2

Outside, the Gloaming reigned still in a state of high glee. The sky was indigo, the clouds were silver, and everywhere was mist and starlight. Margot felt the pulse of magic as soon as her bare feet touched the road: a strong current streaming over the vale, and coming from Landricourt.

There had always been an atmosphere of possibility, of expectation, about the Gloaming: plants stretched out their leaves, lifted their flower-heads to the skies, and grew with frenetic energy; the winds turned cool and warm by turns, snatches of lost melodies swept along with them; it rained, sometimes, out of clear, dark skies, a display presided over by the bright moon and the muted sun all at once. Things were different, when the Gloaming came in.

But this was different again. Margot scarcely recognised her own town, for all seemed altered under this intense twilight. It was as though all the magic of Argantel, lost or perhaps asleep, came trickling back when the Gloaming came in — or came sweeping through the vale with a roar, as it had today. The effects — subtle before, and so regular, so ordinary, as to escape particular notice — could not now be ignored.

Margot linked arms with Sylvaine, and they walked, two abreast, back along the Waldewiese and out the western gate. Some way into the vale beyond, Sylvaine paused, and discarded her shoes and stockings. ‘That’s better,’ she muttered, bare skin to the road, and the two women permitted the Gloaming, in all its mischief, to sweep them away.

 

Ask the wind, sang Margot. Ask the rain, ask the night,

Why the mist comes down in the deep twilight,

Why the starlight gleams and the river flows,

Oh! Ask the skies, ask the waking rose.

 

Ask the wind! sang Sylvaine. Ask the moon, ask the sun,

Why the Gloaming comes ere night’s begun,

Why the mirrors drift, why the clock-tower cries,

Ask the wind what he knows of the star-drowned skies.

 

Sylvaine went on, but Margot ceased to hear the words, for something curious was happening. There had been but little breeze, when first they had stepped into the street outside of the Chanteraine Emporium. But as they forged onward, growing ever nearer to Landricourt, the wind picked up, and was by now become a powerful force against which Margot and Sylvaine were forced to struggle in order to proceed. And though Sylvaine sang grimly on, unfazed, Margot was distracted, for the wind swept billows of pale, glittering mist before it, and it appeared to her magic-drunk mind that there were faces in it.

There were faces in it; she did not imagine it. Or more rightly, there was the same face everywhere she looked: a thin, whitish face, with great, silvery eyes and a mane of starlight for hair. The mouth moved, but if words came forth, Margot heard them not.

This went on for some minutes, and Margot felt that her regard was returned: that if she saw the face, the face also saw her. It was fascinated with her, indeed, and with Sylvaine, for those eyes scrutinised them both as it spun about, dervish-like. They were but minutes from Landricourt, and drawn within clear sight of the rambling, beshadowed house, when the dervish calmed, the hurricane of faces resolved into one, solid visage, and suddenly became a man.

‘You called me,’ he said.

Margot surveyed him in astonishment — or, there was no real surprise; only the feeling that she ought to be astonished, and might have been were her blood not fizzing with magic, and the Gloaming all around. As it was, she took in the sight of this abruptly-manifested being with a glad interest. He was tall and waifish, and had an appearance of youth about him. His cheeks were hollow with gauntness, but he possessed an air of energy in spite of this apparent frailty. His hair, mist and starshine, fell in long, long lengths, and it might have touched the floor were it not drifting ceaselessly about, tossed by its own winds. He wore garments spun from the same silver-touched clouds that filled the Gloaming skies, and could easily have melded into them without trace if he so chose.

He returned the dual regard of Margot and Sylvaine with bright curiosity, and when neither of them spoke he said again: ‘You called me. It was you, was it not?’

‘I believe,’ said Sylvaine around a dry throat, her voice a little hoarse, ‘that we expressed an interest in asking things of the wind.’

‘Why, so we did,’ said Margot in wonder. ‘And here he is! Shall we be visited by the rain and the Night, next, do you think?’

‘Or the Sun and moon?’ said Sylvaine faintly. ‘The skies and the rose…’

‘I am Mistral,’ said the wind.

