Chapter Seven

After the disaster with the Recorder, the child was abruptly moved again, this time to the palace with its sun-filled courtyard in Foulkrin, where the Threadanchor lived with her two younger children and a spectacular array of kindred, retainers, and servants. The red wooden horse, whom the Empress did not know was named Stomps-on-Beavers, did not make this trip with the child, though the enormous atlas with its glowing illuminations did.

The Empress-Elect found her new life as bewildering as the old. When not on their best first-city-visiting behavior, Astel and Estel were very loud and very interested in everything, and the Threadanchor was very loud and very interested in her and very matter-of-fact about the business of mothering. (Their father, the Threadanchor's second husband, was rarely in Foulkrin, but spent most of his time searching for dusty facts in dustier books in the furthest corners of the empire.) She had plates of food made up for the Empress-Elect and watched while she ate them, and if the Empress-Elect did not eat them, the Threadanchor wanted to know if she was sick.

She did not try to discuss the political situation of Foulkrin with the child but had a cousin take her with the other children to the Estuary, a square lake in the northeast corner of Foulkrin, where citizens swam among water lilies and ducks blazing with green and orange plumage paddled lazily. There were shallow, warmer pools at the edges where babies could learn to float. The Empress-Elect was not a baby, but she had never been in water deeper than a wooden tub. The cousin held her up in the water while she windmilled her arms. (Astel and Estel did not remember a time when they didn't know how to swim and darted around the stone plinths at the center of the lake, where ancient willows drooped to the water, a curtain of whispering stems hiding their twisting bodies.) After thirty minutes, he took her out of the water. He sat her next to him on the bank and pointed out the ducks and the lilies and the fat muskrat who had commandeered one of the bordering pools for his den, naming each of them sonorously and slowly for her in the language of Foulkrin.

The Empress-Elect was bewildered to see the sky so often, to feel the warmth of the sun directly on her skin every day, to be surrounded by so much water. In Diagasar, it was a special treat to be taken up to the roof to look at the gardens and the Cornerstone Trees spreading high above, but here she saw trees so often she couldn't even count them. The constant presence of foliage was alarming, but what made her fearful was being always exposed, unprotected. In her city, her mother's city, there were always walls to hide behind and doors to disappear into, always a room just beyond and a passage tucked below. In Foulkrin, buildings stood apart from one another, so boats could pass between on slender canals, and one was never completely sheltered from the exterior by their enormous glass windows (which the residents had an alarming habit of leaving opened and unshuttered, in any case.) The insides of houses were never larger than their outsides, in the city on the water.

She did not talk again for months, by which Foulkrin's Threadanchor was not surprised but also not pleased. Her own children spoke the language of Diagasar, and she had thought they would have taught the Empress-Elect how to get her point across in the tongue of Foulkrin during their many visits to the Golden Stronghold of Warrens. But even if she had been at home, the child couldn't have forced herself to speak.

Estel circumnavigated the difficulty by drawing pictures on the floor and asking the Empress-Elect to point to which one she needed. After a few days of this system she got a notebook of heavy paper from a merchant and made cards that she could use again and again.

The system was not perfect—it took a full week for the Estel and Astel to work out that the Empress-Elect was terrified of the rushing sound the Foulkrin lavatories made when one tugged on the handle to vanish the contents—but it was less distressing by far than trying to catch her face and get her to speak words back to you. The Threadanchor attempted this latter in frustration several times before it became clear that doing so brought the small girl to the point of hysterics.

“I think their Recorder did something to her,” Estel told her mother darkly, but the Threadanchor was not sure this was the only difficulty, remembering what her friend had told her of the child's odd mannerisms and confusion.

The Divining Bowl (Foulkrin's version of the Choosing Clock) had found Estel's older brother to be the Swordkeeper of Foulkrin when he had been twelve and known only as Istel. Four years later, Estel had been chosen as the next Threadanchor within days of her birth. Three years after that, the Bowl had shown murky images of the next child carrying a book while Astel was still jostling his mother's bladder in the womb. Foulkrin had not seen any long, terrifying periods without one of the three positions filled, as Diagasar had, probably because current ruler excepted, it was not unusual for their Threadanchors to have ten or fourteen children. Astel and Estel had dozens of cousins with whom to play and explore the city, who referred to them only by their use-names and not their titles.

