The first thing Rafiq heard after a fuzz of soft edges and round, fluffy noises was the sound of Prince Akish swearing. That was neither soft nor fluffy. At first Rafiq thought that the tiles beneath his feet were soft and fluffy too, but once his consciousness adjusted to the abrupt fact that he was now in the ballroom he’d seen from the book, he came to the rather unpleasant realisation that the tiles were in fact some sort of quicksand, and that he had sunk in it to his knees. Prince Akish had also sunk into the floor some way ahead of him and was making all possible speed to clamber onto a nearby table that was squat, long, and above all unsinking.
“Chair,” said Kako significantly. She alone was standing on a tile that seemed to be solid, and if Rafiq read her aright, she was very much amused. Still, there was a chair in easy reach, and when he carefully levered himself out of the miry tiles and onto it, he found that quite a decent area around the chair seemed to be quite solid as well. It was hard to be annoyed with Kako when the floor beneath him was so blessedly normal.
Prince Akish scowled around at the ballroom. “What enchantment have we walked into?”
“I think,” said Kako, with a laugh trembling in her voice; “I think the floor is quicksand.”
“Don’t be pert, girl. I could ascertain so much for myself.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Kako said. The laugh was gone from her voice but to Rafiq’s eyes she fairly irradiated laughter. “Look at all the furniture: it’s just close enough to clamber on or jump to. It’s a giant game of The Floor Is Quicksand. I used to play it with my brother and sisters.”
Prince Akish’s brows snapped together. “Is this accursed place making light of our quest?”
Rafiq cast his eyes up and began feeling carefully around the base of his chair with his feet. Once Prince Akish began to be annoyed about real or perceived slights, everything took lesser place to his ire. Still, when he finished being annoyed he was bound to tell Rafiq to find them a way forward, and since Rafiq was now hungry with the kind of dull, continuous ache that preyed upon the mind, it seemed sensible to begin finding a way through the quicksand.
“Not light, exactly,” Kako said, as Rafiq’s questing feet met slightly firmer tile where he was certain he had only met treacherous quicksand before. “It does seem to have a fascination with games, though.”
“Rafiq–” began Prince Akish.
“Never mind Rafiq; he’s stuck over there,” said Kako. “I’ll find a path for us.”
Was he stuck, though? wondered Rafiq. The tiles that he had mired through seemed to be solidifying quite quickly.
“Stay there,” Kako said warningly as Rafiq brought his feet beneath him to rise. “The quicksand is beginning to firm.”
“That’s a good reason to move,” he said.
“Yes, if it were going to stay like that. I’ve got a feeling that it’s only gone away to make room for something more nasty.”
“What about you?”
“I think I’ve found a pattern,” said Kako. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Three to the left, then blue, then yellow. One step back, repeat. I tested it with the quicksand tiles before you both got here. There was a bit of a lag.”
And there, thought Rafiq. There it was again! The strange, absolute certainty that Kako was lying to them. Still, lying or no, when she made her way across the floor toward him in an inching, crab-like manner that followed her prescription, she didn’t sink so much as an inch through the tiles.
She was quite close to him when Rafiq heard the faint whirring of something magical stirring. It was deep in the floor, crawling along the underside of the tiles. Rafiq was still trying to pinpoint the source of it when Kako said a frantic: “Aiee!” and leapt for his lap. He caught her by reflex, wincing very slightly: for all her diminutive size, Kako was surprisingly heavy. She was also surprisingly warm for a human. Where a bare section of her back touched the inside of his arm Rafiq felt the contact like a ray of the hottest summer sun. Without meaning to, he found himself tightening his arms around Kako, delighting in the sunlight warmth of her.
She wriggled indignantly, and when Rafiq remembered himself enough to release her, she immediately curled one foot up to examine it. There was blood seeping from the underside of it. Rafiq automatically reached for the foot to inspect the damage but Kako elbowed him and hunched away, swiping the trickle of blood away on the silken fabric that clothed her other leg.
“It’s fine. The wound will close by itself.”
“What is it?” called the prince.
“Spikes,” said Kako, observing the floor with disfavour. “Small and very sharp. Lucky I was mostly on the right path. They took me by surprise.”