‘That makes sense,’ said Sylvaine.

He smiled. ‘I do not think the rain or the Night will answer, nor the Sun or moon, for they are outside the borders of this land of yours, and beyond the reach of your song. But the rose! She, perhaps, we may encounter.’

Margot wondered how it was that the wind had troubled himself to come down upon request, and stand patiently by, awaiting their questions (if they could muster themselves enough to make any of him). But it occurred to her that he was as entranced by them as they were by him, and overflowing with curiosity. He looked about at the darkened, star-drenched meadows, the dusty dirt-road upon which he stood, the clouds overhead and the looming presence of Landricourt behind, and said: ‘It is not so very bad, is it? Quite drained, they did say, and a misery to visit. But I am pleasantly surprised.’

‘It is not usually like this,’ Margot felt it necessary to explain. ‘These are the Gloaming hours, and much more potently so than is usually the case.’

‘I see,’ said Mistral, and it seemed to Margot that he really did see, far more distinctly than she could herself.

‘I have a question,’ said Sylvaine.

Mistral tilted his head, and fixed all the energy of his attention upon her.

‘Why does the mist come down in the deep twilight?’

‘And for that matter,’ added Margot, ‘why does the Gloaming come, and swallow up the afternoon?’

‘I do not know,’ said Mistral with a smile.

Sylvaine was disappointed. ‘But the song said to ask you!’

‘I did not make the song,’ Mistral reminded her gently.

‘Neither did we, exactly.’

‘Your questions are perhaps too literal,’ Mistral suggested. ‘Or too exact. Try another.’

‘What do you know of Argantel?’ Margot said.

Mistral gazed at her. ‘I know that it was once another place,’ he said softly. ‘They called it Arganthael, and it was a place of great wonder. Laendricourt stood at its centre, and from within those walls issued forth articles of irreplaceable value to the world.’

‘Like the moth-wing coat,’ said Margot, with a sudden flash of understanding.

Mistral looked long at the coat Sylvaine wore, as though he had only just taken particular note of it. ‘Yes.’

‘And?’ prompted Sylvaine. ‘What became of it?’

‘Of Arganthael? It was broken.’

He did not seem disposed to say more. ‘Broken?’ repeated Margot. ‘How?’

‘Sundered into two, and none of the mirrors have ever been right again since.’

This could not be made sense of, no matter how Margot tried. ‘What have mirrors got to do with anything?’

‘We sang about mirrors,’ Sylvaine reminded Margot. ‘We said that they drift.’

‘Oh, they do!’ Mistral supplied, with a smile of childlike delight. ‘It is quite the puzzle, for they are never where they are supposed to be.’

Sylvaine folded her arms, and looked hard at Mistral. ‘Perhaps we could talk to the rose? She might make better sense.’

‘Oh, I doubt it.’

‘That we could talk to her, or that she might make better sense?’

‘The second of those.’ Mistral smiled. ‘Words are not to be faulted, if their import should fail to be understood.’

Sylvaine visibly gave up. ‘I am going to find my father,’ she announced, and set off again towards Landricourt.

‘Thank you,’ Margot said to Mistral, in some little haste. ‘I am sorry that we are unable to understand the answers you’ve been so kind as to give us.’

‘You will soon,’ said Mistral, with a serene confidence which silenced Margot.

She hesitated, doubting, and then set off after Sylvaine, who strode ahead with her silver-stitched coat flapping behind her.

Margot soon caught up, and they went into Landricourt together. Shadows raced up the great hall’s walls as they threw open the doors, letting the starlight in; and it flowed in all in a rush, carpeting the floor with the semblance of thick frost. It covered Margot’s feet, too, though it did not chill her. It felt warm, if anything, and tickled her feet with a faint hum of energy. There was mist everywhere, and someone was singing below.

‘Who can that be?’ said Margot. By habit, her mind had supplied the name of Adelaide, but it could not be her. She had departed the house at the onset of the Gloaming, with all the rest of the winemakers. Margot had been the last to leave, excepting only Maewen, who never sang.