It was here, too, that the Empress-Elect acquired a use-name. In the spring after her arrival, when the trees lining the Grand Canal of Foulkrin mirrored themselves in the water and dripped pink and red flowers onto the prows of boats, two gray-cloaked figures appeared in the Wayhouse at the edge of the city. They had not come by boat but by walking the riverbank from Diagasar. The Foulkrin Command (led by Istel as Swordkeeper, which was the normal way of things for cities that were not Diagasar and families that were not that of the Empress) brought them to the palace of the Threadanchor, where they requested to see the Empress-Elect.

While the child had started to talk again—a word here and there, and still she seemed terrified and overwhelmed by the enormity of the world—she still hid herself whenever she could, in closets, in stairwells, occasionally in unused boats, and once, memorably, in a pie-safe. (She did not eat any pie, but put her elbow in an egg tart.) She was hiding again when the visitors from Diagasar arrived in the palace. It took an hour for the other children to comb likely hiding-spots, and Astel was the one who discovered her in a blanket-chest in his mother's room. Estel brought boiled eggs, and they lured her to the audience hall where the two visitors stood.

The visitors took down their hoods, revealing red hair. It was Hakan and Lufar, who had cared for the Empress-Elect in the garrison and taught her to play hopping games and skip rope. She started to cry. They had each brought a gift for her—Lufar, a chain carved from polished cherrywood, and Hakan, the long-absent red wooden horse, Stomps-On-Beavers. The Empress-Elect clutched the horse and cried harder. They were returning to the woods of silver-walled Sleketh, they told her. It had been so long since they had seen their home that it had become only a dim memory. It took weeks to reach Sleketh by horse, and they were on foot. They would likely not be back for a long time, but they would make a welcome for the Empress-Elect if she ever came there. She cried and dropped both of the toys with a clatter and pressed her face into each of their cloaks.

The son of the Empress had made himself acting City Commander, they told the Threadanchor of Foulkrin stonily, over the child's head. The Threadanchor's face tightened, and she looked at Istel and his second-in-command, another of her cousins.

Lufar and Hakan crouched by the child, whose sobs became caws and then gasps, and waited. She picked up the chain and flapped it in the air, making a satisfying rattling noise. Her gasps stopped and she looked Hakan in the face. The Empress-Elect asked, in a sudden burst of hope, if they would go to Sleketh and bring her father back to the city. Her city. Was he waiting there, in the woods? Had he also wanted to go home?

Hakan, whose face had remained stern and tired while he gave her back the wooden horse, knelt on the stone floor, tears leaking into the creases in his face, his eyes looking more tired yet.

“Oh, you,” he said, pressing his large palms onto her small ones. “Your da loved Diagasar. He is still there, and he will always be there.” He clasped his hands together and bowed his head to her.

The two politely refused to stay for the night in either the Wayhouse or the Threadanchor's guest quarters.

“We have a long way to go,” Lufar said, shrugging her shoulders. When they had been successfully imposed upon to take full packs of dried food and wineskins of cider and lemon-water and finally managed to take their leave, it was discovered that the Empress-Elect had disappeared again.

Astel found her again (he was deadly at hide-and-look, and most of the cousins refused to play with him), this time in the hollow under one of the great beds where one of his uncles slept. He sat cross-legged across from her. She was carefully shaking each section in her new wooden chain against the next, one after another.

He waited until she had made a full revolution around the chain, then asked, “What did that man call you?”

Click, click, clack. The Empress-Elect had brought Stomps-on-Beavers the red horse to her hiding place under the bed as well. She rolled him in front of her and began tapping each link of the wooden chain against one of his ears, testing the noise they made. Clack, clack.

“It sounded like Elabel. That's a good name. It would be better than calling you Empress-Elect all the time.”

The Empress-Elect looked at his hands, uncertain. (Though she had known Astel all her life, his eyes were still too overwhelming to look into.) He was circling his thumbs around each other. Hakan had called her “Oh, you,” in the language of Diagasar. “El, abel.” It was a gentle form of address, suitable only for a small child, and only the garrison and her father had used it for her. Adults used a more grown-up “you,” and the Recorder, Swordkeeper, and Empress each had their own “you” that no one else was allowed to use at all. She did not think she would ever be like her sister or her brother or her mother.

“El, abel,” she said very quietly. She wished Hakan and Lufar would have stayed with her.

