1

Under the glittering Gloaming, Margot De Courcey walked barefoot from Landricourt into the town of Argantel, singing songs she never remembered hearing before. They were strange, nonsensical songs, but then it was a strange, nonsensical time; not only was the Gloaming early, it was somehow more… well, just more.

A day had passed since its first early arrival, and again it had swept over them before its time. Today, only two chimes of the great clock had sounded before the light was swallowed up, and the blue shroud of twilight had covered everything.

Was it supposed to glitter like that? Margot formed the thought in an abstracted way, her mouth still busy forming the words of her melodic oddities as she walked, a basket of flowers and herbs dangling from her arm.

 

And the mirrors sang, ‘Hey-ho, trally-do,

We know the names of the clouds and the snow,

And where it is that the North Wind goes

When the chiming stops and it no longer blows.

And what of the rose that evening brings?

We know the songs that its mirror-heart sings,

We know the stars and the mists and the sky,

We know when magic goes streaming by.

 

Margot stopped singing, entranced by the vision before her, for she was halfway down the vale and all about her was shadow and shine. It was as though the stars had jaunted down for an evening’s entertainment below, and had settled everywhere, anointing each leaf, every flower and blade of grass, with a pale twinkle. The shadows were so deep she could fancy she could fall into them, and never come out again, but the thought did not make her afraid. A current of some kind swept her ever onwards, flowing from Landricourt over the bright grasses and into the town. When she paused and looked back, a thin line showed where she had been: a thin line of darkness, where the stars had gone out.

 

Thirty-seven years and thirty-seven songs, Margot began again, a different melody leaping to her lips.

Thirty-seven dreams and thirty-seven wrongs,

Thirty-seven faces and thirty-seven lies,

Thirty-seven hours and thirty-seven skies.

 

She stopped again, for here was someone coming towards her through the mist and the stars, a shadow of a figure she did not recognise, not even when it was almost upon her. But when the woman spoke, she recognised the voice of Sylvaine Chanteraine.

‘Who is there?’ came the voice.

Margot identified herself, remembering only at the last instant to speak her name, and not to sing it.

‘Margot! What are you doing out here?’

‘I do not know. I was picking herbs…’ Margot ran out of words, for the rest escaped her. What was she doing?

‘Have you seen Florian?’ said Sylvie, in a tone of unusual urgency.

‘Not since yesterday.’

Sylvaine gave a sigh. ‘I had hoped… you’ve come from Landricourt? You’re certain he is not there?’

‘Certain,’ said Margot, and hummed a few bars of another song.

Sylvaine stepped closer, and peered intently at Margot. Her hair looked outlandishly bright purple in the weird light of the Gloaming, and her face shone too pale. She looked like some wild, magical creature, and Margot wanted to step back again. ‘Are you drunk?’ said Sylvaine abruptly.

‘Why, no,’ said Margot serenely. ‘I never touch drink.’

Sylvaine looked her over, rather rudely. ‘You have come from Landricourt,’ she said again, and this time it was not a question.

‘I have. Singing all the while.’ Having announced which, she proceeded to take up her song again, but was quickly silenced when Sylvaine raised a hand and said sharply: ‘Please stop.’

Some small, distant part of Margot remembered that she was not much disposed to wander about singing, as a general rule, and that the evensong of the winemakers was, for her, an exception rather than the rule; this part welcomed Sylvaine’s prohibition against further song with relief. But the other compulsion was stronger. Did it come from the Gloaming, too? Was it the stars that brought it, or the flow beneath her feet that carried her across Argantel? She did not know, but it had hold of her; she began to sing again.

 

Roses are red, and roses are gold,

Roses are stranger than ever was told,

Roses are amber and roses are wine,

They come with the morning and swell on the vine,

But come they in darkness and dress all in white,

Like starlight and moonshine crept in with the night,

Then silver they’ll go, and—

 

Sylvaine had, through much of this verse, been making ever more urgent gestures for Margot to be quiet, and had tried talking over the top of her to no avail. Now she extinguished Margot’s song by the simple expedient of clapping a hand over her mouth, which treatment Margot bore in silent astonishment.

‘Will you be quiet!’ hissed Sylvaine.

Margot, her mouth covered, said nothing.

Tentatively, Sylvaine took her hand away. They both waited some time to see whether the verbal flow would resume, Margot quite as interested in the possibility as Sylvaine.

She remained quiet; her songs seemed to be gone.