Surprise? wondered Rafiq. No, that was annoyance he’d seen on her face. Annoyance at herself. At her own carelessness, perhaps? And why could he smell burning silk once again? That was the important question, decided Rafiq. Another was the question of why Kako was so very warm? His eyes snapped to Kako’s face, which was at present looking decidedly wary, a light suffusion of dark orange permeating the air around her. It was very, very faint: had been faint from the first moment he’d seen her. Those tiny, tell-tale colours in aura around her had been so close to indiscernible that Rafiq hadn’t consciously seen them. He’d only reacted to them as he would have reacted to any other she-dragon.
Remembering his melted blade and the scent of burning silk then, he grimly bent to examine Kako’s trouser leg in spite of her physical and verbal protests. There where her blood had smeared across the silk were burnt patches; tight, crumpled little sections that had blackened, hardened, and in some cases burnt right through.
“Happy?” said Kako when he straightened. “When I melted your stupid dagger it ruined the only set of clothes I have access to.”
Rafiq looked down into those clever, wary, almond eyes and said in quiet certainty: “You have fire in your blood.”
Kako startled so badly that she almost fell off his lap and into the intermittent spikes that surrounded them. She caught herself with one clutching hand at Rafiq’s collar and said: “Excuse me?” Her voice was very carefully calculated between anger and annoyance, but Rafiq could see reddening in her faint aura. She was very frightened indeed. If he hadn’t been sure of it before, he was now.
“Sorry,” he said, and tore away the whispy loops of Kako’s scarf from her neck.
She made a stifled sound, snatching the scarf back to her neck, but it was too late. Rafiq had already seen the new, pink scar that ran below her left ear and across her throat to the opposite shoulder. It was a very familiar slash: he had used the exact slice on the Dragon of the Keep.
Kako was the Dragon of the Keep.
“Don’t assault the serving maid!” called the prince irritably. “I informed you of neck scarfs earlier, Rafiq. I won’t be held responsible if she wants to marry you.”
“We’ll talk later,” said Rafiq softly, as Kako rewound her scarf.
Kako, with her fingers trembling slightly, said to the prince in a careless voice: “Oh no! My mother expects me to marry much higher. At least a steward, I should think.”
The prince, who didn’t care about the matrimonial aspirations of a serving girl, said: “Is the path found, or must we begin again?”
“It’s found,” said Kako, slipping from Rafiq’s lap. She favoured her left foot slightly but didn’t seem to have too much trouble standing. “I just had to stop for a bit to fix my foot. Follow me, Rafiq. Three steps to the left, then blue, then yellow. One step back, repeat. Follow me exactly. And make sure your whole foot is inside the tile. The spikes are rather painful.”
Kako and Rafiq made their way slowly across the floor, followed closely and then overtaken by the evening shadows. By and large their path bore them left, and it wasn’t long before Prince Akish was cautiously able to lower himself to the floor behind them. Kako was entirely silent, and though Rafiq had found her chatter both bothersome and cheeky, he now found that he felt very badly about her muteness. It seemed, he thought uncomfortably, that he’d behaved more like Prince Akish than a dragon, and he didn’t like the feeling. He didn’t miss the occasional look that Kako flicked his way, her sloe eyes shuttered and watchful.
Akish, while not so self-absorbed as to be oblivious to the tension, was fortunately too busy counting tiles under his breath to notice, and it wasn’t until they found themselves between a wardrobe and the grand bed they’d seen from the other Circle that he seemed to notice how little light remained of the day. He muttered something beneath his breath, producing a flare of sorcerous light, and at once the tiles beneath their feet blanched to white, all hope of identification gone.
“That’s torn it,” said Kako, gazing around. They were the first words she’d spoken in quite some time, and it was something of a relief to hear her voice again. Rafiq realised that he’d been waiting for her to disappear through the Door Out and leave himself and Akish to their own machinations.
Prince Akish said something rather rude and banished the light, but it was too late. In the last of the fleeting sun the tiles remained white, useless as a guide. “What happened?” he demanded.
“I think your magic reacted with the Keep’s magical mechanics. It thinks you’re trying to cheat with magic, so it’s taken away your privileges.”
The prince looked annoyed with himself. “I didn’t consider the possibility. Will the patterns come back, wench?”
“I’d imagine so,” Kako said. “Probably not until morning, though. We may as well stop for the night.”