‘Not my father,’ said Sylvaine with a twitch of her lips, and it certainly was not he, for the voice was female. But she walked nonetheless in the general direction of the song, intrigued.

‘It is coming from the cellars,’ said Margot, and thither they went, stealing softly down cold stone stairs into the deeper darkness below. Much was changed along the way. The roses were always abundant under the Gloaming, and it was not much to Margot’s surprise to see that they were growing faster and more thickly than ever. They had taken over the doorways and the floors, and seemed intent upon claiming the stairs, too, and venturing deeper than they had ever done before. She was more surprised to see that they had given up their ethereal colour, and blazed forth instead in a host of different hues.

The work of Rozebaiel, Margot realised; but what did it mean?

It was Rozebaiel who sang. She was in the largest of the winemakers’ storerooms, humming her lilting, wordless ditties to herself in high enjoyment. The chamber was devoted to the products of last season’s labours, wine just a year old, and ready for drinking. Much of it had already been taken away and sold, but many jars and bottles were left. Rozebaiel had opened them all and was dancing between them; with flicks of her thin fingers and puffs of her own breath, she sent flurries of rose-petals streaming into the top of each bottle and jar, whereupon they promptly dissipated. The wine, as always, was silver-pale, but the petals were crimson and indigo and amber and gold, vibrant with life and magic. The wine looked wan in comparison, and pallid, but flushes of strong colour shot through the liquid with each flicker of Rozebaiel’s fingers, until the bottles were filled with wines as blood-red or amber-gold as the flowers she commanded.

‘What are you doing to the wine?’ blurted Margot, and Rozebaiel’s singing abruptly stopped.

‘I am mending it,’ she said, without looking up, or pausing in her work. ‘Don’t you see how much better it is? Though it still misses something.’ She completed her transformation of the last few jars, and then stood back to survey them, a critical frown creasing her flower-face.

‘Much better,’ came Mistral’s voice, making Margot jump, for she had not realised he had followed them. ‘But the final touch lies beyond your power, Rose. Shall I assist you?’

Rozebaiel greeted Mistral’s entrance with overpowering eagerness, and all but fell upon him in her joy. ‘I knew you would come!’ she cried. ‘I knew you would not leave me here alone!’

‘No, no, I never would,’ said Mistral gently, bearing all the ferocity of her love with gentle patience. ‘I am late, I fear, for I had to await an opportunity; the mirrors do not lightly bend to my will, any more. But I am come, little Rose. Shall we finish your work? Then perhaps we may both go home.’

‘Home,’ repeated Rozebaiel. ‘It is so very dull here, my Mistral! Everything sleeps! They are all excessively stupid, and it is tiring labour to wake them up again.’

‘But you have done fine work,’ said he soothingly. ‘I admired it when I came down. How alive everything looks!’

‘It is not that I mind, exactly,’ Rozebaiel said — perhaps less than truthfully, considering the extent of her indignation before. ‘It is wearying for them to keep up the proper raiment, when there is hardly a scrap of magic to be had anywhere. And they are not so very dull in that whitish garb, are they? There is even something likeable about it, and perhaps I shall keep a few, when I go home. But so weak and watery! And this wine, the same! Intolerable.’

Mistral dipped the tip of one long, thin finger into the neck of the nearest bottle. A soft wind blew up, making a flurry of Rozebaiel’s fallen rose-petals underfoot. When he withdrew his hand, the wine in the bottle had taken up a similar flow and swirled in lazy circles, shot through with the same starry mists that pervaded the rest of Argantel.

‘I miss Walkelin’s assistance,’ admitted Mistral, examining the breath-taking effect he had just created with a dissatisfied air. ‘He had always the knack for making a neater weave. But it will suffice, will it not?’

‘It is perfect,’ breathed Rozebaiel, and she clapped her hands with childish enthusiasm. ‘Now do the rest!’