‘Finally,’ sighed Sylvaine, and fixed her attention upon the ground beneath her feet. Margot had kept largely to the road on her way through the vale, for it bore the rippling current admirably, and swept her on with it. There was a thrumming beneath Margot’s feet which she felt full well considering her lack of shoes. But Sylvaine, shod though she was, appeared to have no difficulty discerning it. ‘It is going to be a strange night,’ she predicted, and looked hard at Margot. ‘It is already, I perceive. Shall I frighten you, if I say that nothing will be as it was, come the morning?’

‘Was it so very marvellous, as it was?’ said Margot.

‘Oh, marvels! We shall have those aplenty.’ Sylvaine said the words disgustedly, and cast an equally unimpressed look at the low juniper bushes that lined the roadsides, each glimmering gently under a mantle of starry motes. ‘You had better come with me,’ she said. She looked, apparently for the first time, at the basket slung over Margot’s arm. ‘What are they?’

‘I found them on my way,’ was the only answer Margot could give. She had scarcely noticed herself picking them, and had carried them off with her without much thinking about the matter. They were jonquil and cherry-bird and wych-elm leaves; blackthorn berries and yellow gentian; pale pasque flowers and lavender and sprigs of linden-branch and who knew what else. Margot had no explanation for them.

‘Very well, bring them along.’ Sylvaine took up a station to Margot’s left and, grasping her elbow in a firm grip, began a march back in the direction of the town of Argantel, propelling Margot along with her. ‘There is too much magic abroad tonight,’ she said as she walked, heedless of whether or not Margot was hard-pressed to keep up. ‘It has got into your head for certain. Perhaps into your blood, too, and if it has not yet then it will if I leave you out here.’ She sighed and said next, ‘There are too many rivers and pools around Landricourt,’ as though such a statement followed in any logical fashion whatsoever from what she had said before.

Margot could make no sense of it, but she was not much moved to try. Nothing had made sense since the Gloaming came in, and she found the state more refreshing than frustrating. It no longer mattered to her whether anything made sense or not, and how liberating that was! She wanted to sing again, but mindful of Sylvaine’s probable displeasure she managed to suppress the impulse.

Sylvaine was not fooled. ‘Please, don’t sing,’ she begged. ‘It encourages it, you see. You ought to see, given what you are. Why do you think the winemakers sing, when the Gloaming comes in?’

‘I do not know,’ said Margot truthfully. No one ever questioned the evensong, any more than they questioned the winemaking or, indeed, the Gloaming; it was simply how things were done, in Argantel.

‘Not that it has ever worked,’ continued Sylvaine, without pausing to elaborate. ‘Not with the roses being what they are. But now! Everything will be changed, and who only knows what will come of it.’

‘They are red,’ offered Margot.

‘I daresay they are.’

‘And amber, and gold.’

‘Yes, yes. Very lovely, and very dangerous, too. There was not that much to object to, the way we were before! It was not precisely right, I acknowledge, but it was not wrong either! Meddling fools.’ And here Sylvaine fell silent a while, absorbed, apparently, in her own unsatisfactory reflections.

‘Rozebaiel is there,’ Margot said after a while, moved to offer some new nugget of information into the silence.

‘At Landricourt?’ said Sylvaine.

‘I saw her three times, today. Once in the wine-cellar, once in the ballroom, and once in the tower. She, too, was singing.’

‘She does that.’ Sylvaine did not sound impressed.

‘You know her, then?’

‘I know of her. We have not met.’ She paused a while, and then added in a grim tone, ‘Yet.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t imagine you do,’ said Sylvaine bluntly. ‘But you don’t need to. There has been a fine mess made, you see, by some of those who went before, and since they have not cleaned up after themselves then it falls instead to some of us who came after.’

‘I dislike mess.’

‘So do I, but we are to have a great deal more of it tonight.’

Margot looked again at the glittering junipers, and thought privately that if this was Sylvaine’s notion of mess then she did not find it so very terrible.

They were bound for the emporium, Margot soon guessed, for Sylvaine led her through the town’s west gates — not yet closed against the encroaching night, for the hour was by no means so advanced as it felt — and along the wide Waldewiese. Sylvaine steered Margot unerringly towards the emporium, and at speed. They entered through the back way, straight into the storeroom, and Sylvaine slammed and bolted the door against the weird light of the Gloaming, shutting it out completely.

They stood in near darkness for a short while, and then a light flared: Sylvaine had lit a lamp. She turned up its glow until the room was brightly illuminated, then nodded towards the narrow stairwell that led up into the rooms above the shop. ‘We’re going up.’

