twist me.”

“It couldn’t,” Longlight said with the trace of a challenge.

“That’s another thing, to explain another time. I did ask you a question.”

“He pleasures a woman well enough. But he didn’t—what should I say? Didn’t love me. But it was never going to be that, was it?”

“Not by every definition.”

“I wanted … to know about him. To understand how he could be so hot and so cold. Know what he was hiding. And I wanted him to care alike about me.”

“Perhaps you should have told him that.”

“You do defend him.”

“If you were attacking Varic, I very much imagine I would be defending him. But you are only asking why he is what he is, and I truly don’t know that; I doubt that anyone does.”

“Varic included?”

“Of course. I care very much for him, which is not always easy. It wouldn’t be possible at all if I didn’t try to see him as completely as possible, not just a word here or an action there. While there are differences both of degree and kind, the same is true of Silvern.”

After a pause, Longlight said, “And Agate—she truly cannot … cannot be—”

“You will meet her soon. Ask her yourself. Allow me to say this, however: Is it truly so easy to get near you?”

“Do you suppose he…” Her voice wandered, hunting for something more precise than words. “… likes that? Knowing, I mean, that with a word, or a touch, he could”—she paused for a heartbeat, then said straightforwardly—“make her suffer?”

There was a flash of something terrible in Edaire’s face; Longlight did not flinch.

Edaire wrapped her hand around her ring, shut her eyes, and said, “I have just caused Dany to score an undeserved touch on Silvern. I shall have to apologize to both of them.” She looked at Longlight. “To answer your fair and honest question, I believe that Varic has looked quite clearly into the wells of his own darkness. I choose to believe that he knows what he could do, and is happy that he does not do it.”

“I said one thing too many, didn’t I.”

“No. He hurt you—not from wanting to hurt, and not without help from people who should have thought better—but you were hurt, and you had every right to ask what he is. What all of us are.”

“It’s easier for you,” Longlight said as a statement of fact, without bitterness. “You’re always first in each other’s minds.”

“Conseil is not a common state, we all know that,” Edaire said, “and inevitably misunderstood. There are conseil couples who do not have exclusive relations. We met a pair once who gloried in others; and of course they were both sharing whatever either did. They wanted very much to pair off with us, simultaneously—or perhaps group would be a better word.”

“That sounds—well. Did you?”

“We couldn’t. Our vow is exclusive in aspect. Anyway, I think they expected too much. We wouldn’t have linked to them.”

Longlight said, “Would you have liked to try?”

“It’s possible for me to think about it. Just as it’s possible for Silvern to respond, deeply, to the sight of a woman who may be nothing like I am, but has those qualities that attract him.” She smiled, and Longlight’s fingers tightened on her teacup.

The mantel clock chimed four. A few silent minimi later, Strange wheeled his chair into the parlor. “It’s quiet down here. Am I interrupting?”

Edaire gave her head an almost imperceptible shake. Longlight said, “No. We were just getting acquainted.”

Strange smiled. “No one better to do it with. Longlight, do you really mean to leave us after all?”

“I should like to stay, a night at least. If I may.”

“That was never in question. I am most pleased. Then I may say that Dany has asked if you would be up for a match, three points or a concetta? We have all the equipment you might need.”

“I’d be pleased.”

“Then let us proceed at once. Edaire, dear, will you push?”

She took the handles of Strange’s chair, and the three of them started down the hall.

They descended in the lift to the ground-floor hallway, and went through one of the inner doors to the arenetto. It was modestly sized, a room ten steps square with seats and exercise equipment on two sides of a slightly raised wooden square five steps on a side.

Dany and Silvern were at work on the boards. Dany wore a jacket and knee-length skirt of padded rough silk reinforced with broad leather bands. The silk was an autumn gold color, the leather decorated with bronze. It was a beautifully made armor, certainly not Lescorial in design. Below the skirt she wore more typical steel shin guards, and she was working barefoot. She was fighting with an iron-tipped staff as tall as an average man (and up to Dany’s shoulder).

Silvern wore a sleeveless shirt and loose trousers of light cotton cloth, pale gray darkened in patches by sweat. He had thin gloves and soft boots, but no armor at all, and his spread hands were empty.

Dany spun the staff as if to sweep at Silvern’s unprotected head. Most of the way through the move, she shifted her weight on the ball of a foot, recoiled and thrust with the end of the stick directly at Silvern’s breastbone.

There was a circular motion in the air before Silvern’s chest, like ripples in water, and the thrust was stopped with an audible bang of metal against metal.

A singlestick grew from Silvern’s fingers, a thin rod a little longer than his arm, of a dead black color. He knocked Dany’s staff aside with it; the sound this time was like a steel hammer against rock. They sparred a few blows more; then the singlestick flickered and was in Silvern’s left hand. The motion made it seem as if he had tossed the rod from one hand to the other, but he had not: it was an Armiger’s weapon, made from magic and will. It could not leave his touch.

Edaire turned Strange’s chair to the left, silently circling the wood. Longlight stood still, watching the players. She knew singlestick and staff fighting both very well; she had been taught them before any edged weapon. One couldn’t count on having an edge to hand, but there was always a stick—a fireplace poker, a branch, a chair leg.

This wasn’t that sort of brawl, though neither was it highly formal. Longlight could hardly imagine Dany hurting Silvern, no matter how skilled she might be; his sorcerer’s armor appeared as a reflex, faster than thought. This wasn’t combat training, or even battle practice. It was mental exercise, honing the already-sharp edge. For her, it had a strange fascination, so much wilder than conventional weapon-play and yet so controlled.

Silvern had two black batons now, and scissored Dany’s staff between them. She slipped her weapon free, whirled it on fingertips high above her head, then shifted her grip to the very end and brought it around in a huge swing that grazed the edge of the wooden square and seemed to throw her dangerously off balance. Silvern crouched to one side.

Dany planted the tip of the staff and vaulted up with it, her whole long body tumbling over Silvern’s bent back; she landed squarely behind him, and swung the staff upward against Silvern’s throat, grabbing the free end with her other hand. Against an ordinary fighter, she could have easily levered back to crush the larynx or snap the neck.

Silvern was, of course, not ordinary. As the staff pulled back, a dark band of protection appeared around his throat. Longlight expected him to throw Dany forward, over his shoulders and onto her back.

Instead, he slashed his right hand sidewise at Dany’s right wrist. Longlight had half an instanta to recognize that if the blow connected, it would almost certainly crack Dany’s forearm.

But her forearm wasn’t there. In that same part’ina, Dany released her grip, spun to the left—under the staff, twirling it in her left fingers—and came up facing Silvern. He pushed the staff away, separating them by a step or so, and laughed out loud.

Silvern held his left hand in front of Dany’s face: the first two fingers were upright, second two folded, thumb extended outward. It was the swordplayer’s signal for pause. Dany nodded, turned to look at the spectators. She leaned on her staff and bowed. Then she faced Longlight and held up her right hand, thumb and little finger touching, three fingers spread in a trident. That was the polite request for a match, and Longlight crossed her palms to accept.

Dany turned to Silvern, who was taking long steps off the wooden square. Without looking back, he said, “Oh, yes, Dany, of course I’ll proctor. Get Longlight set up, and I’ll be ready when you are.”

He held his arms forward. Edaire went to him, held his hands discreetly for one moment, then embraced him fully, lifted onto her toes.

“You’re all clean,” Silvern said. “You’ll have to change.”

“We’re going to dress for dinner, silly.” She tilted her head back, and they kissed. Then their lips separated, just by a little fingers-breadth, and something passed between them, silent but perceptible.

Silvern turned to look at Longlight. He said, quietly and plainly, “I am glad you will be staying for the holiday.”

“This way,” Dany said, and led Longlight across the platform, through a door into a room lined with storage cabinets and exercise equipment. A shower room connected at the back.