“All right, Elabel,” he said. “Do you want an egg?”

 

The threads did not look the same to her in Foulkrin, and they did not feel the same, either, against her hands. They were white and thick and sturdy, more like twine than thread. They moved water when she pulled on them, and a small wave resulted if one in the middle of a canal was pulled to either side. As in Diagasar, other people passed through the threads as though they didn't exist at all.

She tentatively showed a cluster of threads she had found tangled in a willow tree to Estel. The older girl might have thought she was teasing and laughed at her, except that Elabel never, ever teased. So she squinted and tilted her head until she, too, could half-see the glimmer of white filaments gathered in the small hand. The threads became clearer and clearer to her eyes as Elabel delicately moved them around (it bothered her terribly that they were stuck and taut among the branches—they almost seemed like they might snap under her hands), and Estel grew more and more excited as she watched. Once they were unknotted and pulled free of the branches, Elabel showed her how she could make a lily skim across the surface of the water by jostling it with a thread, then—with a sudden surge of bravado—she briefly suspended herself in the air by clinging to two threads, one in each hand. Estel gasped and applauded, then went to get Astel so Elabel could show him, too.

Astel could not see the threads no matter how hard he squinted, but he could see rocks and plants and even the muskrat in its pond move when Elabel plucked her hands in the air at them. (The muskrat was deeply offended, and launched himself into the lake after she tugged on his tail with a loop of a slack thread.) They had seen the Empress do similar small acts of magic during their visits to Diagasar—catching a falling book without using her hands, or opening a door from several feet away—and this was perhaps the reason that they told no one else, not their mother, not Istel, not their cousins or uncles or aunts, about Elabel's gift.

So it was a secret that only the three of them shared: one magician and two sometimes-delighted, sometimes-exasperated spectators. They were always interested in whatever new and unusual thing she worked out how to do when in hiding in a cupboard or a boat (though sometimes her lack of precautions and limited depth perception meant a half-hour of scrambling to clean up the mess afterwards). If she took a cluster of threads together and twisted them a bit, she found she could keep a fig hanging in mid-air; if she twisted them more tightly, she could make the fig disappear entirely from normal sight (to her it look like a glowing, fig-shaped ball) and then reappear with a tug on the threads.

Sometimes things Elabel had just touched moved with the threads as though they were extensions of her. A kite whose leash she held would invariably get caught on some threads high above and hang there, immobilized. When the leash was let go, the kite took several minutes to realize it was a normal bit of paper and wood and flutter away. (This upset Elabel terribly and she refused to play kites at all.)

They found that Elabel could also manage particularly odd things in the absence of the threads.

One day when Astel wanted to play a game with a leather ball and wooden paddles that was very popular among his cousins, she spent a half-hour carefully moving threads out of the garden path they had chosen for this purpose, hooking them behind trees and benches and ornamental shrubs. She was a very clumsy child, and it was somewhat dubious that she could hit a ball smaller than an apple with a big awkward paddle, but Astel and Estel were very patient, and she was determined to give herself at least a chance at playing as easily as they did.

Astel started the game, by serving the light ball in a long, slow arc toward Elabel. She could see it coming, and anxiously flailed the racket up and at it.

The paddle went through the ball, as though it were made of mist or smoke.

Estel, who had let her eyes wander from the ball's trajectory, thought Elabel had simply missed the hit, and started off on a well-practiced recital of reassurance: it's all right, we'll start again, just roll it back here …

But Astel's eyes went very wide and frightened. He grabbed his sister's shoulder as she started forward. Her eyes fell to the object on the ground and they, too, went wide and frightened.

Elabel slowly turned around and went to the edge of the path where the ball had fallen and, ever so reluctantly, picked it up.

It still had something of the idea of a ball without actually being one anymore. There was a general impression of the thing existing, but all its edges were blurry, the color ambiguous (either muddied or shifting—it was hard to look at it too long without feeling sick), the solidity more of an afterthought or a beforethought. It was easier to remember it had been there than to look at it directly.

Elabel tried to give the ball to Astel. The idea-of-a-ball fell through his hand like a stone through water, and he withdrew his arm with a screech and clutched it as though he had been burned.

Elabel did the only thing she could think of and addressed the thing that was now hovering a few inches over the path, making the air hum and shimmer on all sides.

“Be a ball again, please,” she said in a desperate whisper.