Up? Though a regular customer of the emporium — she did not know who was not — Margot had rarely been in the storeroom before. She had never at all been invited to explore the rest of the building, and she was not loath to do so now. She made for the stairs — but paused along the way, for her eye had fallen upon the box in which she and Florian had hidden their cache of odd treasures. Had it moved? She could almost have said that it had jumped up, and done its best to catch her eye.

‘A moment,’ she said, and pointed to the box. ‘In there are some things of Rozebaiel’s.’

Sylvaine looked sharply at the box. ‘How came they to be there? And how came you to know of it?’

‘I put them there. And Florian did as well.’ Margot thought for a moment. ‘It was yesterday,’ she elaborated. ‘Or perhaps the day before.’

‘Aye, time begins to be difficult to follow,’ said Sylvaine grimly, and opened the box. She extracted the lovely ribbon without much looking at it, but the moth-wing coat was another matter entirely. When she drew the pile of airy gauze forth, her mouth dropped open and, for some moments, she did not seem able to speak. At length she recovered herself. ‘This is not Rozebaiel’s,’ she said in a voice that slightly shook.

‘No,’ agreed Margot. ‘That one we found in the house of Oriane.’

If Sylvaine heard, she did not reply. She was too busy shaking out the coat, very carefully indeed, and turning it about. ‘I am sure,’ she was saying softly, ‘that it is the same one! Oh, yes — see here,’ and she thrust the coat under Margot’s nose, pointing to a slight irregularity with the weaving. ‘It is the same! How can it be the same?’

‘Is it yours, then?’ said Margot in confusion.

‘In effect,’ said Sylvaine. ‘It was… my mother’s.’ So saying, she laid the coat over her own shoulders and slipped her arms into its wispy sleeves. Margot thought privately that it looked made for Sylvaine, for the pretty mauve tint looked custom-matched to her wild hair.

A day or two ago, Margot would have said it was her imagination only that made the embroidery glow like the moon, when Sylvaine put the coat on.

Sylvaine rolled her shoulders and shuddered, suffering under some affliction Margot could not recognise. ‘Ah, well,’ she said softly. ‘After all, then, what choice is there?’ On which words she turned resolutely to the staircase and ascended it, calling to Margot, ‘I take it back, Margot. Sing as much as you like. Wear the ribbon. We are out of our depth entirely, but what of that? There is no knowing where any of this will go, unless we go along with it. And who knows what might come of it, if we do?’

‘Perhaps something bad,’ said Margot dreamily, draping the ribbon over her left wrist and tying it there. She noticed, distantly, that the box was almost empty, which did not seem right. Only the little bottle, filled with Pharamond’s elixir for Oriane, was left; had there not been some other things in there? Florian’s neckcloth, for one. She thought to ask Sylvaine about it, but the other woman was already halfway up the stairs, talking all the while.

Margot put the elixir-bottle into her skirt.

‘Yes,’ agreed Sylvaine. ‘That is the way of everything, is it not? And then, you know, we might also be…’ She hesitated. She had gone out of sight, now, and Margot heard only her voice drifting back down the stairs.

‘Be what?’ prompted Margot, ascending after her.

‘Oh, changed!’ said Sylvaine. ‘But in good ways, not bad. Or neither.’

Margot came out at the top of the stairs into a large room which spanned, she judged, the whole width and breadth of the building. Anything she might have said in response to Sylvaine fled from her mind, lost to wonder — and a touch of fear. ‘Your father’s workroom?’ she enquired of Sylvaine.

‘The heart of the emporium,’ Sylvaine intoned.

The first thing which caught Margot’s notice was the windows. There were eight of them, and they were impossible. Not least because each was filled with a single, unbroken sheet of glass, no matter that they were as tall as Margot herself and twice as wide. Such glasswork was beyond the capability of any craftsman, she would have thought. And they showed nothing that they ought. Instead of affording views over the narrow streets of Argantel and their complement of tall, slate-tiled and stone-built houses, they showed variously: a lake of green waters, its surface smothered in lily-pads; an ocean of clouds shot through with lightning; a forest of bejewelled trees clad in russet and gold; a web of rivers and becks, their swift-running waters criss-crossing each other in a veritable maze; a great chamber, ruined, its walls hung with rotting tapestries; a moonlit arbour of ancient, wizened trees; a jumbled village of tall, unusually narrow houses, thatch-roofed and leaning precariously; and a stretch of desert, sands glittering with jewel-dust in every colour.