Dany opened some cabinets, and quickly found Longlight an athletic breasthalter, a shirt with padded sleeves, a leather vest that buckled to size. Longlight changed her trousers for a loose pair in heavy white cotton, strapped on kneepads, put her own boots on again.

Across the room, Silvern was assembling a pair of splintans, the weapons for swordgame: slightly curved wooden slats held together with leather clips, the edge filled with chalk to mark a touch. The clips were supposed to give way under an excessive blow. It didn’t always prevent a cracked bone, but it was considered bad form to snap one’s sword. The game was about movement and control, not simple force.

Silvern tried the swords, balanced and swung them, then nodded to himself and chalked the edges.

“Dany’s challenge,” he said, and offered choice of weapons to Longlight. She took a splintan, went to a corner of the square, and stood at relaxed guard. Dany went to the opposite corner.

Silvern took up a post at the edge of the platform. “Normal rules,” he said, “no effect of wounds. Three, two, one … go.”

Both women took a step to the right. Longlight held her sword upright, two-handed; Dany’s was horizontal in her right hand, her left close in to her body. They took another step. They were observing the circle, an imaginary pattern on the floor, defined by the length of sword, arm, and stride. In theory, one was safe as long as one kept to the circumference of the circle. In practice, it meant very little in anything but formal swordgame; but one had to start somewhere. The first phase of the game ended when someone broke the formality.

Longlight decided to break it. She took a long, diving step, thrusting at Dany’s left hip. Dany sidestepped without effort and crossed swords with Longlight, gently, sending a faint puff of chalk into the air. Longlight returned the stroke. Then they both recovered, stepped back, stepped close again and exchanged serious blows, rattling the splintans. Dany seemed to stumble; Longlight took a wary step forward, felt the swish of air past her shoulder.

Longlight was aware that Dany was drawing her back, one step and parry at a time. Her family’s combat master called it jugging the hare. The double object was to analyze your opponent’s style, see what response each move brought, and draw the opponent into a position where the learned and logical response would be fatally wrong.

Once you were aware of the strategy, there were two tactics against it. One was to turn wild, fight randomly and furiously for a minima or so, upsetting the opponent’s calculations. The other way required a detailed and absolute knowledge of one’s own habits and reflexes, the ability to stand above and behind oneself, conscious of what one would do by instinct—then further see what move the opponent was counting on, and alter it into a trap.

Longlight was not in a reflective mood. That settled the issue. She tore in, step-swing, step-thrust, step-dodge-stroke. Abruptly there was a flash of red dust, and a streak of chalk scarred Longlight’s left forearm. “Point,” she said, and without missing a motion swept Dany’s blade aside, scored on her arm, on her shoulder.

“Concetta,” Dany said, and let the point of her splintan drop to the boards. They separated, bowed to each other.

There was applause from the sideline. Longlight turned. Another person was sitting with Strange and Edaire: a large, black-haired man, almost as big as Silvern, with a broad smile on his broad, pale face. He wore a black satin waistcoat, a white shirt, and a black cravat. Tucked casually into his waistcoat pocket was a silver rete and quadrant, and a heavy silver ring with a polished onyx was on his left hand.

Strange said, “My dear Longlight, I would have you meet another of our regular companions, the honorable Birch. Birch, my lady Longlight of the Great Rogue Hills.”

Birch held out his right hand.

Longlight dropped to both knees. “Supergratio.…”

“My lady Coron,” Birch said gravely, “most honored. But please rise. In Strange House we do not go about kneeling to one another.”

As Longlight rose, Birch said, “I believe we are about to be something like neighbors. Can you tell me how the travel is between your country and Capel Storrow?”

“There are roads,” she said, hurrying to think, “and we try to keep them open. No near Ironway, I’m afraid.” She glanced at Edaire, who said nothing. “But I hope you will visit us.”

Birch spread his hands. “I am your Archimage and would be neglectful if I did not. But I look forward to the pleasure.”

Longlight looked at herself, the sweat on her clothes, said, “I must clean up now.…”

“Of course I shall see you at dinner.”

Longlight, Dany, and Silvern went back to the changing room. Birch said to Strange, “I ought to retire for a bit. At dinner, then?”

Strange nodded, and Birch went out.

From the inner room, the sound of showers could be heard. Quietly, not to be heard above the water, Edaire said, “Sometimes I forget how we can look to a new guest.”

Strange said, “I think Longlight will settle in well. She seems to have an independent soul.”

“Yes.” She drummed her fingers on the arm of his chair. “How much of it did you know, old owl?”

“Most. Her state on arrival, and Varic’s. And what happened when Varic left the group to see Agate.”

“So you picked me to…”

“I set you in her way, I suppose.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry for the trouble, and after the day you’d had already. Can I make it right?”

“No need,” she said, smiling. “Silvern will say the same thing, a little later. And I’m sure he will.”

---

Out of the cold shower, Longlight reached for her clothes, but Dany said, “Those are all travel-dusty. No use to put them on again, just to rest and change again for dinner. Here.” She was wearing a long, white linen robe and thick-soled canvas slippers, and produced the same for Longlight. “Here, put the hood up, too. Your hair’s still damp.”

“Thank you, Dany.”

“You fight handsome. You mean it when you cut. Next time we should use real singlesticks, do you think?”

“That could be very good. Though I liked watching your staff work. I haven’t used a staff in years; do you think we could practice that?”

They talked combat all the way upstairs and into the entry hall, where a voice said, “Excuse me, I seem to be having a vision of Goddess. Double vision, in fact.”

The women turned. Winterhill was standing by the secretary desk, dressed in brown riding leathers, his hand on a dispatch bag.

A young woman was with him. She had long, red hair that curved around her narrow face, enclosing it. She wore a thigh-length huntsman’s coat of dark red leather, black wool trousers tucked into riding boots. The thumbs of her long-fingered hands were hooked into the coat’s belt. She stepped lightly forward, took Dany’s hands in hers; they hugged.

Winterhill said, “I am delighted to see you here, milady Coron. I see you’ve already found an adventure. May I introduce you to another friend? Reccan, the Coron Longlight. My lady Coron, Reccan of the City Lystourel.”

Longlight said, “Pleased, Reccan.”

Reccan smiled, without opening her mouth, and bowed, pressed Longlight’s hand between her palms.

“Can she not speak?” Longlight said to Winterhill.

Reccan flicked a pencil apparently from the air, scribbled on a pad that had appeared just as suddenly in her right hand. She pulled off the top sheet and presented it to Longlight. It said, in precise block writing:

NO. BUT I HEAR YOU WELL ENOUGH.

“My regrets,” Longlight said quickly. Reccan gave an elaborate shrug, a dismissive wave of her left hand. Then her left fingers moved in a complicated, rapid set of gestures.

Winterhill’s hand twitched in what seemed to be a reply. He said, “Reccan would like to know if you are enjoying your stay here.”

Longlight started to reply to Winterhill, then turned to face Reccan and said, “Very much so. My grandfather, as’t goes, was a guest here. I wish I had known of it sooner.”

Reccan wrote a note: I WISH THE SAME.

“Are you a hunter, Reccan?”

Winterhill tilted his head, with a sly look, but did not speak.

Reccan held out her hands, palms up and empty, then rolled her left hand over. A dark green pencil, unsharpened, poked out beyond her fingertips. Her fingers were long, but the pencil was longer than her whole hand. Then it fanned out into three pencils, red, blue, and green. Her left hand took the fan away, and another grew in its place. Then she crossed the two fans, and they seemed to interpenetrate, weave into a wooden lattice; Reccan tapped it on the desk to show its solidity. Then she tugged at its corners, and it came apart into six straight, solid rods again, which she pressed into Longlight’s hand. Longlight looked down: she was holding a single white-painted pencil, with a freshly sharpened point.

“I see,” Longlight said. “Varic spoke of you, though not by name.”