A ball was abruptly sitting in the gravel. It was not the brown leather with stitching that Astel had borrowed from his cousin Ygrves, but a red wooden thing four times the diameter, traced with white flowers.

“That's—” Astel said. “Why is it like that?”

“Elabel,” Estel said suddenly. “Put the threads back. Put them back right now.”

Elabel, too distressed to even cry, squinched her eyes shut so tightly they ached and reached for the threads on either side of the path. With a snap-twang that she felt in her skin and sinuses, but which did not reach her ears, they jerked away from where she had tucked them, snapping branches and sending bursts of leaves into the air. One thread hit the edge of a low stone wall and cracked it, sending a spray of gravel across the path. Astel gasped as a rush of air buffeted him into the hedge. Estel had the presence of mind to grab Elabel's hands and open her fingers; the threads stopped yearning toward her and slid back into place, vibrating in a way that made all the plants in the garden tremble.

The children spent an hour picking up the broken wood and sweeping the stones to the side of the path. Any proper outdoor game with more than a handful of their cousins would have produced as much damage, Astel and Estel reassured each other, both quite sure that the uprooting of an enormous rhododendron was not the most frightening thing that had happened in the garden that afternoon.

 

A thing the children were rarely allowed to do, which Elabel liked very much, was visit Istel in his rooms near the outer rampart. (The walls of Foulkrin were low, and as far as Elabel could tell, served mainly to tidy up a thick curtain of threads that encircled the city. Foulkrin had obviously been settled and built after the battles with the thrall-currents had more or less been won and the edges of the Veil had been stabilized: no one had ever had to stand on its ramparts with the Sword in one hand and the Book in the other. Though it did sit in the middle of a wide, marshy lake, so even with low walls, it would have been hard to attack.) His quarter was a very old, very small island tucked in a corner of the city that was still mostly water punctuated by stands of reeds. It possessed a real, dry, cobblestone square with a short street that separated two blocks of houses, whose corbeled upper stories leaned over the pavement. There was no bridge crossing to it, only a dock. (For the semi-aquatic occupants of Foulkrin, this was no great barrier; it only made the town-within-a-town feel special and strange.)

Istel himself reminded her painfully of her father. He was tall (though not as tall as her father had been) and stood in the same way, moving with his sword as though it were a part of his body. His face was lined and often grave. His Command looked at him with the same mixture of respect, good humor, and awe that she had seen in her father's Command when they had looked at him. Often, he did not shave his beard and appeared at the head of his garrison looking fierce and a little wild, as her father had done.

Astel laughed to the point of tears and violent coughing when Elabel told him this. Istel had neat, even dreadlocks that fell to the middle of his back, which he wore pulled back under a gold fillet. The white patches of skin that were normal in the Threadanchor's family—she herself had them in lace-like patterns over her hands—had appeared in the shape of a butterfly over Istel's broad face, in stark relief against the deep brown of his neck and shoulders. In his case the paleness had affected his eyes, leaving them a bright, startling blue. He otherwise looked very much like his mother, with her full, sculpted lips, wide nose, and strong jaw. No one, Astel said, would have mistaken Istel for her red-haired, beak-nosed, narrow-chinned father from a hundred paces, or even a thousand.

Elabel was very hurt by the laughter and did not talk for a day afterward. Astel made her a peace offering by showing her a broken fountain that two otters had commandeered.

Istel's rooms had small windows in thick walls and a ceramic stove like the one that had been in her father's bedroom. He was as politely unsociable as it was possible for him to be, and indeed the children were only allowed to impose upon him when the Threadanchor and all her other kindred were occupied in one of the city-wide tournaments or fairs or boat races or swimming races or festivals—all terribly noisy, days-long events that Elabel could not tolerate without screaming and which Istel ever-so-politely hid from. There were four annual events a year, during which he was required to appear and look somberly and approvingly over the proceedings in his capacity as Swordkeeper. Otherwise, he preferred to keep to his business of tending the Command and his various small pastimes.

These pastimes were what fascinated Elabel to an unending degree. Istel, bizarrely, did not seem to care if he was good at anything besides being the Swordkeeper and the Commander. Elabel knew from her sister that if one attempted anything, even something ordinary like eating an orange, one had to do it perfectly the first time or one was stupid and worthless. But Istel did not seem to know this rule.