“What a plaguey nuisance! Very well, we’ll stop for the night. Find somewhere to sleep and we’ll start again in the morning.”
Prince Akish of course took the bed. It was a massive, canopied thing that could have held the three of them with ease and very little embarrassment, but in spite of that Kako made herself a nest in the wardrobe with some conveniently hanging furs and Rafiq threw himself onto a nearby chaise lounge that was much less comfortable than it looked. From there he could see the diminishing flame of the sunset as it flickered and died, while listening to Kako’s tiny rustles as she settled in her wardrobe and Prince Akish’s various rasps, rattles and thumps as he divested himself of the more cumbersome pieces of his armour.
After the fidgets and rustles came the quiet, and it was slowly borne in on Rafiq that Kako was working small, quiet magic. He rolled over to watch her work, the soft, fiery heat of her magic overshadowing the peaceful iridescence of lavender that fluctuated in her aura. It looked as though the working was calming her.
When Prince Akish’ irregular in and out of breath had settled down to a rhythmic snore, Kako’s voice, low and muted, said: “Are you going to tell him?”
“No,” said Rafiq. “But if he asks me–”
“You’ll have to tell him. All right. I can work with that.”
Rafiq, struggling to find a way to put his regret into words, rolled over onto his back once again and said to the ceiling: “I didn’t mean to tear your scarf. I’ll get you a new one.”
Kako’s dragon aura had almost faded now, but he saw the faint edging of forgiving gold from the depths of the wardrobe and relaxed.
“That’s all right,” said Kako. “I have others. Good night, Rafiq.”
Kako was gone again. Rafiq, waking late in the night to the solitary snoring of Prince Akish, saw the empty, shadowed inside of the wardrobe in which she’d been sleeping. He was conscious of a feeling of relief mingled with disappointment: it was safer if she stayed away from Akish, but he’d really thought she meant it when she said she’d stay. He found himself regretful that he wouldn’t have the chance to ask Kako about her dragon form. He would have liked to know more about the construct– not to mention the small matter of why she wasn’t dead. He’d never heard of a human with fire in the blood surviving when they died in dragon form.
Rafiq was still pondering the question when he heard slight scuffling sounds from across the room. It was Kako; carefully clambering across furniture piece by piece to make her way back to the wardrobe, and she appeared to be carrying a small bundle. It seemed good to Rafiq to close his eyes once again and feign sleep. He was surprised to discover himself smiling.
He felt Kako hovering over him a little later. What was she about? Then there was a slight fumbling somewhere in the region of his right arm, and Rafiq heard the slight creak of the wardrobe as Kako climbed back in and made herself comfortable. He sat up and saw in the grey light of early morning that she had tucked a carefully folded handkerchief of food into the crook of his arm, along with a small flask of water. The food was simple fare—bread and some species of preserves that were tangy and a little bit sweet—but there was quite a lot of it. It was the sort of thing he would have expected of a hungry youth raiding the larder late at night. It was immensely satisfying; filling and delightfully piquant.
When he had finished eating Rafiq folded the handkerchief neatly, took a long, refreshing draught of water, and lay back to gaze up at the silvery ceiling with his hands laced behind his head. It was very pretty, of course, but the silver did throw some strange reflections. The blue in the floor, for example, was nothing like the blue that the silver reflected back at him. It was more of a robin’s egg blue. And come to think of it, the yellow tiles reflected in the ceiling looked closer to robin’s egg blue than yellow, too.
Rafiq blinked. Ah. They’d been looking for patterns in the wrong place. His eyes followed the pattern of blue across the ceiling and found that it led very precisely and easily to a window across the ballroom. Rafiq briefly considered pointing it out to Akish, but after the food and drink Kako had brought he wasn’t distractingly hungry or thirsty– or particularly inclined to assist the prince, if it came to that.
Rafiq threw a look over at Kako and saw that she was watching him, her eyes glittering in the shadows. She had realised the same thing that he had; and like himself, was declining to tell the prince. Interesting. He closed his eyes and drifted back into a pleasant sleep.