The short pencil and pad came out again. WINTERHILL SPOKE OF YOU. BUT OF COURSE NO ONE BELIEVES HIS STORIES.

“Ah, I see,” Longlight said. Then a breeze caught her legs, and she was abruptly reminded of her casual dress. “Your pardon, but I must get properly dressed.”

“Well, I find it quite becoming,” Winterhill said. “Call me a Pandekt, but simplicity has great attractions.”

Dany folded her arms and pretended to look stern. Winterhill held up his hands in mock defense. “Very well, very well, no Pandekt, just a City boy loose in the woods. Milady Coron, I hope we shall talk later, when you are properly dressed. Dany, I would greet you rightly, but I taste like a horse-path. Until we can be better met, then, I take my leave.” He bowed extravagantly and stepped lightly down the hall.

Longlight and Dany looked after him. Dany said, “He has no sense of place, that man, and I wonder he lives in spite of it; but it is a good strong heart inside. Worthy, do you know.”

“I think I do know.” Longlight looked at her robe. “And I really ought to find my room—and I know Strange told me where it was, but I’ve forgotten.”

“Upper floor, one more above us, the end room on the courtyard side. Climb the stairs where the hall turns, and enter the last door on the right hand. It is sure to be ready for you. Of the doors in the end of the hall, the locked ones are maids’ cupboards; the one you can open, with the glass panel, is the stairway. Down a floor to the service kitchen, where you may help yourself if you’re hungry, or ring down for anything, anytime. Dinner will be at nine, so there is time for you finally to rest.”

“Thank you.”

Dany inclined her head, and touched her right earlobe. It was deeply notched, a triangular piece a thumb’s width at the base cut neatly out. Her left ear was intact. Something from a combat, Longlight thought, and let it pass.

She found what should be the correct door, hesitated for a moment with her hand on the handle, imagining the effect if she should burst in on someone else wearing just a robe (admittedly a perfectly modest one).

She opened the door, saw a parlor, a corridor past a brightly lit bathroom, another room beyond. Someone was emerging from the far room, and Longlight started to shut the door.

The woman bowed quickly. “Milady? I’m Pearsy, the day chambermaid. As you hau’nt’er been here, I ought show you the room. Where things are, and the hot water and all. It can be scaldin’, if you’ve not used patent heaters. And short on I’ll bring some dinner clothes that ought fit. Will that be well?”

“Yes, very well.”

Pearsy pointed out the call buttons in each room, and the bedside cord—“They’re all electrical, you know, needn’t worry to pull hard, the cord’s just easier to hand if you’re sleepy, you see”—and demonstrated the bathroom water heater, a gas-fired copper cylinder tucked away in a ventilated closet that did indeed produce scalding-hot water to sink and shower. Longlight had never seen such a thing outside a public bath—even her costly City hotel had bathwater that might have been called energetically tepid—and questioned Pearsy about the device until the maid, with just a touch of fright, said, “Do please ask Butler Bliss on’t, honored, or Strange himself.”

“Thank you, Pearsy, I shall.”

“Dinner’s at nine, honored; shall I bring your clothes about a quarter after eight? The bedside clock has a bell, if you wish to sleep till then.”

“Quarter after eight will be fine.”

“I’ll just be on, then. Comfort to you, honored.”

The maid departed. Longlight showered again in the splendid hot water; she would have stayed under longer, but realized she was starting to doze off standing up. Inside the bathroom door hung a long robe of fine thick toweling, which was good, because she didn’t have the energy to dry herself in the usual way. She remembered to set the clock bell, let the robe flump to the floor, slipped between the cool linens, and after what seemed one eyeblink was waking to the clang.

She got her eyes fully open and pulled the robe on in time to answer Pearsy’s knock. The maid had one arm loaded with clothing, a shoe carrier in the other; she began laying articles out on the parlor daybed. “Will anything here suit, Honored? I tried to mind your sizes, earlier.”

“Oh … I’m sure.… To whom do they belong?”

“Why, the House, honored. It’s Strange’s way to have what his guests might need. There is an ornament case on your dresser. Do you wish any help in dressing?”

“No, thank you.”

“Then I’ll leave you now, honored. But ring if there’s anything you need. I’ll be off by dinner’s end, but Ginger will answer all the night.”

Longlight nodded, still looking at the clothes, and made a gesture of dismissal. The maid went out, closing the door without a sound.

She sorted through the clothes. None of it was the strictly formal costume she would have expected; most of the fashions were not what she would have chosen for herself. She thought about the visit to Ivory’s and decided that her Coronage ought to take some of the Cityish style journals by post, if only to lessen the shocks in future.

She chose a narrow, calf-length black skirt, plain but for a column of small silver buttons, and over it a short jacket of deep maroon satin, laced across the midriff, with a shallow neckline as wide as her collarbones. The lacings really did call for assistance, but she managed it herself. She meant to wear her boots, but they hadn’t been polished. Of the shoes the maid had brought, a pair of silver sandals with slight heels seemed best, though they were awfully open; after some deliberation, she found a pair of long, opaque black stockings to wear with them.

The ornament case gave no trouble; the jewelry in it was all of classic pattern. She put large pearl drops in her ears, and slipped the armorial pouch Ivory’s had made for her over a shoulder. She suspected that weapons, even ornamental ones, were not much worn in Strange House.

She opened the door, set her unshined boots in the hall next to it for whoever took care of such things, closed the door behind her.

“That outfit looks quite lovely on you,” a voice said. “May I take you down to dinner?”

She turned. It was Birch, just closing the door to his room. He was wearing a long, black gown, plain to the waist, then falling in organ-pipe pleats to his ankles. There was white lace at his throat and wrists, and he wore high-sided house shoes of soft black velvet. The small silver astrolabe that had been in his waistcoat pocket earlier now hung around his neck.

“I’d be pleased, Reverence.”

He nodded and extended the hand without the ring. “This is to take, if you choose,” he said, “not to reflect to. Is that well, Longlight?”

“That is well, Birch,” she said, and linked arms with him.

They took the northwestern stairs, at the elbow of the corridor; the ground-floor door opened onto the air, the colonnaded breezeway to the main house. It was full dark, the nearly full moon about halfway up, flickering in the woods to the north and on the lake to the south.

Longlight said, “Do we have time to look? Just a mim?”

“All the time you wish.”

In the moonlight through the breezeway, Birch did seem to tower, his black clothes making his hands and face float in the dark; but to her he seemed entirely unthreatening, a kind of hovering calm.

“Can you tell me a bit about … some of the other guests here?”

“I will gladly tell you whatever I am free to tell.”

“Who is Dany? Has she always been Strange’s … companion?”

“Dany first came to visit, hm, hm, not quite nine years ago. She was in the company of the Prince Jule of Tisipha, in Nisimene.”

“Where is that?”

“In the Southern Hemisphere. It’s not on most Lescorial maps, it’s half the world away, though it’s as large as Ferangard, and richer. Back then, Jule was a regular guest, what we sometimes call a Player. They came every Cold Solstice for four years, until Jule became King in her own right. That was rather sudden: the two heirs before her were killed in a hunting accident, and the King’s heart failed when he got the news. So Jule got the crown, and stopped visiting. Dany would have been first guardsman in the kingdom, but instead she asked for her discharge, to come here. Did you see the notch in her right earlobe?”

“Yes.”

“The earring of Royal Service was removed, and cannot be replaced.”

“I see.…”

“She brought Strange a letter from King Jule. It said, ‘I give you my best and truest servant: and I would give much more to come with her, but I cannot so easily cut off a crown.’”

“So Dany is Strange’s first guardsman.”

“That is certainly literally true. But Dany is also a Houseguest, and guests are not in servitude. If you would better know what exactly is between them, you should ask them both yourself, and determine the meaning from the answers you receive.”

“You sound like Varic,” she said too quickly.