Mistral complied, moving between the bottles one by one. Margot, meanwhile, watched this undertaking in silent awe and total incomprehension, Sylvaine as silent a presence by her side. At length, all the bottles and jars of wine that were in the storeroom were winds-wafted and starry and drenched in colour, and the sight so much dazzled Margot’s eyes that they began to water.

‘Done!’ declared Rozebaiel, with a final, decisive clap of her hands that seemed to proclaim the business quite finished. She turned upon Mistral then, and said, with a mixture of authoritativeness and beseeching charm, ‘And now home, Mistral, please!’

Mistral looked uncomfortable. ‘Would that I could whisk us both away, little Rose, and without further ado! But the winds have forgotten the way, or perhaps it is closed against us. We must find the mirror through which we came, and go back that way.’

‘Oh, the mirror!’ said Rozebaiel in disgust. ‘Wretched, tricksy objects! It is somewhere here about, I am sure! Sidling from wall to wall, pretending to be this, or that, and laughing at us all the while.’

‘It is somewhere here about, indeed,’ echoed Mistral, letting the rest of Rozebaiel’s speech pass. His eye alighted upon Margot and Sylvaine, and he developed an expression of faint surprise, as though he had forgotten they were there. ‘Do you chance to have seen a mirror somewhere about?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ said Sylvaine.

‘It would not, in all probability, look much like a mirror,’ he offered. ‘At least, not all the time. It might happen to resemble a door, say, or a pool of water, or a window—’

‘I saw one turn itself into a vase, once,’ offered Rozebaiel. ‘A horrid glass vase, all splotched about with the most foolish colours, and sadly ugly besides! And it was no use protesting that it would never dream of being so low an object as a mere a vase, for I saw it.’

Mistral smiled apologetically. ‘It might also have looked like a vase,’ he said to Margot and Sylvaine. He looked upon them with hope. ‘You have not happened to see it, have you?’

‘Doors we have seen aplenty,’ said Margot. ‘And a few windows, though whether any of those were mirrors I cannot say. How is it possible to tell?’

‘Pools of water and vases?’ said Sylvaine. ‘No! We have seen none of those. But it might also choose to be a chair, I suppose, or a picture-frame, or a bottle?’

‘A bottle!’ echoed Rozebaiel, and stared at the many arrayed before her in high suspicion. ‘Are you here, Mirror, you abominable thing?’

‘Perhaps it were best not to insult it, if you wish for a favourable response,’ suggested Mistral in his gentle way.

Rozebaiel merely said: ‘It is quite deserved.’ She fell into thought, or perhaps daydreaming, Margot could not tell which. Drifting vaguely among the bottles, she trailed her fingers through the roiling crimson liquid of the nearest one and then licked them clean of wine, humming something. Her face changed, and she was silent for a moment before saying, ‘Oh, you found my ribbon?’ Her bright gaze swept up and down Margot’s frame until she spotted the article in question, still tied around Margot’s wrist. ‘Yes, there it is. I had not even noticed it was gone.’ She said this placidly, and made no move to reclaim her property.

‘How did you know she had got it?’ said Sylvaine, for she, too, had noticed that Rozebaiel’s information had apparently not come from her having noticed Margot wearing it.

But Margot knew. The look on her face had reminded her of someone: of Florian, when he had drunk a sip of Pharamond’s goldish elixir — the one made from the rosewater and the wine out of Landricourt, and who knew what else besides. Margot had not before been able to account for the odd, distant look on Florian’s face afterwards, as though he had briefly wandered very far from her. But now she knew: he had seen something, and so had Rozebaiel. Something, apparently, that had happened; something true.

Pharamond had tried to send Oriane a potion that would show her truths, and he had tried to send her a book of paintings of Landricourt as well. Had he known that she would disappear? Had he been trying to prepare her, warn her, equip her for whatever lay ahead?

He might have. He must have been drinking his own elixirs, too; did they offer visions of future truths, as well as past ones?

‘What is the wine?’ she said to Rozebaiel. ‘Why have we always made it here?’

Rozebaiel did not appear to hear Margot. She had drunk a little more of the stuff, and her eyes had gone vacant again.