The day was one of annoyance and frustration. Prince Akish was frustrated, which meant that everyone around him was annoyed. It didn’t help, thought Rafiq tiredly, that by the time Kako had led them another few feet across the tiled floor, the pattern suddenly and explicably changed. The first indication they had of any such thing was the tiles heating painfully beneath their feet. By the time they’d scrambled for somewhere safe, Prince Akish’s boots were smoking gently and the soles of Kako’s feet were burnt into red, angry blisters.
Kako looked more resigned than tearful, though her face had a carefully blank look that suggested she wasn’t giving in to her pain. Akish, on the other hand, was loud and vituperative in his distress both of burnt shoe-leather and lost path, and spent the next few hours eating his rations in an angry sort of way before climbing over some of the closer furniture to get a better look at the room. When Rafiq asked somewhat sarcastically for Commands, Akish only said: “Be silent, lizard. I am attempting to find the pattern again.”
True to his word, he did find the pattern again. By that time Kako had managed to heal the burns on her feet, and though the scar was still on the bottom of her foot, the rest of the skin looked smooth and new.
“How did you find it?” she asked Akish, accepting Rafiq’s hand to rise from the footstool upon which she had taken refuge.
“The pattern was clear from above,” said Akish grandly, and led the way.
Rafiq exchanged a look with Kako, brows raised. Akish was obviously in one of his more childish moods today. Rafiq had known him to go into terrifyingly infantile rages at the least pretext when he was in such a state, the prince’s vaunted prowess and battle cunning notwithstanding. Kako looked distinctly wary and Rafiq got the impression that she was used to dealing with such anger. He wondered if her princess often went into the same kind of paroxysms.
Before long it was obvious to Rafiq that the pattern was not taking them in the direction he had discovered last night. That was unfortunate, given Akish’s current mood, but he saw no reason to enlighten the prince. He was beginning to think that Kako was by no means eager for them to get through the Circles of challenge, and since it was no part of Rafiq’s design to make things easy for Prince Akish, he continued to follow behind silently. The pattern ended at a small side-door at the other end of the ballroom from whence they had entered. Prince Akish, with a grunt of triumph, wrenched the door open, and an incongruous flood of late afternoon sunlight streamed into the room.
“Oh well done,” said Kako. “You’ve found the Door Out.”
Rafiq craned his neck to see around the seething Prince Akish, and found himself looking at the wide stairs and open courtyard by which he and Akish had entered the Keep.
“This,” said Akish through his teeth, “Is insupportable! Wench, what is the meaning of this?”
“It’s the Door Out,” Kako repeated. “I told you: there’s one for every Circle. We’ve been following the wrong pattern.”
Much to Rafiq’s surprise, the prince didn’t immediately explode. Instead, he said: “You did inform me. This challenge is more irritating than I’d supposed. Can we go back to the entrance of this Circle?”
“We can go back to the point at which we entered, but the door is closed to us. We can only go forward or out.”
“You know a great deal, wench,” said Akish, closing the door again. He turned his back to it and looked very narrowly at Kako. “I’m beginning to believe I went too lightly on you in the last Circle.”
“Oh, is Rafiq going to hold a knife to my throat again?”
Prince Akish put one hand around her throat almost casually. “You’re remarkably forward for a maid.”
“Yes,” said Kako. Her voice was strained, but she was otherwise unaffected. “The princess finds it very useful.”
Rafiq made a restless move, powerless by Thrall to do anything to help; and Prince Akish, jerking Kako closer, shot him a smouldering look. “Keep back, lizard! I don’t need your help. How do we proceed to the next circle, wench?”
“I’m sure we have to find the right pattern to follow,” said Kako chokingly. Her face was suffused with crimson, but when Rafiq opened his mouth to tell the Prince he’d found the way himself he saw Kako’s hand rise, the index finger slightly uplifted. “I don’t know anything else.”
“I don’t believe you. You know entirely too much of this accursed place.”
Kako rasped: “Live here. Know how it thinks.”
“You’ll kill her,” Rafiq said shortly. Kako’s finger was still raised, but she was beginning to droop. He opened his mouth to tell the prince the way out in spite of her wishes but Kako lost consciousness as he did so, dragging the prince forward with the unexpectedness of her weight. Akish gave vent to a series of unpleasant remarks regarding her parentage and said to Rafiq: “Plague take the wench, she knows nothing after all! Pick her up and carry her back with us. It’s possible she may yet prove useful.”