“I should. It is one of the things he taught me.”

“But…” She was fighting the words she wanted to say, and it only made her think more strongly of Varic, the way he had struggled. “But he does not love Goddess. He’s an Anticonist.”

“No, Longlight. Varic is an Atheist.”

She stared. For a moment, shimmering there in the dark, Birch looked whitely dangerous, as a Demon must look when waiting for a soul to call its name. But it passed at once.

Birch said, “That is a confidence, naturally. But I think it is safe with you.”

“But what have you done about this?”

“Hm. Well, I have taught him to know if a horse is properly shod and to put a good edge on cutting steels. And I have tried to show him that there are priests who care about fair wages and adequate food for the Commons as much as the ascent of souls; and, I hope, a little of how to be patient with us when we seem not to care enough about the made world. In exchange, he has taught me to fish with a cast rod and understand the difference between what Ferangarders call ‘war’ and what they call ‘peace.’ Also, someone who has held a Coron’s full power and authority since he was fifteen has spoken to a blacksmith’s son as if the smith’s-get were one day going to have great power and authority of his own, and ought to know how to bear it.”

“I mind all he is a good soul—verra kind, tho’ he’ll not have’t out so. But—in the light of all things—”

“In the bare glow of Goddess, yes, we’re small. But a candle will burn at noon. Have you ever been part of a group Craft? Or a Communion?”

“Some Communions. My father took me to Windscapel a few times. Windscapel—because the roads to Capel Storrow, as I said—”

If he noticed her embarrassment, he gave no sign. “That would have been Whitedawn’s tenure. A good example. Tell me then: When she invoked Goddess—before the actual requests, just when she was speaking before the crowd—did you see something unusual, among the people?”

“Yes. There was a—glow, in everyone there.” She touched her chest, just at the point of the breastbone. “A kind of heart of light.”

“The lucate varus,” Birch said.

“Oh. Is that what it’s called?” Her voice was slightly distant. “My Quercian isn’t what it should be.…”

“It is a little like his name,” Birch said with infinite gentleness and a clarity that dispelled any hint of condescension. “And indeed, what should your Quercian be, with no Quercians around to complain? As’t may: The word means ‘where the light comes to rest.’ That’s our name for it; in Alinsea it’s ‘the great well,’ and in Dany’s country Nisimene the name means ‘the burning heart.’

“But I’m wandering inside my digression. The point is that any group Craft calls on the Spirit flow of all the participants. Everyone living has power, just as we have breath in our lungs; not everyone has the—wherewithal, call it—to work Craft, just as not everyone can use breath in beautiful singing. But everyone does have a song. Varic may insist that Goddess is only a story we tell one another. But I have seen his light shine toward the Absolute.”

“In his way,” Longlight said, feeling suddenly peaceful.

“Indeed. In his way. Are you ready to go in now?”

The breezeway door led to a room quite as big as the dining hall of some grand houses, but there was no table set, and light spilled under double doors on its south wall. Silvern and Edaire were there, apparently waiting as well. Edaire came over to take Longlight’s hands. “Oh, my, you’re chilled! Are you all right?”

“We were just talking in the night air,” Birch said.

Edaire was wearing a loose tailcoat and broad trousers of royal-blue velvet, with white frills at wrists and throat; there was a spray of blue-edged white bellflowers on her left breast. Silvern wore a gray silk jacket and trousers, a pleated white shirt with steel studs, a cravat of figured silver-blue satin. There were some miniature medals hung at his heart pocket, and below them the steel sunburst, sword, and anvil of the Archweaponer Sorcerers.

Longlight said, “Will there be place cards inside? Or do I sit with you?”

“Though I would be most glad of your company, you may sit where it pleases you,” Birch said. “At this table there is no precedence. Strange will take the window end, for ease of maneuver and as host, but the rest of us sit as it suits whatever conversation is going on—and move about if it’s convenient. Don’t be surprised when someone shifts a seat; do it yourself if you like. However, as you’re a new visitor, we’ll leave you a seat next to Strange, and open one whenever you want it.”

Bliss opened the doors to the grand hall, and Dany pushed Strange’s chair into view. “Honoreds,” he said, “there is a table prepared. We would have you partake of it.”

Longlight waited. Silvern and Edaire waited, too, until Birch extended his arm to Longlight and smiled merrily. They went in.

The room was a large square, fifteen steps or more across. A long, narrow table, set for ten, was set down the center, north to south. The south wall was a deep, three-sided bay, all windows from knee height to the high ceiling; beyond it the gardens could be seen, framed by the residence wings, and farther on, the pillars of the boathouse and the lake, all gleaming in moonlight. The east and west walls had long fireplaces, paintings, and fragments of antique carving mounted above them, and swinging servants’ doors. On the north wall, between the doors they had entered through and a matching set at the northwest, there was a huge tapestry, marked with great age, illustrating the tale of The People Who Hunted Goddess in high-allegorical Midreigns fashion.

The chandeliers had been discreetly electrified, glasswicks glowing through the crystal to generally brighten the room. The fine carved ornamentation of the ceiling showed up as one hardly ever saw by candlelight, or even gas. There were candles as well, four-armed silver sticks that made a warmer light on the china and crystal and a more conversational glow on the diners.

Dany’s long, full gown was of dark brown cloth with complex geometric patterns in metallic gold thread. It was held about her waist by a broad belt, more than a span wide, with decorative grommets and lacing. A chain of gold links and pearls was wrapped several times about her throat, and her single earring was a leaf of hammered rainbow bronze. She wore high-backed sandals of leather and gold. Strange still wore a pocketed robe, this one of violet satin. Across the shoulders, extending around the back, were appliqué rain clouds. His cravat was of black and white check. A silver brooch was pinned to the glossy white lapel, a castelline with a silver chain that disappeared into a pocket.

Dany put Strange at the window end of the table, then sat on his left. She indicated the seat to his right for Longlight. Silvern sat next to Longlight, Edaire next to him. Birch took the chair at the north end.

Varic and Agate came through the door in the northwest corner. He opened the door for her and walked a step behind; they did not touch. Varic was wearing a short jacket of dark blue brocaded silk, with a black satin collar, black broadcloth trousers, a black cravat with a pearl pin. Agate wore a long gown of golden satin, with violet cording around the midsection and deep vertical pleats from waist to floor; it was a modern version of the Quercian robes of citizenship. Her shoes, incongruously, were high-buttoned white boots.

Varic said, “Milady Coron, I would have you meet the Archpoet Agate, an Accredited-Master-at-Large of the Lescorial Guild.”

Agate bowed and pressed her hands together instead of offering one. Longlight did the same. Agate said, “I hope we shall find time to talk very soon.”

“Yes. I hope we shall.”

Agate took the seat next to Birch, Varic the one next to hers.

The northeastern door opened for Winterhill and Reccan. She held his left arm with her right; with their free hands, they were conversing in gestures.

Winterhill wore a plainly styled jacket of light brown velvet, an unadorned white shirt with a flap-over front and side buttons, tan broadcloth trousers. His boots had slightly elevated heels and the wear marks of spurs.

Reccan was in a hunter’s-green suit of soft wool; the jacket was flared at the wrists and below the tight waist, the trousers were cut closely and tucked into high boots of the softest brown leather. Halfway to the table, she pointed at Birch, and whatever her hands were saying was clearly emphatic.

“She says congratulations, Archimage,” Winterhill said. “Not that I was surprised.”

Varic said, “You probably voted,” and Birch burst out laughing.

“Me in a priest’s robe?” Winterhill said. “Oh, I don’t know. But … Birch, you wouldn’t mind leaving me one of your old rigs, would you? Just in case.” He stood behind Birch for a moment, as if comparing their sizes. “I could smuggle a lot, you know.”

Strange said, “Winterhill, we’re hungry.”

