“You look so sweet when you blush, Cat.” Bee’s smirk made me laugh, although I was still flushed. She crossed to the high basement window with its four expensive panes of glass, cracked the latch, and pushed open the window to let out some of the heat. “What else haven’t you told us, Rory? We’ve asked you more than once to tell us about the spirit world and the Wild Hunt and the spirit courts, but you always say you don’t know anything.”

A flicker of wildness stirred in his amber eyes. He leaned closer, growing more threatening, like a great cat guarding the succulent deer it has just dragged in. Bee glanced toward the knives hanging by the stove, but I held my spoon and did not retreat.

“You two persist in talking to me as if I am a man. I am not a man. It amuses me to walk in these clothes. I am a cat. I live in the wild, and I hunt. The dragons are my people’s enemy. As for the other, I cannot walk in the spirit courts. I know nothing of their kind, except that they rule us.”

“How do they rule you?” Bee asked.

He considered the bones of the fish. “How do princes rule here? All creatures in the spirit lands where I grew up bide under the rule of the courts because the courts are stronger.”

“But why are the dragons your enemies?” Bee asked.

“If we are caught in the tides of their dreaming, we are changed, and lose both our bodily form and the mind that makes us a self. How can they not be our enemies?”

Bee’s smile had the brilliant assurance of the sun flashing out as wind drove off its shield of clouds. “You see! The headmaster must know about dragons, dreaming, and the Great Smoke. Why else would he have tricked us into crossing into the spirit world? Cat, get my sketchbook.”

After wiping my hands, I unfastened the lid of Vai’s chest. Bee had placed her sketchbook at the top, wrapped in an oilskin pouch. As she flipped through its pages, I went through the contents of the chest.

The top was spanned by the length of canvas, sewn with pockets, in which I kept my sewing things and my other necessaries. Beneath the unrolled canvas lay a pretty pagne I had never before seen, a festive gold-and-orange print with smiling suns and laughing moons. I blinked watering eyes, for it was obviously a special gift from Aunty, one the family had chosen for me with affection. Below this I found trousers and underthings and, beneath them, some of Vai’s beautiful dash jackets tucked within clean pagnes for extra protection.

“He can probably describe exactly where and when he got each one,” I said, running my hands along the folds.

Bee snapped shut the sketchbook. “What is it like to love someone that much?”