In the lower part of his rooms, he had built himself a small potter's wheel. Next to it sat a giant urn filled with raw clay that he covered with a waxed piece of cloth, and another giant urn filled with water. He spent most of his evenings peacefully making lumpy cup after lumpy cup, smashing most of them back into wet lumps on a bit of dry plaster. Ever so rarely he let one dry enough to shape its base with a metal tool and take it a workshop on the other side of the square, where a woman with a dark cloud of hair all around her head maintained two enormous kilns and several vats of blue glaze in slightly different shades. As a result, all of his cups were small and lopsided and blue. He had not started making bowls or plates yet, though he had had the potter's wheel for years.

Astel and Estel found their adult brother horribly boring, because he categorically refused to relate any of violent business the Command got up to, and he would not let them play swordfight with any of his long knives. He didn't have a sweet tooth and therefore didn't keep any sort of biscuits on hand. The books on his shelves were mostly historical treatises, and he never hosted any interesting guests.

The idea of the two older children accompanying Elabel at all was proposed so she wouldn't be as bored and lonely as they always professed themselves to be when obligated to visit Istel. But Elabel found that she could watch him at his makeshift potter's wheel for hours. The cups he made seemed more real and more solid than any cup she had ever touched before, and somehow every bulge and lump seemed deliberate.

She had lived in Foulkrin for nearly two years and had been passed off on their Swordkeeper fourteen or fifteen times before Istel decided that she might have a try on the wheel. Sometimes, now, the Threadanchor didn't even send Estel and Astel with her, because her oldest son and the future Empress got on so well, and this was one such evening. He took a wooden crescent and cut out two fist-sized lumps of clay from inside the vat (one lump quite large, for his fist, and one quite small, for Elabel's tiny one.) They wedged the clay into short, thick cones, and Istel stuck her cone to the wheel and told her to stick her wet thumbs into the center while she kicked feverishly at the foot pedal, trying to keep it at speed. The two separate motions became her undoing, and clay and water sprayed across her face and the walls.

Istel, imperturbable as ever, cut off her lump with a bit of wire and stuck his on for yet another demonstration. Slowly, slowly, he pumped the wheel to a humming spin and pushed his thumbs into the top.

Either her eyes had sharpened or some other sense had deepened as she was playing with the threads and making up new games to show the other children. Twelve or maybe fourteen threads passed through Istel's rooms, most of them so slender than Elabel could hook them with a pinky. This sort of filaments were only useful to move bits of paper or drops of water. Two passed by his potter's wheel, and in the normal way of things, he and the threads paid each other no mind.

But as his wheel spun, the threads shivered, a motion so small that Elabel at first thought she had imagined it. They seemed to waver, as if an invisible someone was blowing down their length. She turned her eyes back to his hands and stared, uncomprehending for a moment, then delighted. The threads were shedding tiny, ephemeral splinters of white light, and these splinters entered the pot under Istel's hands, more and more as it grew larger and became more defined. These threads formed a glimmering, barely-visible network just under the surface of the pot, as though it were formed on a scaffold of infinitesimally fine, shining wires.

Elabel looked around the room and found that her previous vision of the world, brilliant with the light of the threads, had grown even brighter. The threads underlaid the surface of everything—they outlined the stones of the walls, traced the grain of the wood in the furniture, snaked inside of the physical threads of their clothing.

Was this how everyone made things? Did the baker make his bread by grinding threads into flour? Did the goldsmiths melt the threads and pour them into molds? Did the carpenters carve away threads when they made chairs and doors? Could she make things this way? Did she have to start with clay? If she split the threads, would they make something all by themselves? Could she change things by touching their tiny threads?

Istel let the wheel, now crowned with a round little vase, spin itself to a stop.

“Can I touch it?” Elabel asked abruptly. “I'll be very, very careful. Very.”

“Of course, love,” Istel said, a little surprised. “Might help you get the feel of it.”

She leaned closer. The new strands wrapped the vase, like a cocoon or a hive. They made a delicate sort of nest, outlining the imprints of where his fingers had been. She traced ridges of the wet clay with the very tip of her nail. The strands deflected and bent under her touch, carrying the clay with them. The surface of the vase briefly bore a scratch where she had touched it. When she drew her hand back, the threads oozed back to the positions where Istel had put them. The scratch disappeared. Istel took his wire and cut the vase off, sliding it to a little board that he carried to his drying shelf. As she watched, it detached gently from the threads that had birthed it, tendrils unwinding after it like ivy seeking the sunlight. After a minute these recoiled and smoothed themselves into their parent fibers again. The object took light briefly from each thread it encountered but gleamed gently all by itself.