Reccan took the seat between Silvern and Birch; Winterhill, finally, the last chair, between Varic and Dany. In a wounded voice, he said, “Not only am I blamed for national hunger, but I’m the only man at the table not seated between two beautiful women—oh, sorry, brother.”

Varic lowered his eyebrows and laughed.

Strange said, “Birch?”

Birch stood up, and everyone was quiet. He said, “Through grace and fortune, will and love, here we all are, together again. We celebrate the turn of season, and we celebrate one another’s company, old and new.”

Silvern raised his wineglass. “I say you, Coron Longlight. Lasting returns, honored.”

“Longlight.”

“Lasting returns.”

“Thank you … all.” She waited, unsure if a longer speech were called for. Then Birch put his glass down and said, “Reccan, would you grace the Book?”

Bliss appeared at Reccan’s left elbow, holding a polished wooden tray with a box covered in flowered green fabric. Reccan raised the hinged lid and took out the precisely stacked Book. The cards seemed to rise by themselves under her fingertips.

It was an old Book. The back design, of two jesters in motley coats, was faded, though the gilding around the edges had been renewed. In a movement almost too quick to follow, she shuffled, reversed half the pack, wove them together again. Then she sat back, and from the other side of the tray, Silvern slid a packet from the center, reversed it, dropped it on top.

Reccan turned up the top card, and the second. The Five of Stones, the Maze reversed. The Five showed a square, dark plinth in the middle of a green meadow; four spherical crystals were set at the points of an incised pattern. A woman in a white gown was placing a fifth crystal at the center of the design. The Maze card had a great stone archway, with hints of walls seen through a mist beyond; one of the card-back jesters leaned against the arch, playing a double pipe.

Bliss carried the tray around the table once, slowly, so that everyone could look silently at the pair.

Birch inclined his head, said quietly, “We ask, Goddess, for fair completions. We ask for straight paths. And we take joy to be dining again together, with such good and beloved friends.” He raised his wineglass, and the others followed. “You are all aware that, as I am for the first time in my life what may be called fully employed”—everyone laughed—“my visits here will be much rarer, and my holidays will be rather, hm, taken up. But I do hope to see you all on every practical occasion … and between times, you are cordially invited to come and have a party at my house.” He looked up. “Even if it is, strictly speaking, Hers.”

“Honoreds,” Silvern shouted, standing up, “I say you all, the Archimage Capel Storrow; I say you all, Birch, our fellow guest!” He chimed his glass against Edaire’s. All who could rise did so; all joined the toast.

“To our next meeting,” Birch said, and they drank again more quietly, and then sat down.

Strange said, “Now here are the wineglasses all dry, and we haven’t even touched the soup. Can’t have that. Bliss, will you attend?”

Bliss did. Then the soup was brought out, served from a vast porcelain tureen: clear leek, with bay leaf and garlic. After the soup, as Birch had said, the conversations became multiple and continuous—new Ironways, the theater in Lystourel, sailing weather on the Southern Gulf—and the diners began to change positions, following thoughts—volcanic-repeater guns, the meaning of a Kólyan name, the gold standard—around the table. They carried their own plates and silver; another guest would pass the crystal, or a server appear to unerringly shift them. Longlight hesitated for a while, both at the novelty of the idea and the fear of crossing traffic. Finally Strange, who rolled about as well, more limited by the need to rearrange chairs, touched her arm and said, “She can’t possibly hear you from here, my dear.” After the first move, it turned out to be easy.

The main courses were a beef roast in a brown sauce, and venison in thin medallions, with a delicate apple-and-cinnamon glaze. There were potatoes with cheese and cream, buttered parsnips, asparagus steamed with just a little vinegar.

“… that’s exactly the problem,” Varic was saying to Silvern, rather loudly. “The more strongly a Northerner is worked up, the more softly he talks, while an Easterner gets louder as his back rises. So if things are going well, each thinks the other’s angry; and when they think they’re about to agree is when the knives are ready to come out. Now: can we make the Kólyan understand this, while keeping our voices within the range of human hearing?”

Reccan conversed with Winterhill and Strange using hand gestures; Longlight began to recognize the simpler signs, yes and no and a twiddling burst of fingers in the air that must indicate laughter. With the others, she used her pad and flying pencil; if it was not as fast as speech, she did not waste pencil-coal on long replies.

Seated next to Strange once again, Longlight said, “It’s all so … open. It’s like I imagined Parliament must be, when I was little, and my father went away to the City for a session.” She laughed. “But Parliament’s more like a big, formal banquet, with bad food.”

Strange said, “Oh, yes, we live as the Kings of Koss in the old tales, though our servants are not quite so insubstantial as theirs. Do you know of the Pandektine reasoner Pershex?”

“No.… But—wait.” She smiled vaguely. “I was taught Pandekt, as well as Quercian. ‘No Levels’?”

“Yes, very good! Pershex was dedicated to the abolition of all divisions between master and servant, owner and renter, and so on. His favorite method of getting his views across was to attach a declaration of principles to a brick and sling it through a window. And not just a wealthy man’s window: true to his principles, he would pick any window that seemed useful. The message, he said, was not for just one group, but for all of them, because they all had to change.”

“I suppose, if someone named him Pershex, he must have felt a sort of destiny.”

“Oh, no, he was self-made. According to the best biography, he was born as Iknatus, ‘fish breeder.’ He’s supposed to have learned the art of brick-throwing chasing away the cats who wanted to eat his stock. There’s a painting of him in the East Wing, a marvelous, crumbly old frieze. Someone was going to knock the house down, but we saved the wall.” Strange pointed through the bay window, at the East Wing. “Bottom floor, a little north of center. The political parts aren’t such bad ideas, at that. Pity about the bricks, though.”

From three seats away, Varic turned and said, “Sometimes people of whatever class need a little noise to make them pay attention.”

Longlight said, “Am I more likely to read a political statement because it has just missed cracking my skull?”

Winterhill said, “Perish that! Imagine if Pinner got hold of the idea. ‘The Lystourel Herald, through your glass each morning.’”

Edaire added, “‘Subscribe for two years and receive this lovely garden shed at no extra charge.’”

Strange was leaning back, his hands pressed together, his face luminous. “Oh, this is good,” he said, not really to anyone else. “This is wonderful.”

Longlight said to him, “Everyone here seems to have … been acquainted for some time.”

“This holiday, yes. Reccan is the newest, but for yourself. Sadly, we don’t have as many new guests as we once did. I had hoped that, with the coming of the Ironways, the House would always be full, but it hasn’t happened that way.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too, Longlight.” He was smiling again at once. “Perhaps it’s just a generational ripple. My friends here are all busy with the world, running trains and government; they are generous to me in spending their spare time here.”

“My grandfather spoke of … That was so long ago. Did you truly know him?”

“It was truly long ago. And we were most excellent friends. Is the grand battleboard still in the north wing of your castle?”

“It is.”

“We spent a good deal of time around that. Whole nights, sometimes. Your grandmother was a tactician of quite fiendish skill, did you know that? If your great-uncle Rangewell hadn’t played alongside me, I doubt I’d have won a single match with them.”

“You’re flattering my family.”

“I’m giving praise where it was earned. There can never be too much of that.”

“And you knew Uncle Range, too.…”

“Yes. Another friend much missed. You understand, this was long ago, when I was more … agile. Since you have come to visit me, however, may I point out that we have a battleboard of our own?”

“I would be delighted to play.”

“Proposed for tomorrow afternoon, then. Plenty of time to postpone if something more interesting happens.”

She felt herself hiccup a laugh, blamed the wine, and let it pass. Strange hadn’t blinked. “I begin to believe that it would be impossible for something interesting not to happen here. Nothing interesting … to … Will you teach me logic, Master Strange?”

“As I consider it the ethical duty of all mortals who can teach to do so, to anyone who wishes to learn, I should be delighted, Longlight. But I think you are already a rather logical person.”