But Mistral said, ‘It knows.’

‘Knows what?’ Margot prompted, when he did not elaborate.

‘Things that have come to pass, and that are presently true, and that will come to pass in the future. It is a knowledge it will share, sometimes.’

‘It has never done so before.’ Margot felt a little disgruntled, for had she not laboured over the rose-wine for season after season, year upon year? Had she not regularly drunk of the fruits of that work, and savoured it, and appreciated it? It had never shared its truths with her.

‘It would not,’ mused Mistral, gazing sightlessly into the depths of one of the jars. ‘It is concentrated magic of the purest kind, and you are on the wrong side of the Sundering. Lost all its potency, had it not? A mere flourish of magic at the Gloaming hour can offer little of lasting benefit.’

Margot withdrew Pharamond’s little glass bottle from her skirt, and held it up to examine it. It was still nearly full of its goldish potion. ‘This is the best your father could manage, I suppose, and not a bad effort either,’ she said to Sylvaine, who heard none of this, for she had followed Rozebaiel’s example and was sampling the wine. ‘Unless it is your work?’

Sylvaine did not answer. She was not really in the room anymore, at that moment.

Margot poured half of the contents of the bottle out onto the floor, and then filled it up from a great jar that stood at her elbow. This one’s complement of wind-tossed wine was amber-coloured, and Margot remembered all at once something that Rozebaiel had said a few days before: You make the amberwyne here?

‘Amberwyne,’ she mused, swirling the stuff around in the bottle. The two liquids merged into a pleasing orangey-gold concoction, laced with Mistral’s wafts of mist and wind, and Margot gladly took a drink.

It was some time before Margot’s wandering mind returned into the cellar-room.

 

The visions came at once, and so thickly and quickly that Margot struggled to keep up with the frantic flow of them. She saw some things she had seen before: herself picking up Rozebaiel’s discarded ribbon, Adelaide singing, and Florian walking to Landricourt with his odd neckcloth. She saw Maewen Brionnet bending over a vat of half-brewed wine, her aged face creased with sadness, and Pharamond Chanteraine in the workroom Sylvaine had called her own, a paintbrush in his hand, applying the finishing touches to a miniature depiction of a tall clock with too many faces. He, too, looked consumed by sorrow; tears fell from his cheeks and mingled with the paint.

She saw something else, then, that set her heart to hammering in her chest, and filled her with a degree of wonder, hope and rage so powerful she hardly knew how to contain them. Her mind soared farther back, much farther, until she saw a tall, spare man, dark-haired and neatly dressed, whose face she had almost forgotten, for she had not set eyes upon it for nearly thirty years. Her father, who had died. But he had not died, she now saw, for there he was in the ballroom of Landricourt, pulling aside a curtain of rose-leaves to reveal a mirror which glowed and glittered in blatant invitation. He touched the cool glass and vanished, and the rose-leaves settled back over a mirror that was no longer there either.

Finally, she saw Pharamond again, but he was younger — her father’s age. He had a child in his arms, a little girl, and though her hair was not yet the colour of violets and heather, Margot knew the child to be Sylvaine. He was talking to her, his face worn with care, and she clung to him as though frightened.

Then Margot was back in the cellar-room with Mistral and Rozebaiel and Sylvaine, shaking with shock.

‘Pharamond,’ she said, when she had caught her breath, ‘is not of Argantel, is he? What is on the other side of the Sundering?’ She looked rather fiercely at Mistral, who smiled gently.

‘Why, Arganthael, and Laendricourt,’ he said.

‘What are we, some pale, miserable reflection of that place? How mortifying. And Pharamond came from there! I saw him. He wore magic like a cloak. How he has survived in this sad, magicless vale, I cannot imagine. And my father—’ Margot’s lips trembled upon these words —‘My father is gone there, and not dead at all, and what he has contrived to do in a place of pure, condensed magic I do not know either.’

Mistral merely nodded. ‘No one ever makes the crossing, but that somebody goes the other way. Some matter of balance, I surmise.’