They spent the afternoon back at the bed, where Kako took far longer than she should have to regain consciousness and the prince did a piece of magic that made a fat slab of architect’s paper appear, along with a winding fountain pen. It also made the colours in the floor disappear once again, which irritated the prince greatly.
Rafiq deposited Kako on the chaise-lounge and removed himself to a nearby chair, worried by the amount of time that she spent unconscious until he saw her eyes open a slit to watch Prince Akish’s busily moving pen as it scrawled characters and numbers on the paper slab.
He found himself grinning. How much of her faint had been real? None of it, he was inclined to think. He was also inclined to think that she’d deliberately needled the prince. There was no excuse for the prince’s behaviour, of course, but Kako had seen his mood and deliberately provoked him, Rafiq was certain. What did she have to gain from being physically attacked?
When Kako finally deigned to wake from her self-imposed ‘faint’, the prince was still at his scribblings and Rafiq was amusedly watching her. She caught his eye and winked, then produced an entirely convincing, throbbing cough.
“Not dead, then, I see,” said the prince, without looking up. “If I were you, I would begin to think of ways in which to be very useful. Your unhelpfulness is starting to pall.”
“Oh,” said Kako, her voice slightly raspy. “How awful. Did you know that the colours in the floor have disappeared again?”
“Yes,” the prince said sourly. “I worked some magic again and the Keep took exception to it.”
“I see. Just trying to be helpful.”
Akish violently scribbled out a section of his figures and barked at Rafiq: “Instead of smirking, lizard, why don’t you clamber over the furniture to see how far you can get?”
“Of course,” said Rafiq, his grin just a little wider.
“The Floor Is Quicksand!” sang Kako at him, and leapt from the chaise lounge to a nearby desk with surprising lightness of foot. Rafiq followed her, enjoying the feel of his muscles coiling and uncoiling. There was less exercise to be had as a human, and the fact that his arms were more useable as a human never quite made up for the fact that he was always flexing his shoulders in expectation of being able to use his wings.
They enjoyed an afternoon of childish fun while the prince worked at his figures. Rafiq, chasing Kako over couch-back and under chandelier, saw Akish frequently flopping on his back on the bed and wondered that the prince didn’t see the same patterns on the ceiling that he had seen.
Kako, noticing the direction of his gaze, stopped for a brief moment atop a dressing table and said: “It’s the canopy. It’s not just a curtained bed, it’s a fully canopied one. All he can see is drapes.”
Rafiq gave a hiss of laughter. “Akish was never one for sleeping with his troops.”
“Exactly,” said Kako. “Serves him right for taking the most comfortable bed.”
“So you do know the way through this Circle!”
“Oh yes,” Kako said, dropping lightly to the next piece of furniture by way of the chandelier. “I told you: I know the way this place thinks. I didn’t think you’d figure it out, actually.”
“He will, too,” Rafiq warned her. “Eventually.”
“Yes, but will he do it before he runs out of food?”
It was a good question, Rafiq thought. The prince was clever, but he was used to commanding battles and planning raids, not solving puzzles that seemed ridiculously complicated while being actually quite simple. The Keep’s puzzles so far had been children’s games– right down to the dragon that guarded it; a child’s story if ever there was one. What chiefly interested him now, though, was whether Kako was a part of the Keep’s magic, or whether she was an actual person.
That night when Kako carefully sneaked away, Rafiq was awake to follow her. She took a perilous route across a spaced-out series of armchairs that made a wandering line around furniture and finally came to a halt beside a knight that was guarding a shallow, curtained alcove. Rafiq, following her, discovered that the alcove became somewhat less shallow the closer one grew. By the time he was leaping from the second-last armchair to the last he could see down the alcove’s gloomy length as if it was a hall. A flutter of pink silk was just disappearing around a corner at the end of it. Rafiq made short work of the last armchair, springing lightly and silently into the alcove, and hurried after Kako. Now that he had been human for a few days his native lightness of foot was growing, just as Kako’s she-dragon aura faded further with each day that she didn’t turn dragon.
The hall made an abrupt end in heavy curtains that were just barely parted. Rafiq had already felt the fiery magic that formed it, and if he had a guess, he would have said that Kako had joined the Keep to a room quite far away from it by the simple expedient of matching drapes.