“Not by the standard here,” she said, and this time forced herself sober.

Still Strange’s expression had not changed. He said, “Is there any particular question about the House that you wish to ask?”

There were a hundred or so, but she said, “Just now, just one. Where do you get those patent cylinders, that make the bathwater so blessedly hot?”

Strange laughed out loud and clapped his hands. “Oh, my dear Longlight, welcome home, welcome home.”

People kept their places during dessert, frozen cream and cake and tea. And then they began drifting again.

Varic and Agate vanished rather suddenly. Then the others departed, with hugs and kisses all around. Longlight tried to follow Strange and Dany, but they turned a corner ahead of her and were gone. She walked up a flight. Her room was all the way down the hall; Bliss had told her that Varic’s was on the opposite side, three doors up.

Then, to her right, she saw the open doors of the Blue Parlor, and realized she was still a floor too low. She blew out a breath in annoyance, turned at what sounded like footsteps but saw nothing. She wandered into the parlor, which was lit by fire glow and one bright lamp. On a sideboard was a decanter of dark brandy and a row of glasses. She stood there, looking at it for a while, wondering where exactly to go next.

Winterhill came through the door. His coat, and the top button of his shirt, were open. It only made him look more conventionally dashing. “Ah. Milady Coron. The others have all scattered. What about you?”

“I suppose I should go to bed.”

“Perhaps. Or there may be surprises yet.”

“What do you mean by surprises?”

“If I knew, would they be surprises? It is the next-to-last night of summer, milady, and who knows what may happen.” He sounded entirely sober, though with Winterhill it was difficult to be certain. A bit weary, possibly.

She said, “May I ask you about Reccan?”

“If you will bring that fine brandy over to these comfortable chairs, you may ask me anything, at a full remission of the usual price.”

They sat down. Winterhill poured.

Longlight said, “Could she ever speak?”

“No.” He put a hand to his throat, absently undoing another shirt button. “Nothing there. She is, if you will excuse the joke, deficient in the parts of speech. That’s why it can’t be mended; Agate tried—but there’s no healthy pattern to heal toward. You’d have to build from nothing, and sorcery’s not good at that. The Craft of resection produces monsters.” His voice lowered. “It’s good you asked me that, and not Strange; it makes him sad.”

“She came here with you today. Did you first bring her?”

“I did. I didn’t know where else to take her.” He took a swallow of brandy and sat back in his chair, apparently not meaning to continue.

Longlight said, “You know the hand-spelling she uses.”

“Soonest’s Visible Speech. Old Dr. Soonest was a benefactor of humanity in oh so many ways. He loved his orphans; he spent his fortune and wrecked his health for them. And do you know, a strange thing in this bad world, most of them loved him back. There are half a dozen members of Parliament who came from Soonest School. All in the Commons, of course. And the City Water Commissioner, and two good judges.”

“And you as well?”

“Alone a boy sat,

On a wintry hill,

And if spring’s not come again,

He’s surely there still.

“Dr. Soonest usually found his pupils names in the homely classics.”

“So … Reccan was in this orphan school as well? That’s where you met?”

“Here, would you push the brandy this way? Thank you.” Again he poured for two.

“Are you trying to get me drunk, Winterhill?”

“I get women drunk when I want to know what they know. I drink with women when I want them to listen to me. Or because I enjoy their drinking company.” He picked up her glass, looked into it. “Anyway, I’m not pouring it into you. Just into this. Back to the tale: no, I did not meet Reccan at the Soonest School. When the doctor died, and the death taxes consumed what was left of his money, the school was purchased by a group of enterprise progressives, who understood that a knowledge of poetry and old plays is far less valuable than practical experience of being hired out as factory labor; and jaunts into the countryside, merely to see white clouds and trees that are actually green, only encourage an unwholesome wildness. That’s how I came to meet Varic, as it happens; he did what he could for us, for the School, but when unbought judges face down fair-traded ones … well, enough. And it’s just possible that even what Reccan had was better than the school after that.”

“What did she have?”

“From her sixth year, a wet basement, or a sulfurated attic, or for some nights at a time a sewer arch or the shade of a lamppost. Six years old is her earliest recall; before that, no one knows how she lived. It’s possible that she isn’t an orphan in the precise sense, that her parents lost her. Imagine that you have this pretty baby, agile and bright-eyed, who never giggles or coos or cries.…” He poured them each a modest splash of brandy.

Longlight said, as if her mind were elsewhere, “You’d never know if she were hurt or hungry. You couldn’t find her except by searching every corner.”

“That is so,” Winterhill said, and for once the touch of sarcasm was gone from his voice.

“Reccan. ‘The Counter.’”

“‘True Counter,’ in Southern dialect. You’ll hear ‘Thay’s a reccan factor,’ for a trader who’s exceptionally honest, or ‘a reccan hand’ for a sailor who’s particular about wages. Either one could be a compliment or not, depending. And in Alinsea, recaigne is the word for a true report, as opposed to marecaigne, travelers’ tales. Strange gave her the name on her fifteenth birthday—or anyway, what we decided was her birthday.”

“What was she called before that?”

“I believe ‘You there’ was common. I heard ‘the dummy’ once or twice.” He paused, then said, in the tone of a comic story, “I know you’re not City. Maybe you just don’t have the background to understand it; no blame if that’s so. She was employed as a thief, in the same way a ferret is ‘employed’ in the catching of rats. You take it off its leash, it runs down the hole and comes back with the prey, and then you put the leash on again. The only real difference is that most ratcatchers like their ferrets, feed them, care for them, treat them well.” He stopped again, looked directly into Longlight’s eyes—something, she realized not pleasantly, he had never quite done before. “Yes, milady Coron. You’ve the wit to understand now. So you can tell why she was ever so slightly a favored ferret.”

“She could never tell tales on her master.”

“Indeed. Provided she also never learned writing or the signs. Do you know what ‘lucy-goosey’ is?”

“No.”

“The bailiffs have started to keep books of lucives of everyone they arrest. The gallery subjects call them ‘Lucy Lockets’—you remember, ‘Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it’? Kitty-fishing’s showing the book to a witness, hoping for an identification. Lucy-goosey is fingering the rascal. Even someone who can’t talk, or write, can point and nod. Lucivitry’s been the death of many a catspaw who once dwelt safe in her ignorance.”

They sat quietly for a moment. From outside, toward the courtyard and lake, there was a splash. “Cool night for a swim,” Winterhill said. “Makes me want another brandy. You?” He poured for both of them without waiting for an answer.

Longlight said, “How did you meet Reccan?”

“She dropped a plate of fried rabbit, in a rather bad restaurant.”

“Ye-e-e-s?”

“I was in the restaurant, looking for the gentleman who employed her. He was about to shoot me from inside a booth. She dropped the plate on his head, causing him to miss, and eventually making honest labor for the City hangman. After that, since I had effectively ended her employment while she had allowed me to continue mine, I had a certain obligation to fill the gap.” He sipped his drink. “I should mention that, given the restaurant, it probably wasn’t really a rabbit.”

“That was when you brought her here.”

“A bachelor town house is no place for a girl of that age, even if I had a bachelor town house. She—no, Strange should tell it if anyone does. But it took a while to make the girl into the Reccan you see.”

“Your Dr. Soonest … I imagine he was very proud of you.”

Winterhill said, as lightly as usual, “Dr. Soonest, by the providence of Goddess, died before my career really began. You must know, milady Coron, that I am a spy, a thief, a killer from behind, a reader of others’ mail, a breaker of true-plighted hearts. In my defense, I may say that I earn enough money by those means to be discriminating in my choice of employers.”

“I can’t say anything right to any of you, can I?” Longlight said roughly.