‘So my father went there, and Pharamond was dragged into here, and neither has ever been able to go back the other way.’ Margot spoke with a bitterness which shocked her, and she realised there were tears on her cheeks. Her poor mother! They said it was the consumption which took her away, but she had thought herself abandoned, of course, and died of grief and shame.

Sylvaine came near, and Margot instantly said: ‘You are not of Argantel either, Sylvaine.’

‘Oh, I know,’ came the answer, and Sylvaine looked as white and shocked as Margot felt.

‘My father is alive,’ said Margot.

Sylvaine said, ‘My mother is a clock.’

‘She… she is what?’

‘A clock,’ repeated Sylvaine, with every appearance of calm, but her hands trembled, and she breathed too quick.

‘The one with too many faces.’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know! I only saw that she was lost in it — trapped, I think — my poor father! He knew it, and could not get her out.’

‘And then you were both stranded here, and my father (and somebody else, I suppose!) lost over there, and what a sorry mess! Your mother must be got out of the clock.’

‘And Oriane and Florian and your father got back from Arganthael.’

‘And your father too?’

‘Perhaps.’ Sylvaine bit her lip. ‘I did not see him, I do not know if he is there.’

‘I saw him,’ Margot replied, and described her visions to Sylvaine.

‘Both past glimpses. Nothing of the future, or the present.’

‘I shall take the bottle.’ Margot wiped the glass dry, and tucked it safe away.

She looked up to find Rozebaiel and Mistral observing her with twin expressions of bright curiosity. ‘You are going into Arganthael?’ said Rozebaiel.

‘If we can find the way,’ said Margot, crestfallen when she recalled that even these creatures of magic had not been able to spirit themselves home. And if we can find the way back again afterwards, she added to herself, for had not her father been stranded in Arganthael for decades? It did not matter. The attempt had to be made.

‘The mirror is somewhere hereabout,’ said Rozebaiel. ‘If it has carried off three poor wretches in three days, then it will carry us, too! You must keep the ribbon,’ she said to Margot, quite as though the ribbon and the mirror were closely related in some obvious fashion.

‘And the other one has the coat,’ Mistral said with approval.

‘What of that?’ said Sylvaine, glancing down at her splendid garment in confusion.

‘It shows the way,’ said Mistral. ‘You would not wish to end up in quite a different Otherwhere, would you?’

‘There are more?’

Mistral smiled. ‘Many more. Your father knows a great deal about it, you may find. But the coat knows its way home, and shall carry you safely there.’

‘In that case, my own boots may carry me back here again.’ Sylvaine admired these articles, though being much scuffed and worn, and their chestnut-leather colour very faded, they did not especially deserve this tribute.

‘That mirror!’ cried Rozebaiel all at once, and indicated, with indignantly pointing finger, a spot on the rough-stone wall which was, as far as Margot could see, quite bare of interest. ‘There it was! I saw it, just now! Mistral! It glittered at me in a detestably winking fashion, and then off it wriggled, and now it is gone again!’ Incensed, Rozebaiel stamped her silk-shod foot, and began to mutter a string of invective under her breath. Then she darted for the door, where a few, bold tendrils thick with rose-leaves were creeping around the frame, and took hold of them with both hands. ‘The one thing my poor, starved flowers have done well in this miserable place is grow. You have taken it over entirely, my beauties, have you not, and made it all your own? You shall find the mirror for me!’ There came a rustling in response, beginning as a whisper and growing to a deep, thrumming hum as the roses came awake all across Landricourt. Margot felt the floor shiver beneath her feet. ‘Find it and hold it still!’ Rozebaiel instructed. ‘And I shall come for it!’

Margot jumped as vine-stalks shot across the walls, putting forth leaves and crimson flowers at an astonishing rate. Within a minute or two, all the walls of the shadowy storeroom were covered over with them, and the ceiling too. When she walked out into the cellar halls, and looked into room after room, she saw the same thing happening everywhere.

