Every night, Abi went to bed late, tired but happy. The only regret she had was that she saw so little of her family and Kat. Maybe one supper in seven or eight was at home. They were far enough from the Hill that generally the lot of them shared meals with the Sisters of Betane. Such meals were fairly simple and a far cry from when she and the Royals would beg food from the Palace kitchen, but truth to tell, they were all so involved in the work that half the time Abi didn’t even notice what she was eating. But as Midwinter passed and Spring approached inexorably, she realized she missed doing the spycraft work for her father that was keeping Perry so busy, she missed being with her family, and she began to wonder if Mags resented that she was no longer available.

Finally she came home late one night, long after dinner, to see a light still on in the room Mags called his workshop, and on impulse she headed there instead of to her own bed.

Mags was deeply involved in constructing something—from where she stood, it looked as if he had hollowed a booklike box and was in the process of turning it into an identical replica of a book—a replica in which you could hide something. Amily stood beside him, holding an actual book—the one he was using as his model. She cleared her throat.

“Work done for the day, Abi?” her mother asked. “Come squeeze in, your father is almost done with this part of the project.”

Now she saw that he was engraving lines in the edges of the box that represented the pages, to replicate the actual pages of the book her mother was holding. The wood-chisel he used was hardly bigger than a horse-hair, and sent up a long, curling thread of wood that was surprisingly pretty. After all the work on the pattern-model she had a much keener appreciation for fine woodworking than she had had before.

“Thet’ll do fer now,” Mags said, sitting up straight and laying the “book” and the chisel aside. “Strike me, iffen I’d known ’twas so much work t’make one on these things, I’da never started i’ th’ fust place.” He turned in his seat to face his daughter. “Long days, m’lass. Hope they’re wuth it.”

“I can’t even begin to tell you,” she said, brightening, as she thought about the latest puzzle they had solved, the one Master Renold had anticipated—a way to strengthen the span by using iron dovetails between the blocks. “But that’s not why I’m here. I—I want to apologize because—”