“No,” Kaylin said. “I believe she was alive—and mobile—at least eighty years ago. I think she created a home for herself in amongst the mortals somehow. That home is visible but...out of phase. And I think we need to reach it if we’re to end the threat she poses. Or posed.” Kaylin grew more thoughtful. “I think she continued her experiments. A painting such as this—but far darker—exists in a purely mortal home.”

“I do not see the point. Mortals are not born the same way, and they do not require—do not possess—the names from which power was apparently leeched.”

“No—but who would have seen the point of this when it was done?” She gestured to the walls in general, where the paintings, in their frames of death, still hung. “It’s possible she had no other choice; she could not randomly kidnap Barrani without alerting them to her presence, her existence. But she had clearly begun to experiment with mortals centuries ago; Amaldi and Darreno are here.

“And the children are trapped in Mrs. Erickson’s house.”

Teela cleared her throat.

“But those children are dead. We know that their ghosts remain—and those ghosts aren’t like Amaldi and Darreno. We know that their bodies became vessels for...something. Something murderous. Something that looked like them, that grew as the bodies grew, and that eventually went on a killing spree for which they were duly executed.”

“All of them?”

Kaylin nodded. “All four. Whatever she had learned to do creating these paintings must have been refined or changed somehow. I don’t know if these paintings ever contained flowers—but the flowers in the green, or one of them, was brought to a mortal woman’s house, and it is part of the painting she created there.

“I don’t see any hint of those flowers in any of these paintings—even the ones that contain the two humans.”

The Avatar was silent for one long beat. He then turned to Serralyn. “That is a possibility,” he said.

“Serralyn, share.”

Serralyn said, “I’m beginning to agree with Mandoran. Everyone else heard what I was thinking—if you had our names, you’d hear it as well.” She winced, no doubt at Sedarias’s reprimand. “It’s clear from what was done here—or from what was undone—that the power for these cages, the...soil in which these vines were rooted, was the potential of the outlands, of the miasma from which the High Halls forms all things within his boundaries.

“She doesn’t have that now. She didn’t have that when she did whatever she did almost a century ago. But if she didn’t have power and needed it, if she studied the green and the areas in the world that were older than the High Halls, she might have found some way to root things...in the green.”