Winterhill stood up, put his hands behind himself, strolled behind Longlight’s chair. More gently, he said, “I brought Reccan here because I simply had no other idea what to do. Strange saw her and immediately guided her hands to push his chair. She was too used to taking commands to rebel—the rebellion came soon enough, and as I said, it took some time before food and silver didn’t vanish every time she left a room. But Strange is never wrong in his judgment of a human being. Those who learned from Strange—Varic, Edaire, Birch—are very rarely so, and Birch has Goddess on his side as well. Myself, I do my best not to think about it.”

There was a sound of people down the hall. Strange came into view, Dany pushing his chair, and after him Edaire and Silvern, Reccan and Birch. They had changed into lounging clothes, nightgowns, and bed jackets. Reccan was a striking vision in a trailing robe of deep green satin, a six-string lute over her shoulder, like something glimpsed in a forest pool. Silvern wore a long gray gown, sashed with red, and embroidered red slippers with pointed toes; Longlight remembered pictures of Kólyan chiefs.

Winterhill said, suddenly merry, “Ah, the hallway dance arrives. Do you sing, milady Houseguest?”

“House—I mean—sing?”

“They have come bearing my old black lute, and I may talk with you no more. Come down to the great hall, and sing a verse with us.”

“Yes, do come,” Edaire said, and Reccan plucked Longlight by the sleeve.

They crowded around Strange in the lift, except for Reccan, who skipped weightlessly down the stairs around the cage as the others descended. In the hall, the dinner table had been moved to the wall before the tapestry, and soft chairs and large cushions set about. The glasswicks were turned out, and candles and oil lamps made warm, moving light. The fireplaces hissed softly. Moonlight through the large window, direct and bounced from the pond, over-sheened everything.

Winterhill sat down in a big chair near the window, settled the lute into position, and teased a few unearthly chords from it. “Steady now,” he said to the instrument. “Girth a little loose, is she?” He tuned for a moment, as the others settled in, then swung full-tilt into “The Coron of the Grange,” a song every child in Lescoray knew in half a dozen verses and at least two choruses.

Silvern sang first, his voice deep and window-rattling:

“The Coron of the Grange one day

Went walking in the rain;

He scolded at the falling drops

To scare them back again.”

Longlight, feeling herself looked at, joined in:

“The Coron went out riding once

All splendidly in green;

He sat his saddle backwards so

He’d know where he had been.”

And then everyone:

“He had the moonlight in his eye,

The people smiled when he went by,

And all the folk who knew him say

That he was passing strange;

You never saw a fellow like

The Coron of the Grange.”

On the choruses, the singers practically yelled the words passing strange; it was obviously a Houseguests’ joke, and Strange laughed every time.

They went on through the list of songs everyone knew: “Whisky, No Water” and “The Moon Rose Red” and “Six Roads Lead to Morning.” Twice Winterhill gave the lute to Edaire. On a few of the songs, Reccan followed in sign language; for others, she produced a tin pipe from the air and played accompaniment. With pipe and lute and Silvern drumming martially on a pillow, they did a “Summer’s Gone to Cavalry” that might have panicked an undefended village.

During “Deep in the Blossoming Somewhere,” Reccan stopped playing and looked distantly out the bay window. It was, Longlight thought, a sad and thoughtful song; perhaps it reminded Reccan of something. Then, on the last verse, Reccan slipped a note into Longlight’s hand. She tilted it against the moonlight to read:

AGATE IS OUTSIDE, BY THE LAKE.

IF YOU WISH TO TALK.

Longlight nodded. She moved quietly toward the door, waited there for a moment, not really wanting to leave, and then slipped out. She wandered for a bit, thought about leaving through one of the breezeways, until one of the staff led her to a courtyard door.

The path toward the columned boathouse was easy to follow in the moonlight. Agate was sitting on the grass, her white gown fanned out, leaning back on her hands and gazing up at the moon. The whole world was black and white out here, like a steel engraving; only when Longlight looked back toward the House and saw the great hall’s bay window lit golden from within was there a touch of color.

“Welcome to Strange House,” Agate said.

“Thank you.” A slight breeze made the water splash on the shore, three steps away, and Longlight felt her skin tighten. “It’s cold.”

“Chilly. Come sit. Would you like some brantcider? Tacker brought me a flask.”

Longlight took a few steps, sat down on the grass. The ground was dry and surprisingly warm. “Real brantcider?”

“Strange has very fine orchards.” She held up a leather-covered pocket flask. “This is new stuff, be warned. There’s older and mellower in the cellars. No glasses, I’m afraid.”

“That’s all right.” She took the flask, carefully.

Agate said, “I can endure the brush of your finger. But I appreciate your caution.”

Longlight drank. The unaged alcohol scraped at her throat, and the scent of apples filled her head. There was an intense flush of warmth. She felt herself sigh.

“It’s an illusion, you know.”

“What is?”

“The warmth. Doesn’t really do anything but freeze you faster and keep you from minding. As I’m sure you know—Westrene mountains cold a’ winters.” She waited a moment. “Well, go on.”

Longlight said, “Seil the wind, embrace the snow.”

“Cleaven to the trail beneathan…”

“Minden an the fire glow.”

“There,” Agate said, “Now we have something, just you and I.” She took back the flask, tipped it. “I can manage a plain old verse. When I’m at rest, anyhow.” She turned her head, facing Longlight eye to eye. “And I thank you for your part in that rest.”

Longlight said nothing.

Agate said, “Has this still not been properly told you?”

“Edaire tried to explain it to me.”

“Edaire is good at that. I hope she succeeded.”

“I don’t know.”

Agate said, “I would be sorry if you were to be angry with Varic. I should be sad if you were so on my account.”

“It fails to matter to you? What we did?”

“I knew that it must have been done, because I know what would have happened had it not been done. That matters quite a lot. There is nothing to mind in it and much to be grateful to you for. Do you not have another companion? Where you live, off to the winter-cold mountains?”

“Varic told you.”

“He would not. I know such things because I cannot keep from knowing them. Well, then. Tell me to what standard you are holding Varic, and I will tell you how well I think he meets it.”

“Concetta.”

“Silvern tried to teach me swordgame,” Agate said, “for the rhythm, and I think for the calm, too. Do you know that method? The sphere of calm?”

“I know of it. I’m no Palion, let alone an Armiger.”

“Perhaps not. Dany helped teach, but it didn’t really take. Not their fault. But I do know thrust and parry, point and concetta. And the invisible circle that one crosses only at peril. There is no such circle here, Longlight. Our play is furious at times, and we acknowledge touches, and sometimes surrender, but here there is no deadly intent.”

“I’m only visiting here,” Longlight said.

“And I cannot be touched,” said Agate. She picked up a plate from the grass. “Would you like a bit of spice bread? Varic’s butler’s wife baked it. There’s enough to share.”

Longlight took the remaining piece of the loaf. Agate put the plate down, spread her hands to either side, and tilted her head back. The moonlight silvered her hair and gave her tanned face the cast of blued metal. Her fingers moved in the grass, tapping, and Longlight felt a pull below her breastbone: sorcery winding up. Agate said:

“Feelings endure the profoundest removal,

Water runs down despite mountains between,

Some things can never be called to approval,

All things exist in the way they are seen.

Others shall pass us as others passed by before,

From enough distance is anything small;

There’s not the time to stand still in the corridor,

Waiting for life to make sense after all.”

In the water, a few steps out, ripples spread as if a pebble had been tossed in. They were very black in the moonlight. Then the water hardened into the face of a sundial, a pointer of transparent ice rising from the disc.

“A cool night,” Agate said, and her breath fogged with the words. “But it will be a fine, bright morning. It’ll have melted by eleven. Good night, Longlight.”

“Will you be—”

“I’ll be up to my bed soon. I am somewhat nocturnal, as you may imagine.” She pointed toward the West Wing tower. “The last light in the West, serenglow. I do not like to be lonely, you must know.”