Carefully twitching the curtains back a little more, he took a cautious look around the room. It wasn’t a small one, but it looked distinctly crowded. Part of that impression was created by the sheer amount of books that had been crammed into the bookcases, corners, spare chairs and tables; but the fact that every chair not occupied by piles of books was occupied by a human of varying size, age, and sex didn’t help the room to look any less crowded. There was a boy sitting solemnly on a footstool with a book that was bigger than he was lying open on his crossed legs. On the top shelf of one of the bookcases was a very tiny girl alternately turning pages and tucking strands of hair behind her ear, from whence they immediately escaped again; and the fattest two-seater couch that Rafiq had ever seen was occupied by an older girl who evidently had no idea of the way that couches worked. She was sprawled on the seat with a book resting on her stomach, her hair hanging over the side and her legs resting comfortably against the back of it, crossed at the ankles. She was showing off a good deal more light brown skin than even Shinpoans would consider to be suitable.
Across from her, as if in direct reproof, sat an elegant young woman with a gracefully straight back and correctly covered legs, reading something decorative and most likely poetical.
When Kako walked into the room, each one of them looked up, smiles—and in the case of the tiny girl in the bookcase, squealing excitement—immediately in evidence. Even the girl sitting upside down on the couch, with her clever, sarcastic face, grinned briefly.
“I see you’ve all sneaked out of bed again,” said Kako, in a congratulatory kind of way.
“Did you make it to the third Circle?” asked the boy, his eyes bright and interested. “We’ve been tracking your progress on the map Dai’s drawing.”
“We did,” Kako said. “Where’s mum?”
“Probably restocking the pantry after you raided it last night,” said the boy. He looked vaguely reproachful. “Why didn’t you wake us?”
“I wanted to speak to mum,” said Kako. “Besides, I saw you all two nights ago. And mum was the one who gave me the sandwiches, so there.”
“You’ve tracked something nasty in,” suddenly said the girl with her legs propped against the back of the couch. She nodded toward Rafiq, who had thought that he was sufficiently well hidden, and he found himself under the gaze of five pairs of eyes. “How unfortunate. It’ll probably get stuck in the carpet, too.”
Kako said: “Bother! What are you doing here?”
“I followed you.”
“Well, yes; that’s pretty obvious. I suppose you’d better come in. It’s not a good idea to spend too much time in the corridor: it doesn’t really exist.”
“Dai!” hissed the older, elegant girl. “Cover your legs!”
The girl called Dai looked Rafiq over once boredly and said: “It doesn’t matter. He’s only a human-form thing. What does he care about legs?”
“Legs are full of flavour and wonderfully chewy,” said Rafiq. “Also humans can’t run away if you bite them off.”
There was a soft plop as Dai’s legs hit the couch and a slight scuffle as they folded beneath her. Rafiq took a certain amount of satisfaction in the fact that her eyes were now very wide and suddenly no longer bored.
“This is Rafiq,” Kako said, her eyes dancing. “He’s the Contender’s um...servant. He’s a dragon-human construct.”
“Sort of the opposite of you,” said the boy. His eyes weren’t quite as obviously Shinpoan as the others’: not only were they bright blue, there was only a slight suggestion of slanting to them. “Do you eat, construct?”
Rafiq’s eyes met Kako’s briefly. He said: “Yes. Not as much as a human-born, but I do require some sustenance.”
“Now that’s interesting!” the boy said excitedly. “Kako doesn’t, you see. Where do you keep your dragon form?”
“Keep it?”
He nodded expectantly. “Yes, while you’re in a Constructed human body. Kako hides in wardrobes and under beds.”
Rafiq looked from one to the other, frowning. “I don’t...I change. There’s no other body. First I’m dragon, then I’m man.”
There was an immediate explosion of excited interest all over the room.
“But Kako says–”
“Kako has–”
“How do you–”
Kako, above the general hubbub, said sharply: “Enough! Rafiq isn’t interested in how I change from human to dragon–”
“I am,” objected Rafiq, but she ignored him.
“–he’s interested in eating. Zen, why don’t you get him something to eat?”
“All right, but Akira’s used all of the preserves for that–”
“–for our cousin?” said Kako swiftly.