Three broad work-benches built from stout oak were lined up down the centre of the room, each cluttered with an array of tools. One held brewing and distilling paraphernalia, and was half-covered in bottles, flasks and jars filled with all manner of liquids; one held the tools of a bookbinder’s trade, and several partly-constructed tomes; and the third was devoted to some pursuit beyond Margot’s comprehension, for she could make no sense of the things that were assembled there. A kind of small, portable loom was one of them, with a length of fabric hanging from it, half-spun. The cloth resembled the ribbon she wore, though it was nowhere near so fine, nor so impossibly beautiful. Three great glass jars stood there also, something misty and insubstantial swirling dreamily inside each one. There was a box full of shards of glass, some coloured, some clear, and all shining softly.

Margot took all of this in with a growing sensation of troubled awe, and said vaguely: ‘What in the world is your father up to?’

‘Quite,’ said Sylvaine, glancing about with the air of one who is so familiar with the contents of a room as to have stopped seeing any individual object long ago. ‘That is exactly the question in my mind, of late.’

‘Of late?’ Margot echoed. ‘Has he not always been…’

‘Strange?’ Sylvaine supplied. ‘Oh yes, always! And taught me the greater part of his trades. For the past three years and more, I have been the one keeping the Chanteraine Emporium stocked. I mix the elixirs, bind up the pocket-books, bake the sweetmeats and morsels and weave the scarves and the shawls, for father has been too… busy.’ She looked at the work-benches, and said with a faint smile, ‘This might rather be called my workroom, now.’ She focused again on Margot, and said in a troubled tone: ‘I do not know where he goes, Margot, or what he does. And he has not been seen at all since before yesterday, not by anybody that I have asked. Is it a coincidence, that my father vanishes just as chaos claims us all?’

Margot’s head had cleared a little since her walk through the vale. She was able to parse the sense of Sylvaine’s words without having to untangle them first, and she could grasp the problem at hand quite lucidly, and without suffering the smallest urge to sing about it. ‘I see what you mean,’ she answered, slowly. ‘But you cannot think that your father has something to do with all of this?’

Sylvaine crossed her arms and stared meaningfully out of the nearest of the windows: the one showing a roiling sea of thunderous clouds. ‘Can I not?’

A bolt of lightning shot across that airy sea as Margot watched, and she blinked. ‘I see your point.’

‘Indeed. So.’ Sylvaine began to move about the room with a searching attitude, though what she might be looking for Margot could not guess. She lifted the tapestried drapes and looked behind them; drew up the thick, burgundy woollen rug from the wood-panelled floor and peeped underneath; opened each one of the cupboards that lined the walls and rummaged through the contents. ‘I don’t know why I am even doing this,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘It is not as though I haven’t searched all these places before, many times over.’

Margot’s befogged mind had glided seamlessly over a certain matter before, but now its import hit her all at once. ‘You said that Florian is missing?’

‘Like Oriane, and like my father. Hasn’t been seen by anybody, since the day before last.’ Sylvaine did not for an instant pause in her labours as she spoke; rather, her endeavours became almost feverish, and she spun about the workroom like a little hurricane, delving and probing and prying into everything. ‘There can be little doubt that they are all vanished by the same means,’ she said. ‘Well — Oriane and Florian both, I should surmise. My father… I cannot say. Perhaps.’

A knot of worry formed in Margot’s stomach, and she bit her lip. Florian was gone, like Oriane, and no one knew where. Oriane had not yet come back. Would Florian, either? Was he in danger? Was Oriane? A sense of helplessness left her frightened and disoriented, and she seized upon Sylvaine’s furious activity as a welcome distraction. ‘What is it that you’re searching for?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sylvaine in frustration. ‘My father stopped working in here years ago, so what has he been doing with his time ever since? I strongly suspect that there is somewhere else he goes. I know that he has had some other project in hand, for he has hinted at it before, but he has never consented to tell me anything about it.’

‘A secret room?’ Margot guessed. ‘You think he might have a hidden workroom somewhere hereabouts?’

Sylvaine suddenly stopped, her shoulders sagging. ‘It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Where could such a room possibly be hidden? This room we are in fills all the space we have from wall to wall, and the rest above and below is equally well accounted for.’

‘Are you certain? Those windows are confusing. We could be several feet from the street and never know it.’

‘I’ve measured,’ said Sylvaine ruefully. ‘It was one of my first ideas, and I measured very carefully. There is nowhere in this house that might admit of a hidden space.’