Longlight crossed the courtyard to the East Wing, went in at the southern end. She climbed two floors and walked out into the middle hall, knowing this time, she hoped, precisely where she was going.

She paused at the door. She could hear nothing from inside, but the doors and walls here were admirably soundproof. There seemed to be a light through the transom glass above the door.

She knocked. The House, she thought, was making her very bold.

Varic opened the door almost at once. The sitting room was in fact well lit, and he did not appear to have been sleeping; his hair was untied but still brushed smoothly back. He wore a dressing gown of night-blue flannel, loosely belted, gray silk pajama trousers that drooped around his bare ankles.

“Yes, Longlight?”

“I wondered if … you wanted to talk. I know that it’s late—”

He opened the door wide, gestured to the parlor seat, shut the door softly behind her.

There was a large secretary desk in the parlor, open, with sketch maps and some sheets of notes under a lensatic lamp. Varic gathered them together quickly, slipped them into a drawer of the desk.

“That’s military work,” Longlight said.

“In a manner of speaking. You’re playing battleboard with Strange tomorrow. Someone has to set up the forces. So, yes, it’s a military secret, from you and Strange at least. And probably Reccan and Tacker as well; they all love the game. Or did you know what I was doing, and intend a bit of scoutcraft?”

“No. I didn’t know.”

Varic nodded and folded the leaf table up. He pointed to a cup and pot on a side table. “I was about to get something to eat and some fresh tea. What may I bring you?”

“Nothing, thank you. Dinner was lovely. And I’ve probably had enough to drink—though now that you suggest it, tea might do me good.”

“Won’t be long.” Cinching his gown a bit tighter, he went into the hall. Barely five minima later, he was back, with a tray; it held some cold smoked salmon and thin toast, a large flask of tea, another cup and saucer, and a squat cut-glass tumbler of whitely fizzing clear liquid.

Varic held out the frothing glass. “Ginger the night man sends his compliments, and this to absolve your indulgence. Drink it quick, it tastes dreadful, but Ginger’s a soul of much wisdom in these matters.”

She gulped the digestive and almost at once felt calmer within.

Varic put the tea in easy reach and settled into the chair facing Longlight. “Now. What did you want to talk about?”

“Ironways,” she said quickly. “There ought to be Ironways in my Coronage.”

“I would agree that there ought. But I’m not an Ironway engineer.”

“No, but you’re in Parliament. More often than I am.”

He looked thoughtful. “When Silvern does your military study, he can start the work. He’s an excellent mapmaker, and lucives of the potentially difficult spots—bridges, tunnels—are a great help. Have you any experience of lucivitry?”

“I know people who do. And I could learn. What about Parliament?”

“Trains are, fortunately, not usually a hard case. Deerleap’s the obvious contact, but there are others; Grandview, Plasher. I’ll give you the names before you leave; write to them all. You needn’t be too specific; ‘We have languished on our muddy roads too long’ will set them in their own motions. And by all means hold a conference with your Commons leaders. Then, of course, there is the population itself.”

“What do I tell them?”

“You tell them that the Coronage is going to have Ironways—don’t ‘propose’ it or ‘suggest’ it. After that there are no rules, but I would offer that you should listen to what they say in response, and be prepared for the complexities.”

“Prepare me.”

He offered her some of the salmon. “You may as well have something interesting to do. Very well. The land everyone understands, a strip ten steps wide, so that two hundred milae of line cut only a single square mila out of the world and the tax base. But, as any number of Corons have been surprised to learn, you can’t just drop a steel rule on the map and consider it a survey. The motives will only pull up so much slope. Bridges are costly, cuts and fills costlier, tunnels absolutely dear. The surveyors are efficient, but on average they can chart only three or four milae a day.

“And then the motives want water and coal, and when they want them, not when and where it might be convenient. Cold cars for fresh food need ice. Livestock must be watered and fed and exercised. People have an infinite battery of particular wants, and invent new ones daily.

“And, of course, someone gives up the land, and someone the quiet, and someone has to live with the threat of fire and the occasional dead cow and the woefully frequent dead citizen. And have you ever seen a small town try to cope with a train wreck?”

“I don’t suppose that I have.”

“It doesn’t matter a bit,” Varic said, very seriously, leaning forward in his chair. “Even the simplest line—passengers between two towns, say, or a mine to a coal yard—has a hundred small complexities and two hundred hidden dismays. But so does an ordinary road: Where do we water the horses? How do we clear the dead leaves, the snow? Do we leave the track as dirt, and put up with mud and ruts, or pave and keep the paving healthy? Have you ever read Cornflower’s The Lost Way?”

“No.”

“He claims that the Quercians had to vacate Lescoray because road maintenance exhausted their resources. I’m not sure I fully agree, but it is a sensibly argued case.”

She laughed. “In the end, though, there isn’t really a choice, is there? Without trade, we’re allun poor, and without roads, there’s no trade. Ironways, ay mind, are the best roads, despite all your cautions.”

“It isn’t in doubt. Goods move ten, twenty times cheaper, and almost as much faster. The worse the terrain, the more benefit.”

She nodded. “So my country needs them.”

Varic said, “It would seem so to me. But I’ve never seen your country, and you know it well. The same with your people.”

“You’re Northesse. It’s no easier there.”

He moved a hand in acknowledgment. “And now that we have talked about Ironways, what did you come here to talk about?”

It took her a moment to catch up with him. He waited for her. “It wasn’t easy for me to stay here, after you went away to another lover,” she said. “It wasn’t easy for me to knock on your door tonight—whatever I thought you would do when you opened it, that was not easy at all.”

“Strange will have explained to you about Agate and I, or found someone to explain it—no, I neither asked him to or want to know about it; I just know it’s Strange’s nature that he did.

“In this House … remarkable things happen. I’ve seen them, felt them. People seem capable of more here than outside, and they are very good people outside.

“But I go back to the City, where the virtues and kindnesses of Strange House do not apply, fairly indeed do not exist. I remember that I am not a very good person outside.”

Suddenly he covered his face with his hands. His knuckles went white as his fingers compressed his skull.

“Are you well?” she said, very carefully.

He seemed to be trying to speak, but did not for several long, hard breaths. Then his hands relaxed, and he said quite easily, “I shall probably live to be a hundred and see the world no better at all than when I entered it.

“I think I must say good night now, my honored lady. I have your war to finish, and then much sand to turn preparing it.” He looked at the floor. “Always shape a battleboard in bare feet; it’s gritty, and can be cold, but it’s far better than sand lurking in your shoes.”

“Hang the war.”

“Never say that. You are in Parliament.” He looked at the door, started to rise, but did not. He said, “Edaire loves Silvern so much that she leaves a door to her mind itself open for him, and so he in return. Winterhill loves romance and adventure, and the knowledge that he is far more free than those who consider themselves his masters. Birch loves the soul of the whole world, and soon it will embrace him. Strange’s love of the mind’s reach is more intense and passionate than most people can bring their physical bodies to.” He looked at her exactly as he had done in the train compartment—the second night, not the first. “Everything I know of love is through the people in this House. They are rich in affection, and no one may go poor in their company.”

“You do not seem to me to wear borrowed clothes.”

He stood up then, walked uncertainly to her side, put a hand on her sleeve—lightly as nothing, but it made her gasp. “One of the marvels of the House is that borrowed clothes seem to belong to whoever wears them. Now, it is very late. Tomorrow night you may well knock on my door again, and I must be able to open it.”

Once again she had to push her mind backward, to comprehend what he had just said so casually. She stood up and faced him, as close as she dared. “It oughtn’t be so difficult, Varic.”

“Surely it ought not. But then difficulty is in my own name, while you were named to look into the sunset.” He opened the door and waited.

She walked toward the stairs. The corridor was lit low, silent, and all the doors were shut. She did not hear Varic’s door close behind her and had to fight not to look back.