There was a brief pause while Zen pushed up his glasses and Dai chuckled.
“Yes. Our cousin ate all the preserves. I hope they give him stomach cramps. But there’s a nice pie in the cooler if Rafiq would like that.”
“Pie!” said a small voice immediately. Rafiq looked up and found that the diminutive girl in the bookcase was watching him intently. She’d gone back to her book when the conversation had turned to Rafiq, but the mention of pie had once more awoken her interest in the conversation. “Pie for me!” she crowed.
“Pie for Rafiq,” corrected Zen, obediently closing his book and leaving the room.
“Pie for me!” insisted the child irritably. She abandoned her book to climb out of the bookcase backwards, and Rafiq, who instinctively moved closer when her tiny legs flailed for the next shelf, was just in time to catch her before she fell.
“It’s all right, she bounces,” said Dai languidly.
“Dragon!” said the child happily, wrapping her arms around Rafiq’s neck. “Dragon for me!”
Kako grinned. “I thought you wanted pie?”
“Pie for me, too!”
“This is Miyoko,” Kako said, by way of introduction. “Oh, and that’s Suki. Akira isn’t here at the moment. Zen is the one fetching the pie, and Dai is the one on the couch.”
A pair of big brown eyes lit with excitement. “Fire!”
“No fire!” said Kako immediately. “Dai, did you give Mee matches again?”
“Suki took them off her days ago and I’ve been locking the door to my workroom.”
“Don’t need matches,” Miyoko explained. “Dragons go whoof!” She puffed her cheeks out and huffed a short, slightly damp breath into Rafiq’s face, by which he understood that she wished him to breathe fire. An interesting idea—could he transform enough to be able to breathe fire without needing to change all the way?—but since Zen was just staggering into the room with a tray piled high with food while Kako peeled Miyoko’s arms from his neck, he didn’t attempt it.
“Help yourself,” Kako told him, nodding at the tray. “And quickly, too, or there’ll be none left for you.”
Rafiq did so hungrily; but he wasn’t so eager for food that he didn’t notice her pulling Dai aside to murmur in her ear. He accepted the pie Zen offered him before Miyoko could snatch it away with her tiny, grubby fingers, and watched them both out of the corner of his eye. Did something change hands? He thought so. So Kako wasn’t here merely to see her family: she’d come with a purpose. Was that purpose behind why she still wandered the Enchanted Keep with himself and the prince? It was useless to attempt to hear what Kako and Dai were saying: Zen was determined to know about Rafiq’s dragon form and how he changed, and Miyoko was just as determined to have Rafiq’s attention all to herself. Suki tried to keep them both in some semblance of politeness, and in so doing added another layer of noise to the babble. By the time both children had been more or less quieted by their elder sister, Kako and Dai were descending upon the supper tray to snatch up the remaining crumbs that hadn’t already been consumed with great dispatch by the younger two and even the lady-like Suki.
Rafiq continued to watch them thoughtfully as he ate, prompting Dai to wink at him salaciously.
Kako didn’t react to his steady regard, but when he’d finished eating she said: “We’d best be going back now, Rafiq.”
There was a general chorus of protest.
“But you just got here!”
“Pies and fruit nectar, that’s all we are to you!”
“Kakooooo!”
“But Akira will be here soon, Kako!”
“I know,” said Kako, answering the most comprehensible of the wails. “But I got to see Akira last night. And why else would I come to see you all but for the food and drink?”
To Rafiq’s surprise, her siblings seemed to take this in good part. Zen and Miyoko crowded close to hug her around the waist and the leg respectively, and Suki sighingly kissed her cheek.
Dai gave her a sideways smile and threw herself onto a couch, blowing Kako a kiss. “Will you be back tomorrow?”
“I think so,” said Kako. She and Dai exchanged a glance, and she added: “I’ll want to see how you and Zen are going with that project.”
Zen looked startled. “We’ve got a project?”
Dai roused herself enough to clip his ear with one hand. “Of course we do, you stupid squib!”
“Oh, that project,” Zen said, his eyes sliding away from Rafiq. “All right: ‘night Kako.”
Kako ushered Rafiq on ahead of her, stopping only to detach Miyoko from her leg, and they walked the passage that wasn’t really there in silence, all the way back to the Enchanted Keep.
