mossbrew out of a jug. "Never before…" He frowned. "Something has been done to that boy. Behind the Shadowline, perhaps."
Chert laughed, but it was not one of the pleasant kind. "We did not need any mirror-magic to know that!
"Yes, yes, but there is more here than I ever thought. You heard him. He did not merely wander across the Shadowline-he was taken. Something strange was done to him there, I have no doubt."
Chert thought of the boy as he had found him just days before, lying at the foot of the Shining Man at the very center of the Funderling Myster¬ies, with the little mirror clutched in his fingers. And then that terrifying fairy-woman had taken the mirror from Chert in turn. What was it all about? Was she the queen the boy was shouting about? He had said some¬thing about a hole, and Chert could see how a heart with a hole in it might describe her.
"I don't understand," Chaven said. "Not any of it. But I cannot help feel¬ing that I need to."
"Well enough." Chert stood, wincing at the ache in his knees. "Me, I have more pressing things to worry about, like where we are going to go and how we are going to find something to eat without anyone noticing you."
"What are you talking about?" Chaven asked.
"Because not only isn't Opal going to feed us today," Chert told him, "I think it's pretty plain that you and I will be a lot healthier if we're not sit¬ting here when she comes out."
"Ah," said the physician, and hastily drained his mug. "Yes, I see what you mean. Let us be going."
16
Night Fires
Pale Daughter told her father Thunder that she had seen a handsome lord dressed all in pearly armor, with hair like moonlight on snow, and that her
heart now rode with him. Thunder knew that it was his half brother
Silvergleam, one of the children of Breeze, and forbade her to go out of the
house again. The music between father and daughter lost its purest note.
The sky above the god's house filled with clouds.
— from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar's Book of Regret
A
FTER SO MANY CENTURIES, it was hard for Yasammez to accustom herself to true daylight again. Even this shy, cloud-blanketed winter sun seemed to blaze into her eyes from the mo¬ment it rose until it slid down behind the hills. She disliked it, but also felt a sort of wonder: had it really been like this once, walking in these south¬ern lands, moving beneath Whitefire's orb every day in light so bright that it turned shadows into stark black stripes? She could scarcely remember it. She had taken the mortals' city, but it was meaningless without the cas¬tle-worse than meaningless, because time was against her. Yasammez had prepared herself for fire and blood, for her own long-forestalled death, for meaningless victory or the finality of defeat, but she could never have pre¬pared herself for this… waiting. The dragging stalemate was beginning to feel as though it might last until the unfamiliar sun burned out and the world went dark. She cursed the Pact of the Glass and her own foolishness
lor agreeing she should never have let her hands be tied. Even if it worked, it would buy the one she loved only a few more moons of life and make the eventual loss even more heartbreaking.
As usual, the traitor was waiting for her on the steps outside the great hall she had taken for her own, a market hall or court where the mortals had once performed the meaningless routines of their short, busy lives. The one the sunlanders had called Gil-the-potboy looked up as she approached and smiled his slow, sad smile. His face, so human now she could scarcely recognize what he had once been, seemed as unmoving and opaque as dough.
"Good morning, my lady," he said. "Will you kill me today?"
"Did you have other plans, Kayyin?"
Something that the King had done to him still prevented her speaking to him mind to mind, so they had fallen back on the court speech of Qul-na-Qar, the common tongue of a hundred different kinds of folk. Yasammez, never one to waste even silent words, could not help feeling that here was another way that blind Ynnir was thwarting her, robbing her mind of rest.
Kayyin rose to follow her inside, hands hidden in his robe. Two of the guards looked at her, waiting for her to order this strange creature kept out, but she made no gesture as he trailed her through the door.
"I do not wish to speak to you today," she warned him.
"Then I will not speak, my lady."
Their footsteps echoed through the hall. Other than two or three of her silent, dark-clad servants waiting in the gallery above, the tall, wood-timbered room was empty. Yasammez preferred it so. Her army had the whole of a city in which to nest. This place was hers, which made the pres¬ence of the traitor even more galling.
Yasammez the Porcupine curled herself into her hard, high-backed chair. Her unwelcome guest seated himself cross-legged at her feet. One of her servants from Shehen appeared as if stepping out of nowhere, and waited until Yasammez flicked her fingers in dismissal. She wanted nothing. Noth¬ing was what she had. She had been outmaneuvered and now she was pay¬ing the price.
"I will not kill you today, Kayyin," she said at last. "No matter how you plague me. Go away."
"It is… interesting," he said, as if he had not heard the last part of what she said. "That name still does not seem entirely real to me, although it was how I thought of myself for centuries. But while living in the mortal lands
1 truly became Gil, and although in some ways 1 slept through those yers, it is like trying to shake off a powerful dream."!
"So first you betray me, now you would renounce your people entirely?"
He smiled, doubtless because he had lured her into conversation, Even when they had been close, when he had been allowed as near to her as Yasammez allowed anyone, he had always enjoyed the sport of making her talk. No one left alive cared about such things at all. It was one of the rea¬sons the sight of his altered, now-alien face filled her with such disquiet. "I renounce nothing, my lady, and you know it. I have been a catspaw-first yours, then the King's-and cannot be faulted for insufficient loyalty. I did not even remember who I truly was until one moon ago. How does that make me a traitor?"
"You know. I trusted you."
"Trusted me, you say? You are still cruel, my lady, whatever else time has done." He smiled, but the mockery was mixed with true sorrow. "The King was wiser than you guessed. And stronger. He made me his. He sent me to live among the mortals. And it has borne fruit, has it not? For the moment, no one is dying."
"It would only have been sunlanders dying. We had won."
"Won what? A more glorious death for all the People? The King, ap¬parently, has other ambitions."
"He is a fool."
Kayyin lifted his hand. "I do not seek to arbitrate the quarrels of the highest. Even when you lifted me up, you did not lift me far enough for that." He peered at her from the corner of his eye, perhaps wondering whether this little gibe had shamed her, but Yasammez showed him noth¬ing but stone, cold stone. She had been old already when Kayyin's father had fought with her against Umadi Sva's bastard offspring, and she had held him as he died in the agony of his burns on the Shivering Plain. If it had been in her to weep at someone's death, she would have wept then. No, she had no shame in her-not about anything to do with Kayyin, at any rate.
After a long silence, the traitor laughed. "You know, it was strange, liv¬ing among the sunlanders. They are not so different from us as you might think."
She did not honor such filth with a reply.
"I have considered it a great deal in the days since I returned to you, my lady, and I think I understand a part of the King's thinking. Perhaps he is
less Willing than you to destroy the mortals because he thinks that they are not entirely to blame."