It was not long before Rozebaiel gave a crow of triumph, and cried exultingly, ‘They have got it! It is in a big, square room with holes in the ceiling.’

‘The ballroom,’ said Margot and Sylvaine together. Margot picked up her skirts and ran, Sylvaine just behind her; Rozebaiel and Mistral hurried in their wake.

The ballroom was in chaos. The roses there were in a high passion of some kind, and twisted and writhed about with a furious energy. Margot felt intimidated by them, for each bristled with thorns grown far too long. Not a bit could be seen of walls or ceiling and very little of the floor, for the flowers had taken full possession of the room. But Rozebaiel marched heedless into the middle of the madness, making her way towards what appeared to be the centre of the storm: a knot of fiercely tangled vines near the top of the wall, where some indignant thing thrashed, and blazed with cold light.

Margot and Sylvaine picked their way more carefully through the litter of thorns, and Mistral merely floated over them.

‘Bring it farther down,’ ordered Rozebaiel, for the mirror had been lurking very high upon the wall, and was out of reach. With a rustle of leaves it was duly lowered, protesting all the while, and finally fell into a listless sulk at the bottom, its light dimming.

‘Excellent,’ Rozebaiel purred. ‘I could not be more pleased with you, dears.’

The roses preened under this praise, and fluffed up their petals with pride.

‘You will let me through,’ she told the mirror sternly. ‘And no trickery!’ Without more ado, Rozebaiel laid her hand to the glass and was gone in a flurry of starlight. Only a lingering mist marked where she had stood moments before, and this soon dissipated.

Margot waited, hoping that Oriane might at any moment appear in Rozebaiel’s place. But nothing happened. Had Rozebaiel’s stern prohibition against trickery cowed the mirror so much that it had not ventured upon its usual antic? Or had the pattern broken into chaos, like everything else seemed to be doing?

‘I would not delay,’ warned Mistral. ‘The flowers will not long be able to hold it, without little Rose. Not in this place.’

‘If we go through, will someone from the other side end up in Argantel?’ said Margot.

Mistral said, ‘Perhaps.’

‘If they do, the effect will be reversed when we come back, no?’ said Sylvaine.

Margot shook her head. ‘If that’s the case, where is Oriane? Should not the return of Rozebaiel have sent her back to us?’

Sylvaine’s eyes widened. ‘Oh! What if Oriane has been sent into some different Otherwhere, instead?’

‘Make up your minds, and quickly!’ snapped Mistral. ‘There is not much time.’

Margot and Sylvaine exchanged a look, and Margot saw Sylvaine swallow. She quailed a little herself, somewhere inside, though this feeling she suppressed. ‘We must make the attempt anyway,’ she said. ‘There is no other choice, for what else can we do? Nothing has come of sitting here and waiting.’ She strode up to the mirror. Giving herself no time to reflect and doubt and lose her nerve, she set her hand to the glass at once — the hand which wore the ribbon that had been woven in Arganthael.

There was a lurching sensation, and the feeling of plunging face-first into cool water.

And then she was in a cellar again, a darker one than before, and with no roses or jars or anything in it at all.

There was only Pharamond Chanteraine, who sat slumped against the wall near the firmly closed door, looking ragged and exhausted and desperately unhappy. He looked at Margot with blank surprise and said: ‘A woman like a rose came through a moment ago.’

‘Rozebaiel,’ said Margot.

‘She turned into a shower of rose-leaves, and was gone.’

‘I can well imagine.’ Margot looked around at the bleak chamber, and again took in Pharamond’s hopeless posture upon the floor. ‘How are you, Seigneur?’ She noticed, then, that he wore the odd mist-wrought trinket around his neck.

He smiled without joy. ‘Defeated, for the present, and I have no glad tidings for you. Hello, my dear.’ His gaze shifted away from Margot; Sylvaine had come in behind.

‘Father!’ said Sylvaine, and went to him at once. ‘What are you doing here? Are you all right?’

Pharamond sighed. ‘I found the mirror,’ he said bleakly. ‘At long last! But I came out in here, and cannot leave, and I do not know if I am even got to where I wanted to be.’