The next morning the colour was still gone from the tiles. Rafiq, who woke with a smile on his lips and many questions bubbling in his mind, cast his eye over the tiles and snuffed a small laugh.
“Oh, are the tiles still white?” said Kako sympathetically, from her wardrobe.
“Plague take it!” Akish said angrily. “Why aren’t the colours back?”
“I expect the Keep is trying a bit of negative reinforcement,” Kako said, her eyes bright. She uncurled from the wardrobe with the unconscious grace of a she-dragon and stretched on the tips of her toes. “It really doesn’t like having to repeat itself. I wouldn’t use any more magic while you’re here, if I were you.”
That was moderately interesting, thought Rafiq, edging slightly sideways to make room for Kako to sit down beside him. He could have sat up, but it looked like Akish was settling to have a temper tantrum, and Rafiq didn’t feel that a tantrum merited his full attention when he could recline comfortably for the duration.
“There’s always the Door Out,” said Kako, with the sighing weariness of one who knows she will not be attended to. Rafiq smiled up at the ceiling.
“We will not abandon the quest!” Prince Akish said immediately. “Rafiq, what do you see?”
The Burden of his Thrall fell immediately, suffocatingly vicelike. Rafiq said, as casually as he could manage: “I see the silver ceiling and the reflected patterns from the floor.”
“The patterns?” Prince Akish stared at him, then up at the ceiling with fierce exultation. “Rafiq, find me a mirror!”
Rafiq rolled languidly to his feet, conscious of a galling annoyance at himself. He had hoped to be able to keep his own counsel better. He brought back one of the side mirrors from the dressing-table a few tiles away and passed it to Akish, meeting Kako’s eyes as he did so. She did her one-shouldered shrug and smiled slightly, which made him feel better.
“Now we progress!” said Prince Akish exultantly, and led the way across the tiles. It was astonishingly quick once they knew the way: a bare twenty yards, and straight as an arrow to that one window. The prince hauled at the window himself, for once too eager to order Rafiq to do it, and leaned out into the open air to scout out the next Circle.
“It’s a garden,” he said. “Not much to be seen from here, I’m afraid. Proceed, lizard.”
***
Somewhere far away from the Enchanted Keep, Dai, sister of Kako, turned a shard of sword between her fingers.
“What is it?” asked Zen. He was gazing at it with intense attention, as if he could force it to give up its secrets by the force of his will alone.
“It’s part of a sword.”
“I know that. I meant, what’s it for?”
“Then you should have asked that,” said Dai. “I don’t know what it’s for. Neither does Kako, but she must be trying to find out, because she wants a passable copy to replace the original. Can you do it?”
“Probably,” said Zen. “Think it belongs to the prince, or Rafiq?”
“Weeeeeeell–”
“What, Kako didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, she told me. Says she picked the prince’s pocket. But this magic– it’s good magic. I mean, really good: lovely, benevolent stuff, and is it ever strong! What’s Akish of Illisr doing with something this nice?”
“Something nasty, belike,” said Zen. “Oh! Dai! Why’s your necklace doing that?”
“What? Oh!”
“That’s your Fae necklace, isn’t it? What’s it doing, trying to get away from the shard?”
“I think so,” said Dai, feeling for the pendant doubtfully. It had pulled itself as far away from the shard as it could get, and now it tugged at the chain around her neck from somewhere over her shoulder. “Do you know, I’m almost certain we have a book about this. Wait here. Don’t touch it.”
Zen waited after she left the room, his hands shoved into his pockets and jiggling on his feet. It looked as though he was physically restraining himself from touching the shard. Dai returned moments later and shot him a suspicious look, but his impatience convincing her that he’d done as he was told, she wiggled the book at him.
“I was right. We do have a book about it. Here, hold the shard.”
“All right!” He held it while Dai grew a spiky, tight-knit spell in the palm of one hand, and stood without flinching as she hurled it at the shard between his fingers. Magic hit shard, and the room lit with a flash of searing white light as the spell exploded into extinction.
“Oooooh,” said Zen, his eyes bright and dazzled.
Dai grinned: a brilliant, triumphant grin. “Ah,” she said. “So that’s what it does! I think Kako is going to like this.”
The Third Circle is ended