Elabel felt her face get hot, and her hands twisted and clenched at her sides. The desire to make her own cup, to see if she could get the threads to do such a delicate thing, clutched at her heart. “Can I try again now, please please?”

A little bemused, Istel cut her another lump of clay. She climbed up on the stepstool to wedge it on the piece of plaster, though her hands shook and she almost pitched it onto the floor.

“Crack it down in the center now,” Istel said, “and start kicking the pedal. Dip your hands in the water. All right. That's good. Hands on top, and feel it spin for a minute.”

Elabel fixed her eyes on one of the threads that had splintered for Istel's vase. It passed through the back wall of the ceramic stove, just on the other side of the wheel. Come here, thread, she thought very hard at it. Please help me make my cup. I only need a little bit of you.

It happened so quickly that she didn't remember it later. She was looking at the thread with the clay spinning under her hands, tickling her palms with sand and cool water. The next moment she was lying on the floor, gasping, a hot, painful line of burning cutting across her face and chest, the tipped-over wheel pinning her legs to the floor, the fabric of her leggings caught in the mechanism that was still struggling to turn.

“What—are you all right? What happened?” Istel yelled. He was already on his knees, stilling the wheel, cutting her clothing out of the shaft that drove it, pulling the clunky object away from her. Her would-be pot had smashed against her belly, a sharp line through its center.

Elabel was weeping, as much in anticipation of being punished as in shame for not being able to call the threads into the clay. Now she wouldn't be welcome to visit Istel anymore. Maybe she would have to leave Foulkrin, once he told his mother what she'd done. Maybe she was supposed to leave the threads entirely alone, and the only reason no one had screamed at her before was that no one realized she was playing with them.

Istel sat her on a chair and rolled up her ripped legging. The wheel had cut her knee deeply, and across her shin a bloody scrape witnessed where the drive shaft had gouged her. “I don't know what happened,” he muttered. “I should have checked it … It's never been so wobbly before, and I didn't think … The wheel must have tipped over on you, love,” he said, this last to her. “That's my fault. I'm sorry, but we'll get you cleaned up in a minute.”

Her gut twisted with shame. “I did it,” she sobbed. “I tried to ask the thread to make the pot, like you did, and it hit me in the face. I'm very sorry. Please don't yell at me. I'm so sorry.”

Istel went very still. His eyes slowly traveled up from her bleeding shin to her face, and he saw the line of angry red skin that crossed over her right cheek and up over her brow and forehead. He touched the mark very lightly; Elabel howled, and his fingers came away red.

“The first Emperor have mercy on us,” he said, even more slowly. “You're so little. I don't … I never …”

Elabel, who had never seen one of the Foulkrin adults at a loss for words before, stopped weeping, so afraid of what came next that there seemed to be a block of ice sitting in her stomach.

After a minute of staring very hard at her, Istel shook himself. “First things first, anyway.” He got a bottle down from the shelf, apologized to her, and wiped a burning liquid across her various injuries. Next came sticking plaster, and then he went across the courtyard to request that the woman with a dark cloud of hair lend him a pair of her son's trousers for Elabel to change into.

“Now,” he said, having fortified the child before him with a pot of drinking chocolate that he had also borrowed from his neighbor, “tell me about the threads, love. Have you been able to see them for long?”

At first she spoke in single words, stuttered phrases, and dribbled sentences, tensing for the thing that was going to make him scream and slap her. But his face, intent but not unkind, did not change as she explained about the golden threads everywhere in Diagasar, and the white threads in Foulkrin, and all the things she had figured out how to do with them. (He wrinkled his nose a bit when she told him about the games with Astel and Estel. “I'll have a word with them,” he said very dryly. “They might have had the sense between the two of them to mention this before now.”)

“Was I not supposed to touch them?” Elabel asked in a very small voice, looking deeply into her cup. (The chocolate, she couldn't help but notice, contained glimmers of bronze thread. She wondered where it came from.)

This provoked an enormous laugh. She looked up, alarmed.

“Dear one,” he said slowly. “This is exactly the thing you were supposed to do.”