‘Arganthael?’ said Sylvaine, and won for herself a raised-eyebrow look of query and surprise.

‘I will ask you how you came to learn that name,’ said Pharamond. ‘Later.’

A soft wind blew through the room, and mist flew everywhere: Mistral had arrived. ‘Ah! Perfect,’ said he, smiling broadly, and vanished in another puff of wind.

Pharamond’s face brightened with hope and delight upon Mistral’s appearance, and fell again when he was gone. ‘Elements,’ he said disgustedly. ‘Not a scrap of sense between them.’

‘I suppose he did not realise you were stuck, father,’ said Sylvaine. ‘And why are you, in fact?’

Perhaps she expected a tale of some magical obstacle or other, some mirror required, or some enchantment necessary; Margot certainly did. But Pharamond only said: ‘The door is locked,’ and fell to laughing in a hysterical way. ‘Thirty years, and I am defeated by a locked door! I have tried every means to open it, and I cannot.’

‘Father, you have not been locked in here all day?’

‘All day and all night. We are in some distant storeroom in the depths of Laendricourt, I suppose, and no one else is ever likely to come into it. There is nothing here.’

‘The mirror—’ began Sylvaine, but upon turning to look she saw that it was gone again, and sighed. ‘I begin to feel as Rozebaiel does, and quite detest those wretched objects.’

‘I wish you had neither of you come,’ said Pharamond. ‘You came in search of me, and Florian and Oriane? I am afraid you have only landed yourselves in insuperable difficulties, as I have.’

‘Brace up, father,’ said Sylvaine stoutly. ‘I am sure we will contrive something—’

The door rattled as she spoke, so unexpectedly that everybody jumped. Then came the unmistakeable clatter of a metal key fitting into a metal lock, and turning, with a groan of protest.

Then the door swung open, and Florian appeared.

‘Oh!’ he said, and stopped a moment upon the threshold. ‘Well, how fortunate. I knew we should find you at last. But what in the world are you all doing in here?’

He turned his sunniest smile upon Margot, who felt that she had never been so glad to see him before, and only refrained from falling upon him in relief due to the presence of so many others. For she could see that someone else was coming in behind Florian, a woman in an ivory dress and with amber-coloured hair.

‘We were worried,’ she said to Florian, who looked unreasonably gratified by the information.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had not meant to disappear, you must know.’

‘The mirrors!’ said Margot disgustedly.

Florian grimaced. ‘Bothersome things.’

The unfamiliar woman smiled upon them and said: ‘Have we found your friends, then, dove? I am so glad! Only I do not know what possessed them to hide themselves away in here.’

‘Nynevarre,’ said Pharamond in a half-broken voice.

Her head whipped around, and she studied the prone figure upon the floor in stunned silence. ‘Pharamond?’ she finally gasped, then flew instantly from joy to rage. ‘Where have you been?’

Margot, however, was no longer listening, for behind Nynevarre came another person: a tall, spare, silver-haired gentleman in clothes that dazzled her eyes, his demeanour rather forbidding. She did not immediately recognise him either, but in half a moment she saw the traces in his face of another, blessedly familiar and beloved one; a face she had never thought to see again.

‘Father,’ she said, and the word emerged as a croak.

Ghislain De Courcey looked equally thunderstruck, and it took him some moments longer to recognise in the adult woman before him the little girl he had involuntarily left, so many years ago. But he saw it, and said her name, and then Margot did hurl herself upon him, heedless of her audience, and wept all over his coat.

‘I do hate to intrude upon all these joyful reunions,’ came Florian’s voice a little while later. ‘But there is some trouble afoot — just a trifle, nothing more!’

‘What’s the trouble?’ said Sylvaine, though without pausing in her unfriendly surveillance of Nynevarre.

‘Oh, well,’ said Florian apologetically. ‘It’s only that time is going speedily awry, and the magic is got all out of hand, and half of us are out of our minds over it. And I think, perhaps, that Oriane is in some little danger.’