‘Right,’ said Margot. ‘So there isn’t a secret room here. What about at home?’

‘Father never worked at home, nor would ever bring any of our creations there either. Even so, I have performed the same search, and found nothing.’

Margot went to the window that overlooked the ancient arbour, and stood a moment admiring the trees all silvered with moonlight. ‘Are these visions only?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Or may one step through?’ Not that doing so would be wise, were it possible, for they looked down upon the arbour from some vantage point high above; the ground must be some considerable distance below them.

‘Visions,’ said Sylvaine absently. ‘They are only windows, not doors…’ Her words trailed off; she bent over one of the work-benches, the one farthest from Margot, intent upon something that lay upon it. ‘Now, how odd? I did not know that my father ever painted.’

Margot went to look. A trio of miniature paintings lay atop the smooth wooden planks, each rendered in breath-taking detail. One depicted the emporium itself: the shop floor with its shelves of inviting wares, and the counter behind which Pharamond so often stood. The second showed a room at Landricourt with which Margot was very familiar: the ruined ballroom, holes in its ceiling and roses thick upon its walls.

The third was by far the strangest. It was a large, domed chamber with many sides, windowless, and empty except for an unusually tall clock which stood in the centre. The clock was ornate, built from a reddish wood polished to a mirror-shine and elaborately carved. It had one great, pale face at its top, as was natural, but it also had many more; they were crowded together up and down the body of the clock, all different sizes, and all displaying different times. Margot thought that there was a mournful air about the painting, as though the clock were not quite happy about something.

‘Oh!’ said she. ‘I have seen something like these, before,’ and she dipped her hand into the left pocket of her skirt. But the book, which she had so carefully deposited in there, was not to be found; nor was it in her right skirt pocket, nor secreted anywhere else about herself that she might have decided to store it. She wondered uneasily how she had lost it. ‘I did have a book,’ she told Sylvaine, ‘full of paintings like these, and made, Florian said, by your father. He tried to send it to Oriane.’

Sylvaine looked as though she did not know what to make of Margot’s news, or the three paintings either. ‘Well,’ she said at last, and straightened her spine. ‘Since this appears to be the only example of my father’s work I have come across in some time, I believe we should consider them important, and take them with us.’ She took out her own pocket-book and tucked the paintings in between their pages, handling them very carefully indeed.

Then she paused a moment in thought, and said: ‘My father sent Florian into Landricourt, you know.’

‘It was mentioned,’ said Margot.

‘To search for… something. I heard him.’

‘Florian did not appear to know what he was meant to look for.’

‘I think either my father did not know himself, or he did not wish to prejudice Florian’s mind in any particular direction. What has ever puzzled me since, though, is: why? Why would not my father go himself, if he wanted something from Landricourt? He is ever welcome there. He and Madame Brionnet have been friends for ever, she would not send him away. And he is friendly with all the winemakers. Indeed, for many years he and I were always going there, and poking into every corner of the place just as we liked. Why did he send Florian?’

Margot, much struck, bethought herself of another idea. ‘And how came it to be that Florian vanished, so soon afterwards?’

She and Sylvaine looked long at one another, and Margot read the same uneasiness in Sylvaine’s face as she felt herself. ‘Your father would not…’ she began, but was unable to finish.

Sylvaine spoke decisively. ‘Deliberately send Florian into danger? Gracious, no! We rely upon that young man for a great many things, and father always said he knew of few so trustworthy, or so dependable. No, if he sent Florian to Landricourt it was because he knew that Florian, of all people, would get the job done. But what was the job?’

‘And where has it taken him?’ Margot added.

Sylvaine twitched the folds of the moth-wing coat more tightly around herself, and visibly squared herself up to face the inevitable conclusion; one which Margot herself was rapidly reaching. ‘It does seem rather like venturing into the eye of the storm,’ she said, ‘but of course we must go back to the house.’

‘I will probably sing again,’ Margot warned.

‘I imagine we will go singing all the way, and make fine fools of ourselves. But if there is a reason for everything — and my father has often said so — then there is a reason for your songs, too, and we could do worse than to find out what it is.’

Margot checked that the ribbon was secure around her wrist. Its presence there felt warm and bright and comforting, and she had a sense that she would be unwise to take it off — or to lose it, like she had somehow lost the book. ‘To Landricourt,’ she said, and tried to speak with confidence.

‘To Landricourt,’ echoed Sylvaine, and led the way downstairs.